Samuel_Tow

OK, so as not to be a "foren troll" (there's a character name for you), could someone please translate the original post into English, please? Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what it's saying.

And, by the way, I am just as foreign as you are, as English is not my native language. I still don't know what you're saying. Really do not know. I cannot comprehend. I don't know how other people manage.

Oh. Yeah, I mistook one post for the other without reading them, so I didn't know there were multiple

Well, then you're not quite lazy enough I very much agree with feeling guilty with not doing something that I should, but... I should be doing my job right now, and here I am posting on the City of Heroes forums. I can live with feeling guilty

Open maps, yes. But would the power suddenly cease functioning when you walked indoors? That's the problem - you can't grab objects "from the environment," you can only grab objects from a specific list of throwable objects that have to be placed in the map by hand. In EVERY map. And even then you only get to throw the objects once, because I highly doubt the game can track a thrown object so you can pick it up again later.

Almost all powers in this game are designed to work "by default," in that even situational powers don't need the developers to specifically programme situations where they can be used. You don't have specific circles on the ground in which you can place a Time Bomb, you don't have only specific maps where you can fly (thank you WoW!), you don't need to find ammo crates to shoot your gun. You click on the power and it activates regardless of where you are or what you're fighting against.

The only exception to this is flight, in that certain powers require you to be on the ground and certain others that your enemy be on the ground. And you can see how often the developers resort to pure aerial combat, thanks to this precise problem. And even then, they have to provide jet packs, because... What if you didn't take a travel power? And these days, not everyone does.

I agree with the notion that the game should have some way to allow us to chuck cars, crates and lamp posts at our enemies. I very much disagree that taking those from the environment is the right solution. I have gone on the record as suggesting that Super Strength's Hurl ditch its insultingly small chunk of concrete and replace it with a subset of Propel's thrown objects, namely the larger ones - forklift, car, air compressor, pool table, statue, etc.

Animation is a problem, but the animation for pulling a boulder out of the ground exists, and theoretically, replacing the boulder with anything of a similar or larger size would make sense. Would it be awkward to pull out and toss a junk car in the middle of a high-tech lab? Oh, sure! Isn't it odd that you can pull an asphalt pavement slab out of a thin metal catwalk, though? Or that you can pull that out of the top of a metal shipping container? Or that you can pull that out of the glass roof of Wentworth's Fine Consignments?

I agree that the inability to throw cars is a problem. I agree that a solution probably exists. I disagree that this is it.

Actually, Saist has a point, because this is pretty much what BABs has told us. It's not "sprite-based" in that a sprite is a 2D shape, but it employs a system very much reminiscent of a sprite-based game like Knights of the Round or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or pretty much every other old arcade game. An animator does not need to animate EVERY single frame, but an animator must very much sit down and define each KEY frame in an animation by hand. In BABs own words, City of Heroes has no capacity for animation blending. At all.

Each of our animations is standalone, and it is up to the animator to ensure that the previous animation ends in such a stance that the next animation won't have to "snap" to a new stance to begin, and that said animation would end in such a stance that the next one can flow out of it. This is what necessitates that we have default stances in the first place - all of our combat animations flow out of a particular combat stance and then end in a particular combat stance, with animations for swapping between them. Everything is done by hand, per character, per power, per animation sequence. Pretty much like it would be for a sprite-based game.

The valley lag has nothing to do with capes or graphics at all. Capes are handled client-side, as are all of the graphics in the game, so anything they can lag is your computer or your connection on your end. The ITF hill lag does not exhibit framerate slowdown (not on my showfps) or connection slowdown (not on my netgraph). What it exhibits is server-side lag, meaning the server machine itself is slowing down and processing things slower with more pauses.

The only graphical aspect of anything in the game that's server-controlled is ragdolls, and I've seen more ragdolls in the same spot than that without any server-side lag. What Castle pointed to as the culprit was the one thing that is ALWAYS handled by the server, which is the powers system. Cimerorans, apparently, have some of the most processor-intensive powers in the game, no doubt because of Phalanx Phighting and whatever AI drives them, and large groups of them drive the complexity of those calculations up exponentially (figuratively speaking).

The only way to fix ITF hill lag is either to make Cimeroran powers simpler or to include fewer of them, neither of which seems to be an option.

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As far as capes go, I'd like to see multiple cape rigs available for characters, but it's a request that's highly unlikely to happen. Maybe one day when everything else is so damn costly thanks to Super Ultra Mode that capes pale in comparison. We'll have to wait and see.

I thought that every player on a typical Quaterfield team was a personification of that

*edit*
By the way, I agree - that TF sucks, and seems to be written by someone who didn't know what a "story" was. Just reading the souvenir highlights just how BORING the whole TF is. "First you defeated 50 Rularuu. Then you raided the first base. Then you defeated another 50 Rularuu. Then you raided the second base. Then you defeated another 50 Rularuu. Then you raided the third base. Then a little mushroom man told you that your princess was in another castle. You weren't quite sure what that was all about." It's hideous! It's like washing the dishes and taking out the trash - just uninteresting busywork.

All of the Shard TFs need to be stripped down and re-written from scratch. I don't necessarily feel they need to be shorter, I just feel they need to be filled with less dead air.

I don't see why not. After all, the Tommy Gun and Sniper Rifle are already horribly inappropriate for what Assault Rifle can do (begging the question of what BABs was thinking at the time), so a shotgun model? Eh, it's not any worse.

So... Thumbs up, I guess. We already have a shotgun model in the game. Why not use that?

I can understand that. I've been described as OCD, myself, in that I demand all of my characters have access to the same resources and find myself unable to "pool" resources from others into just one, but my cure for feelings of "needing" to do something is typically laziness. I feel the need to fix up all of my characters, yes, but the feeling that I couldn't be arsed is significantly stronger

Yeah, take powers you're not gonna' use.

fixed

You don't give yourself enough credit. You are able to take a media which few manage to take seriously and produce decent work (both visual and written) which doesn't default to self-parody. I respect that greatly.

The answer to that is in the original post - so that people can reroll characters without losing badges that can never be gotten again. Some of us rode the coat tails of the suggestion to work in a few of our own desires, as well, such as not having to earn the same weapon two dozen times (something I've done before).

I did just that in the same post.