Samuel_Tow

10 000, actually, or rather 9999 on four digit tumblers that you had to roll through using little clickable arrows. Yes, seriously.

Ah, those were the days. Now those dang dirty kids are always running around with their early travel powers and their Inventions, always hanging out at those filthy Markets and farming that damn Architect. They don't make 'em like they used to.

Huh? Could you point me to that? I suspect I might be seeing that, but I thought it was a crappy mouse that I had to swap my old for because my new rig doesn't have a PS2 and I'm a Luddite who still uses PS2 keyboard and mouse.

You travel back in time and meet Arachnos in the 1960s. They have period-appropriate costumes. They look ridiculous, and intentionally so.

Are you familiar with the fable of the self-fulfilling prophecy?

Huh? I don't remember seeing any fortunatas back then. Can you link to a pic?

Well, when you put a bit more effort to explain, yes, it's much easier to understand. Run-on sentences don't help, and I'm not saying this to be a dick. I literally could not comprehend the idea of your previous post.

Yes, you have every right to complain. I'd say you're doing more than your fair share. I don't believe you have every right to resort to hyperbole and exaggeration, though, because I honestly don't see any of the problems you mention, bar the Market outage, and even that doesn't seem like too big of a problem.

Every Issue has people crashing, every issue has people with graphic corruption. It's a fact of life. It sucks that it had to be you this time around, believe me. I've been on the wrong side of a few of these, and I was never very pleased. But the most I can say is give it time. It'll get fixed.

To be bluntly honest, however, I'd rather have the new Issue for myself and the people who can run it sooner than have the Issue delayed for however long it takes to make it so no-one will ever have issues with it at all. Even if an early release ends up boning ME, then them's the breaks. I'd still sooner see the game keep some pace over sitting around until no-one cares about the new stuff anymore.

And again - it was the anniversary. They had a hard deadline. No way around it.

Wordy, you say?

Which is not an improvement over "henchman."

That's true, but once again, I argue that this is much more a question of presentation and writing than it is of actual game mechanics. The game doesn't have to let me do as I please as long as it makes it seem as MY CHARACTER does as HE pleases. Tavish Bell's arc is a good example. "Go do something!" says Tavish Bell. "OK!" responds my character. Promptly, I am given a waypoint in the door behind them. I step inside, and "Yeah, might be a good idea to snoop around. Let the contract expire, who cares?" My character doesn't necessarily do what I wanted, but he still defies his contact.

Willy Wheeler is a ALMOST another good example. He's a slimy nobody who basically serves as an information vending machine that you make use of to pull jobs, and eventually screw over by turning in Ace McKnight.

Basically, it comes down to the contacts not saying "Har har har! I'm so great! You there, loser! Come do my dirty work!" but rather saying "No, not in the face! I'll tell you what you want, just please don't hurt me!"

For instance: When Daos says "Do this or Arachnos will be cross, the mission ought to have my character give him the finger and walk away, pointing me to a building where I'll get jumped by Arachnos soldiers. I wipe the floor with them, come back to Daos and he tries to save face and still act like he planned it all along.

Mission structure doesn't need to so much as budge. Writing needs to branch out.

Actually, they do use a skeleton that players don't have access to, and unlikely to ever see.

We have three character models, but there's actually a fourth character rig with a selection of animations and costume pieces for it. I don't know what the developers call it, but I tend to call it the Monster rig, because that's what it's used for in-game. It's used for things like the Hydra, the War Wolves, the different Clockwork princes and I believe the Robotics henchmen. Oh, and the Kheldian Crab/Lobster transformation. Currently, Demon Summoning Demonlings appear to use this rig, though on a much smaller scale. The monster frame is still bipedal, it's just more hunched-over and has shorter legs, a bigger torso and longer arms, so Demonlings are still bipedal.

From what I've seen, the Demon Prince uses either the regular standing animation or a variant of the Monster one. I still haven't seen the thing for real, so I can't say.

The Ember Demon and the Hellfire Gargoyle... Confound me. I honestly don't know which rig they use, because their stances, movement animations and power animations are custom and unique to them and them alone. As such, I can't actually tell which rig they're using since I can't spot the tell-tale idle stance for it. I THINK they use the Monster rig because they have those long, thick arms and those shorter, stubbier legs, but with so many kinks and double knees and angled hooves and claws, I honestly can't tell. Most of their animations are indeed quadrupedal, however, as they do move on all fours and tend to throw their powers with one hand and hunched over. They DO stand up from time to time, usually to have a psychiatric breakdown, but most of their time they spend on all fours.

That said, I'm not sure if we can count them as quadrupeds because they are still built such that most of their body weight is on the hind legs and they still have a biped torso. They're just hunched over and walk on their, uh... Hideous, mis-shapen claws. To be honest, though, I don't know what the precise definition of quadruped is, so I can't give a definite answer.

See, this I can get behind. THAT sort of mechanic requires armour and isn't doable with just costume pieces.

Basically, how about this:

Instead of damage resistance, each added armour piece would be kind of like a pet that takes a percentage of incoming damage with a specific level of health of its own. So, the armour would stop some damage, but would get damaged itself and break off eventually, requiring you to reapply the armour. Hence, the set will have no toggles and only very costly clicks, but would have to support its armour by reapplying it when it breaks.

OK, that I can get behind!

Here's my question, though - how is this superior to using the costume creator itself, which seems to me to have more power in customization than what you're looking to design. If you're basically adding/replacing costume pieces, don't you have a far greater selection of designs using the costume editor than a custom powerset will ever provide?

Shields serve a purpose for one simple reason - they are analogous to a weapon, in that you don't wear them as clothes and you don't carry them if you're not going to defend yourself. You can have a helmet without having Helmet Defence, but you can't have a shield without Shield Defence. It wouldn't make sense. Shields, therefore, get a context exception.

But armour isn't really something you need to work to use. Armour you simply wear. Current armour sets like Stone Armour and Ice Armour, though possibly replicable with costume pieces, come with exotic mechanics unique to the concept of the element they draw from. I re-read your original post, and I still can't tell what is mechanically, functionally and inherently so exotic about the concept of armour that it requires its own powerset.

I don't mean to shoot down, but I just don't think either the mechanics or visuals of this aren't better served by existing systems.

Standard Code Rant aside, no, one animation isn't. The problem here isn't about remaking ONE animation, it's about remaking ALL animations for EVERY character model. And character models do not actually share animations between them. Their animations are usually very similar, but each is hand-tweaked to fit that model.

You're mixing terminology here. "Movement" in the sense of the motions of different parts of the body is distinctly different from "movement" in the sense of locomotion around the world. You'll notice that Hail of Bullets roots you for the duration of the power, disallowing all translational movement. Also note that Hail of Bullets starts from the Combat stance and ends in the Ready stance that all of your movement animations start and end at.

City of Heroes uses what I like to describe as a "hub" animation system, from a purely uneducated point of view. You have a series of "stances" that every animation in the game has to start from and end in. The ones people are most familiar with are idle, combat and ready. Idle is out of combat, combat is the one you get for initiating combat and ready is usually what you end in after an attack. Assault Rifle held up vs. held down, to put a concrete example. However, there are more than that. For instance, most two-handed and left-handed weapon share the same basic stance, most right-handed weapon share another, assault rifles and such have their own, unarmed have their own as well, I believe. And ALL of this is duplicated while flying.

Hail of Bullets is not an offender in this case, because it starts from combat or ready and ends in ready. No other powers are supposed to start in the middle of executing Hail of Bullets. By contrast, what you are suggesting IS an offender, because what you are suggesting is a brand new basic state which will require its own host of stances. While on your bike, you will need to have animations for movement in all direction, and probably alternatives for combat animations, as well. You will need animations to start off a stance "on bike" and end at a stance "on bike," which will necessitate a new copy of every animation that's usable with a bike. And not a minor tweak of it, either, not nearly like what it was with Shield Defence.

The reason for this hub setup is so that animations flow smoothly from one to the next. For instance, if you have Hack, Slash and Slice, you would need nine animations if you wanted to flow from one directly to the other. You would need Hack -> Slash, Hack -> Slice, Hack -> Hack, Slash -> Hack, Slash -> Slice, Slash -> Slash, Slice -> Hack, Slice -> Slash, Slice -> Slice. Now introduce one "stance" that all animations start and stop from and you reduce the number of animations needed to 3: stance -> slash -> stance, stance -> hack -> stance, stance -> slice -> stance. Much, MUCH simpler to make.

Always remember that when trying to devise new animations for the game.

It's a nightmare because of how many animations there are in the game and how many of them end up needing to be tweaked by suggestions like these. BABs has quoted numbers on the order of 1600, if my memory serves, and just shields had them go through hundreds, about 20 per day if I remember correctly, JUST to get shields to work with JUST melee attack powersets. It's a serious undertaking, and one you're going to need some serious convincing to even place under consideration.

People keep telling me that, but I have personally never seen any bidders for these inspirations, myself, or indeed seen them sell for much over 5000. Maybe it's bad timing on my part, I don't know.