Samuel_Tow
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Quote:...Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Stating that it's my failure is idiotic and laughable, Sam. It's the way the game is designed and it's a poor design. Stamina should not be as good as it is and base recovery isn't as good as it should be.
What? I mean... What? Stating that it's... What? Where did I even imply... What? What? I keep reading that quote over and over again, and I just don't get it. What, did you read the word "failure" and take offence or something?
All that was meant to say is that the game is designed to limit your endurance and, yes, cause you to run out. This is not an aberrant, unintended side effect of imbalance concerns, it's how it's intended to play. Running out of endurance is no less unintended than running out of health is. You CANNOT claim that being ever at all being able to run out of health and die is a failing of the system and that a properly balanced one should never allow this to happen. The same holds true for endurance. If the baseline performance was such that endurance never ran the risk of running out, then that system would be poorly balanced, at best having a redundant, meaningless stat.
When I say "it's your failure," I don't mean to say you screwed up, I mean to say that you came upon your own limitation. The system didn't bug out and put you in a situation where your endurance wasn't supposed to run out. If you don't want to ever run out of endurance, you have the tools to do so, at a cost. If you choose to do that, then that's fine, apparently. The developers have never hinted at this being a pressing concern. If you don't choose to do so, like I choose not to, then you deal with endurance in other ways, including occasionally running out. Again, this is not a sing of the game being bugged or poorly-conceived, it's a consequence of player's choices.
As far as it being impossible to not run out of endurance mid-fight pre-22, that's false on its face unless you want to quantify your statement or elaborate on circumstances. It's very much possibly, it just may not be possible in the ways you prefer to play. That's not a bad thing, mind you, but it still comes down to player preference.
Basically: The game is designed such that endurance should always run the risk of running out. If your endurance runs out, that's not a sign of bad design. -
Quote:Well, the decision about not taking them was made five years agoOriginally Posted by SlackTech
It certainly sounds as if you've made your decision (though, to be honest, reading the first page of this thread made me think that you'd made that decision already and were simply seeking validation).
I was more worried about facing potential ranting team-mates over it. If people here had overwhelmingly told to take it and like it, I would have considered revising my position. I probably wouldn't have but I'd know what to expect. As it turns out, there really doesn't seem to be any reason to worry or second-guess myself.
And, heck, I got a couple of good reasons to take the thing after all. All in all, it's been pretty productive
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Quote:I read my CoH manual. Haven't bothered with the CoV one. It didn't make much sense to me at all, since I read it prior to even starting the game, but I referenced it more than a few times trying to figure things out, and it helped. It's out of date, and it wasn't very good even back when it was new, but that's besides the point. That was then. This is now. Believe it or not, we do have better documentation these days. And in-game, no less. When I started out, we didn't have a Help menu at allOriginally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Show of hands - how many longer-term players went "Wait, did they actually update the manual?"
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Quote:Yeah, I figured it was something like this. That's why I went out hunting for that article on transparency. I guess it does make sense for brighter metals to be reflective, but as we've already established, more than just metals reflect light. Glass, plastics, leathers, rubbers and, heck, water reflect light. I mean, your typical tar monster is usually pretty shiny and slimy, at least in CGI. I doubt tar itself is, though.Originally Posted by flashrains
As a graphics person: The thing about the metallic tights is that in order for dark tights to be as reflective as light-colored tights, there would need to be a different shader applied to handle the reflections - the current reflections are subtractive, which gives a mirrorlike finish when your tights are silver or gold, but doesn't show much when they're black, and indeed if it were real metal with no coat of paint on top of it that's what it'd look like. In order for black costume parts to reflect the surrounding environment, the reflections would need to be additive, but if they were, then they wouldn't show up at all on anyone's tights that were not a dark color and would look completely not like metal on medium colors.
See, this I can get behind in a big way. I don't know why, but the game seems to have overfocused its shiny and reflective effects on metallic surfaces, and I never even realised this. The fact of the matter is that, as you mentioned, tights, leathers, vynils and latex can be pretty shiny and reflective, themselves. Reflective tights might not be a bad idea, and the few really light leather pants we have access to really ought to be at least shiny, if not reflective. I mean, pants like these actually exist.Quote:That said, a costume texture with additive environment reflection would be pretty neat to have - the result would look like slick enamel paint ala the black cars Sam mentioned, patent leather, or vinyl, depending on how it was used, and I think it'd be pretty sweet to see this as a new texture for Tights Sleek (though unfortunately they haven't done that). -
Quote:Theoretical pure black does absorb all light, but as far as I'm aware, a material of that colour doesn't exit. "Black" objects still reflect plenty of light, or we wouldn't be able to see their contour lines. Black metals, even if they're not reflective in the traditional sense, still reflect enough light for their edges to white out and for their facets to be of different shading. White objects, by contrast, reflect a lot of light, but they scatter it, so you don't see a reflection you can recognise as such.Originally Posted by Sapphic_Neko
And thinking on it. Real black absorbs all light, and hence cannot really reflect anything.
If you're looking at a cars paint job the reflection comes from the clear coat, not the black itself.
A further note on reflections - most object in real life are reflective, even those we traditionally don't view as such. Sitting on my desk right now, I can tell the wood grain on the desk itself is reflective, but very faintly. In fact, the fabric sweater I'm wearing right now can be viewed as reflective, as I can both see a faint image of brightly-coloured objects under sufficient lighting in it, and I know it can reflect enough light on a sunny day to cast a shadow.
The point of it all is that, yes, black is traditionally the absence of light, but black objects still reflect. -
Quote:Something tells me you're a guyOriginally Posted by Rodion
More simply put: how many different outfits does Barbie have? How many does GI Joe have?
Either way, as a guy myself, I couldn't begin to imagine what, to be honest, a "fanservice" outfit for a guy would be. I've heard women mention different preferences, and I've heard Twilight described as this, but I just can't appreciate it. I can appreciate female fanservice, obviously, but when it comes to male... I haven't the foggiest.
As such, costume limitations notwithstanding, I'd have to ask the ladies here to contribute on "male cheesecakes," because I got nothin'. -
There are two problems clashing here that always seem to get lumped together, and both have to do with the literal interpretation of the word "recovery."
On the one hand, you have the old pre-EQ idea of action recovery, where after a hearty fight, a party of adventurers would have to find an inn or set up a camp, rest, patch up, eat, and heal themselves. In a P&P RPG, this is done through roleplaying. In a computer RPG, this is done by simply being too weak to continue and needing help to recover. This could be in the form of limited-use items, help from allies or just waiting around long enough, and several of the early MMOs' abilities, and as far as I know ENTIRE CLASSES revolved around recovering the team's strength AFTER battle. Such classes you could do without if you were fighting right next to a Trauma Inn, but once you ventured out into the wilderness, you NEEDED them if you wanted to get anything done.
This translates poorly into City of Heroes for a couple of reasons. Firstly, City of Heroes doesn't shoot for realism. Not even the quasi-realism of your typical Fantasy setting. In a Fantasy game, you get dead, you can be healed. In City of Heroes, you get dead, you just get petter on your own. Gunshot wounds heal by themselves, kneeling down fixes broken limbs and a person feeling empathy for you can bring you back to life. The old mentality that after-combat recovery should be a large part of game balancing is, in my opinion, out of place. It suggests that balance should take into account all spawns of an entire mission, such that merely winning is not victory enough, but winning with enough strength left to continue fighting is all that counts. This is problematic in a game with such a strong sense of solo play, especially considering that NOT finishing a battle at full health and endurance basically means you sit on your hands. This is NOT good game design.
On the other hand, you have the RUSHRUSHRUSH idea of action recovery, in that there shouldn't be any. As soon as you're done with one spawn, you should instantly be ready for the next, ideally without having to move too much. This reduces the game to a sort of a sequence of arena matches, or something akin to survival mode, and it assumes that one shouldn't never have to worry about his stats outside of being killed directly and overtly. This is a culture bred out of oddities in our game balance. Originally, City of Heroes was (perplexingly) designed to follow the EverQuest model, down to the importance of after-action recovery. That's why Rest had a 10 minute recharge (it was never an hour), and why having a "healer" was so important - you needed someone to top you off between fights. This didn't work out, as Health, Stamina and decent builds circumvented that need, allowing players to just move from spawn to spawn.
I do not believe this mentality is appropriate for City of Heroes, either, because it assumes to ignore certain game balance aspects in ways that aren't healthy for the game. In their search for faster endurance recovery, players end up boosting their recovery IN COMBAT so much that it trivialises endurance management. Endurance, as I see it designed, is intended to be something of an absolute limit of resources, forming a cap on your abilities, forcing you to pick WHICH abilities to use, rather than using them all indiscriminately. Running out of endurance mid-combat is intended to be a sign of YOUR failure, not the game cheating you out of a win. You can't run all the toggles you can take. You can't use all the powers you can get. You can't slot and use everything you can learn. That's the point.
In my eyes, the proper solution to the problem is somewhere in-between the two mentalities. I don't want to see the EQ after-action suck where you basically sit on your hands, but I want to see SOME recovery, if for no reason other than to acknowledge that you just got hurt. As such, I look at trivial recovery - after-action recovery exists, but it is not severely limiting. Rest is probably the perfect tool for this. Resting takes, on average, about 10-15 seconds. That's not long (nowhere near as long as it takes for health to regenerate), but it IS long enough to make a point. It isn't something that basically prevents you from playing, but it prevents you from moving and fighting, so it's the perfect balance. I've already seen people complain about resting, but honestly - if you're complaining about having to wait for TEN SECONDS, you have no sympathy from me.
The problem with Rest is its three-minute timer. As others have pointed out, I feel this is a mistake. It makes no sense logically, and it sucks practically, because all too often you'll be left without enough "bars" to fight on, but also without Rest to rest, so you end up waiting for upwards of 60 seconds, basically wasting your time. If rest had instant recharge, that would solve two problems: First of all, no-one would ever have to tap his foot and wait, even when out of breath and out of health. Second, it will make the outcome of a battle still matter. If you exit at full bars, you go on. If you don't, you rest and THEN go on. I've seen it said that it would cause a different problem by eliminating after-action recovery times as they are seen in older MMOs, but I think that's both incorrect and a good thing. It's a good thing because those recovery times sucked and we have no ATs solely designed to deal with them, and it's incorrect because, as others have pointed out before, waiting to rest up is still waiting, it's just waiting a lot LESS. The spazzes among us will still despise Resting and will do what they can to avoid it, while those who can put up with a bit of recovery time will have an easier time NOT waiting around for bars to fill up.
In short, make Rest instant-recharge. -
This one's back, huh?
One thing I may or may not have mentioned here before is the difference between male and female costume options. It's incredibly easy to make women in revealing costumes. They have several categories (Tops/Bottoms with Skin, Shirts, Skirts and Short Pants) seemingly specifically designed for this. You'd be a fool not to expect to see that a lot, and probably more than is statistically likely. However, men simply DO NOT have those options. Think about it - how many ways do you have to make a revealing costume for a man? In fact, let's count the ways:
1. Bare Chest (Smooth or Muscular) with patterns on top and a chest piece to hide his nipples (we want it to look like a shirt, not body paint)
2. The ONE briefs lower leg texture.
3. Bare Chest. Just Bare Chest.
4. Err... What else?
That's just it - you can dress a woman in her underwear, in a variety of revealing outfits, in variety of sexy outfits an you don't even need any imagination for it. That's what the costume editor is designed to do. But making a man revealing requires a lot of creativity and not a little bending of the rules. I remember a guy who had what looked like half armour, only he'd used a bare chest with a Belly Tee (I think men have access to that), an Enforcer chest piece and a pair of Tech Wings. Clever, but practically the only combination that could have worked. -
Quote:Good point. I've caught a few snap remarks for doing just that, myself. I always carry two pairs of Awaken + Break Free, and those allow me to get up unimpeded. Because I also carry a large collection of greens and blues I can sacrifice, I can usually get up and resume the fight, probably at the cost of a third to half my inspirations tray. I don't die often enough for this to matter, so when I DO, I tend to get up with this almost instantly, and a few people have politely informed that they had an ally resurrect power which could have saved me the inspirations if only I hadn't been an idiotOriginally Posted by Wicked_Wendy
After I posted I remembered one other thing.. These days it doesn't seem like anyone really cares, or even checks to see if you can rez, I have played on countless PUGS where by the time I find the fallen team mate and get ready to rez they pop an awake and just GO (after some stumbling around and rest time).
In fact, you guys have a point that I haven't heard resurrect powers mentioned in probably years, at least in-game. I'm probably the only one who still asks, as in "Should I wait for a rez or should I hit the hospital?" just to make sure someone doesn't have the power. I haven't seen someone throw a hissy fit and stomp his feet, absolutely refusing to hospital out, like that jackass who sat out the bulk of the last mission of the Archus TF because we couldn't resurrect him. So I guess the peer pressure to take the power shouldn't be as serious as I expected it to be.
Well, I guess that settles it, then.
P.S. On dual builds - I don't think that's an option. Enhancement prices notwithstanding, I'm not making a whole new build just to swap out one power. And if I didn't take the rez, it means I took something else I wanted, which I wouldn't want to trade away. If the idea was for me to make a team-centric build where I would forego my personal powers for more team support powers and slot team powers more than personal ones... Forget about it! That ain't gonna' happen. I'd never use such a build, because I didn't sing into this game to play that sort of character. I respect the good people who DO, but that's not my thing. -
Quote:Huh... You have a point here. Darkest grey instead of black does actually look a lot more glossy and, if you squint, it does reflect things, too. However, it also looks grey, not black, and I know it's not because it reflects grey and blue surroundings. There are a few colours that my eyes pick out in a big way. Usually primary colours, like pure blue, green or red. White, and especially black, are probably the most telling to me, likely why I like black so much. A very dark grey is still just that - grey. And even then, it's still murky.Originally Posted by flashrains
Changing from true black to the darkest shade of gray does wonders for making your metallic tights look like reflective black metal.
I guess I shouldn't really be complaining. It's not THAT big of a deal, in the end, because new Metallic looks a lot like old Metallic in pure black, and I had a glowy aura on top of it to make it look gleaming, so I'll manage either way. It's just odd they'd rig it up that way. Maybe I don't know enough about graphics technology, though. -
Quote:Wowza! That musta' been a productive five minutes, because that Avatar is AWESOME! Nice work, Cel, and welcome back to the game. I hope your life will look ever so slightly better now that you're backOriginally Posted by Cel_Shaded
I think I can whip up something in 5 minutes if I try.
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Well, I used up my ONE free test for 3D Mark Vintage, and I got the following results, compared to the one in Tom's Hardware:
3DMakr Score
Mine: 14 620, Tom's: 13 958
GPU Score
Mine: 11 926, Tom's: 12 207
CPU Score
Mine: 45 325, Tom's: 24 503
Well... That's about what would be expected, then. I guess I should just shut up and silently slink away, huh? I don't know. Maybe I either over-estimated my computer or underestimated the things I was putting it through. I thought for sure, Cryostasis, a 2009 game, at least, would run well, but apparently its Russian developers designed it to run on some theoretical future computer.
Yeah, sweeping the drivers and tuning things up actually sped my system up a bit, and I guess it's operating about on par with what would be expected.
I guess that settles that. -
Quote:Or real cyborgs, yes. The concepts there are innumerable, to be honest. That's kind of why I've always wanted to see it. We could do so much more if the system supported layered textures like that.Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
Or real cyborgs.
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Quote:Oh, cry me a river. English is not my native language, either (or anywhere close to it), yet I manage just fine. English as a foreign language is NOT an excuse, and it's actually insulting to those of us who put in the time and effort to cope.Originally Posted by StarCrusader
It's not easy writing in a strange language...try mine and let's see how you do..thx for being around and making life so wonderfull for the rest of us :/
If you have problems with English, that's fine. Apologise for it and we'll all go about our business. But don't try to pull the "woe is me" trump card. It doesn't work. I should know. -
Quote:I got a shiver down my spine for a second before I remembered Brawl no longer has an endurance cost. DON'T SCARE ME LIKE THAT!Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Brawl is used a lot.
There are a few outliers there. I wasn't aware MA/SR was one, but if you want to cite end hogs, you can't go wrong with a Stone/Stone Brute, though I guess I'd have to append "NOT Perma-Granite." You have four shields, a toggle status protection and a damage aura, and situations when you need them ALL. On top of that, Stone Melee is an unusually heavy-hitting attack set with unusually fast animation times, giving it some SERIOUS burst cost if you go full tilt. Basically, your recovery is down the toilet thanks to the zillion shields in your secondary and you're costing yourself a fortune thanks to your primary.
That sucks. It sucks enough to convince even me to take Stamina. But that IS an outlier.
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I need to make a confession here. I constantly append "unless you want to remove the endurance bar altogether" to the ends of my statements for the simple fact that I wouldn't actually complain if that happened. Sure, it's be a move that would make me question Castles' sanity, and I realise how many things it would break, but I still wouldn't complain because endurance management SUCKS. As far as I'm concerned, the most you can do about it is make it suck less. I realise it's there for balance and it plays an important part, but I've never found myself saying "Yes! I'm out of endurance! Goody! That means I have to go back to the drawing board and do MORE WORK to figure out how to fix this!" At most I roll my eyes and just get done with it.
That said, I still maintain that endurance management is... Well, manageable without Stamina in the general case. I maintain that and keep insisting because to believe otherwise would mean that I would hate playing this game. I don't WANT Stamina, and I have plenty of other things I want to take instead. Like Confront. And Dimension Shift. Point is, I don't want to have to take Stamina, and I know for a fact that others share my sentiment, so I have to stick to my guns just to keep that point alive. -
Quote:For a six-year-old game to grow, it needs to attract players who aren't six-year fans with six-year-old machines. In order for the game to attract players at all, it can't look six years old, or everyone will just pass it up for the new shiny. Like it or not, looks matter, because most people won't stick with a game beyond the first day if there isn't SOMETHING to grab their attention. I've tried and dropped plenty of MMOs within a day, so I know that's a factor.Originally Posted by Severe
as nice as it is..i think it was a big waste of time.
the game is in a huge lull and i think they could have done something better with their time then give a buncha shadows to a 6 year old game with a dwindling playerbase
the % of people who will actually use ultra mode is so low i really cant believe they think it was a good idea.
there are people who still cant play in grandeville for crying out loud cause its too laggy.
But, humour me. What could they have done with their newly hired graphics programmers that didn't involve better graphics? -
Quote:Huh? I thought 3D Mark was depricated. Last I heard about it was 2005. If it's still a viable benchmark, I'll give it a run as soon as I find some time to do so. Thank you. Will post results when I have them.Originally Posted by Eislor
Sam, didn't they give you an invoice for the parts? If they did, look up the PS.
You mentioned Everest, have you used it to do some stress testing of your system? You might try 3DMark for some more stress testing and compare it to the results here, if you numbers are not close you might have a defective card. -
Quote:As far as I can tell, yes, actually. It even has the same chain mail cable bundle sleeves and those gaudy Velcro ties. The ports LOOK like they're the same on the side of it, too, though I don't want to open my box again. Ever. Closing that thing back down with all the cables in there is like packing a suitcase for a long holiday, and I don't enjoy using my knee on my PC case too much.Originally Posted by Back_Blast
Hm, this look familiar? http://www.fspgroupusa.com/everest80plus-700/p/405.html
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A couple of things:
First, what Bill said. There's "won't," there's "can't" and there's "not now."
Secondly, as one of the developers mentioned before, everything is a question of priorities. You can have something done well, fast or cheap, and you generally only ever get to pick any two of the three. A lot of "not now" is because of this.
Other than that, staying optimistic is a good general policy. I still hold SOME hope for an extra AT or two at some point down the road. -
Quote:My knowledge in metallurgy is severely limited, and thanks to that dang rock'n'roll, I can't look for "black metal" and actually find ANYTHING to do with metallurgy, so I can't even do research on this. I would assume metal that is black is usually painted, but I wouldn't know.Originally Posted by Canine
The thing is though. Black cars aren't 'reflective black metal', they're reflective black plastic, because what you're seeing is a reflection off the paint, not the metal.
I'm not sure if there *is* a shiny black metallic element, as the majority of metallic elements are described as 'silvery' or 'silvery grey'. Copper's a little bit of an oddity in that regard, along with Gold.
However, the only reason I brought in realism here was to explress that black reflections are something that ought to be available SOMEHOW. I mean, Impervium is a blackish purple metal and THAT is plenty shiny enough. Just look at your typical Combine architecture Arachnos fort. Whether that's plastic, paint or magical black shiny metal, shininess shouldn't be restricted to bright colours only, sinply because dark colours can be glossy, too. That's kind of the point of Environment Reflections.
I have quite a few black-metal-clad heroes and villains. I don't know if that's realistic, but that was never really my prerogative. I know they look cool, and I wanted to see if they couldn't look cool and shiny. No such luck. Considering everything ELSE that I can see Environment Reflections on is terrible (doesn't actually reflect the environment in real time), this is kind of disappointing. -
Quote:It isn't new to Ultra Mode, no. I actually raised the same concern back in CoV Beta and during I6 Live. Faux reflections suffer the same fate, I believe I opened with that, but the thing is... I was kind of hoping Ultra Mode would fix that. I guess it isn't up to ultra mode, though. This looks like an artefact of how the game handles transparency, an issue that has been plaguing the game ever since I2, when we first got to use auras and found that black ones were almost entirely transparent.Originally Posted by Necrotron
Disable Ultra Mode and take the same screenies. You will find that the regular "fake" reflections don't show up at all on black costume pieces.
Example: Disable environmental reflections, enter the costume editor and add one of the metallic visors to your head. Change the colour around, and rotate.
My point being, this isn't new to Ultra Mode.
One would have to delve into technicalities FAR too obscure to a player to really discuss this, but to say that this is not what I expected to see. -
Quote:Ah, OK, that I can see as a problem. Since commands can be given custom error messages, the /help one could easily be given the message "This is not a chat channel, this command summons the Help menu." Or even better yet, make it accept as many arguments as someone provides it and open the menu, anyway. I don't know what the setup for parsing commands is for City of Heroes, so I don't know if it's doable, but either a better error message or an easier time opening the menu is vital.Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
"That blob of text" doesn't mean the Help menu. It means "h takes 0 args, you provided x." Which isn't particularly helpful.
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Now I feel sad. Why doesn't anyone ever specifically bait ME? I have plenty of topics I can rant about... The closest I've come was Leo_G unintentionally referencing a concept argument we'd had before
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Nah, forget about it. No way I can see a thing in that mess. The power unit is mounted upside down for some reason - I guess to match the bolt holes on the back of the case, and if it has any labels, they're pressed up against one of the side plates. All I can read off the side is "FSP Group."
I CAN read a few of the port designations, though. I managed to follow the cables through the tangle, no doubt giving myself cross-eye for the rest of the day. I can spot two cable bundles going into the card - a blue chain mail bundle and a red chain mail bundle. The blue chain mail bundle actually comes out of a hole in the power unit itself, it's not plugged into any of the cables. I've no idea what that's connected to on the inside. The red chain mail bundle IS plugged in, however, and it's plugged into a port that, if I'm reading the label correctly, is labelled SATA, which I assume the power for my hard drives also shares. both bundles are chain mail from beginning to end, so I know there's nothing else plugged into them, and the extra SATA power cable I used for my second hard drive came out of another SATA slot.
I don't know what that means, but I don't think both power cords going to the card are on the same, err... What was that? Basically, one comes from inside the power unit case, one's plugged into the external ports. -
I see. I guess I never really read into that.
Still, though, wouldn't black metals still be reflective if they're shiny and smooth enough? Ours just AREN'T, they look flat and matte. And even if they don't, wouldn't it make sense to still make them shiny and reflective, since when people thing "reflective black metal," they tend to think cars painted black? It's just odd that black metallic surfaces just won't reflect.