Samuel_Tow
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Posts
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Quote:That's the first time I've heard of this.Originally Posted by ShadowNate
My source is being at herocon during one of the post-panel QA sessions, this was asked multiple times and answered multiple times with "No."
Going Rogue is different from City of Villains in notation only. Which is a smart move. Trying to pretend something with only enough content to be a fairly sizeable expansion pack was a standalone game hamstrung them in too many ways, and they weren't likely to repeat the same mistake. However, WHAT the expansion holds isn't limited by what it's typed as. And as much as I hate to bring up WoW, they have so-designated expansions that do very much bring on new classes, so it's not out of character for an expansion to do so.Quote:Going rogue is just a expansion, unlike CoV which was a game ment to be played either with or without its heroes counterpart, there is simply no need to add new AT's and if they did I imagine it would push back the release of GR considerably.
And how is that different from mixing the hero and villain ATs into the same universe? Considering they were already stepping on each other's toes in just their respective factions, opening them up to both sides will do exactly as you describe, yet that's treated as a good thing. Why wouldn't it be?Quote:Also IMO all those concepts you listed would be stepping on the toes of the already existing ATs, pretty much all of them would lead to less diverse teams. Just my opinion however. -
Quote:Two items of interest:Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
And you would have failed miserably. The problem with faultline, as well-explained by the dev notes of its release, was inherent in the whole zone design. people would've avoided the zone- and your precious 3-6 arcs- just like they do with the shadow shard.
1. You are aware that the Shadow Shard HAS no story arcs, right? It has four of the worst, most boring, most repetitive, most time consuming Task Forces known to man. Even if the whole zone was a flat-floored white room 10x10 big, there is NO POINT to go there, and what little there is to do is wretched. People keep claiming it's the zone that keeps them out, but if there were anything at all to draw them in, I'd bet my metal-tipped tail that you'd see a lot less of that complaint.
2. Outside of Faultline, Terra Volta and possibly the Shadow Shard, which zones require a significant "change" to make them easier to navigate? Faultline required it, that much I will admit, even if I don't agree with the solution to the problem. Terra Volta is inexplicably designed without a decent route to the top level and without a decent exit out of the Gordon Trench (there are ways to reach both, but they require more dexterity than slapping your butt on the keyboard provides, hence why I point them out as problems), which would need to be added either via elevator or rams with railings. But beyond that? What in Boomtown is so disruptive that the zone MUST be completely redesigned or be nigh-on unplayable for many people? What, more specifically, that wasn't wrong with the Crash Site which wasn't changed when it became the War Zone?
I don't deny that certain things need to be added to these zones in a revamp. No question there. The question is whether these revamps can be done with a modicum of restraint, fixing things only where necessary, of we'll just ask them to scrap the zone and rebuild it from scratch, which is very much what they did with Faultline. I don't see the latter as the superior option as it replaces a lot of decent content with a lot of... Pretty much decent content, only slightly different. It's not a fair trade when it comes at the costs involved.
The Architect gives us a good estimate of how much work it takes to create a polished arc. For me, it's about a week's worth of, like, three-hour days, and I hold a regular job besides that. Add on a day or so for peer testing (it'd be faster if testers were paid for this, rather than whomever I could beg to try it). Granted, this ignores custom-made developer-only content like unique maps and new villains, but reusing old content, it's not THAT time-consuming to make three small arcs, provided there isn't just one lone guy working on it in his lunch breaks.Quote:As for how long it can take? More than you probably think. I've heard "industry estimates" from 60 to 300 hours of dev time per hour of player time, depending on various factors, including the quality of the tools involved. Given that I worked in generating online flash-based training for soldiers where the estimate was normally 300+ hours of dev time for 1 hour of learning time while taking advantage of rather "canned" code, I can believe that.
I also certainly hope that, unlike a player doing it, there is more than one person working on this for the entire game.Quote:If you want to use AE as an example, remember that AE tools were better and more robust than anything and everything that started before. Then remember that, unlike a fan that "starts development" when he opens the editor, there's a whole range of Conceptualizing... of meetings to get approval for the concept... of scripting it out... of getting peer review and sign-off on the script.. of putting it in... of peer review... and revisions all along the way.
Basically, it comes down to how important the written word is to the development team. If I have to be perfectly honest, it doesn't seem to be quite very. I've been a stout defender of adding new mechanics like the Architect (not so much) and power customization as adding value to the game, but sooner or later we'll have to start adding more missions and redoing the old missions. Excuses and explanations will only work for so long. -
Quote:In Dragonica, I would often get asked to answer a simple logical or mathematical question based off pictures. If I answered correctly, I was buffed. If I answered incorrectly or did not answer at all, I was teleported "back to town."Originally Posted by Santorican
How can you even tell that someone is a bot?
Lemme' tell ya', it's a lot of fun when a massive window pops up in the centre of your screen in the middle of a busy fight to make sure you're human. And I don't believe it cured death. -
Quote:That's a lot of how I got the name for my panda girl, when a coworker called a picture a "panda" in his rush, when he meant to say "koala," which is what was on the picture. Putting the the two together gave me Pandala, which ended up being a remote area in Zambia, and wasn't used by a character that I could find.Originally Posted by EU_Damz
For example my girlfriend [at the time] drank malibu a lot and im more of a magners type of person. One day playing the game i saw those two bottles and my mind being wierd just combined the two.
Malibu + Magners = maliner
To me that sounded like a very cool name to have, something without real meaning.
Just looking around my room now i combine names of items and i've come up with a whole load.
Chargilled chicken sandwhich + can of relentless = charless or sanlent
Scratchcard + aftershave = scarter or cartave scar
sky box + magazine = skyma -
Quote:I have a post that addresses this somewhere in the thread. It shows up on page 2 for me, but because I use 20-post pages, it's likely on page 3 or 4 for some people. I went at great length to explain this. Whether it's a GOOD name is subjective. Whether it's appropriate for a super hero name with the likes of Green Lantern much-revered... Yes, I firmly believe it fits right in.Originally Posted by Willowpaw
I'm in agreement here, and with a few others who are of the opinion that Cecity does not quite work as a good and decent superhero name.
Which ignores a large chunk of the story I actually provided in the original post. Adding Braille into the name would assume the Braille alphabet would be in any way, shape or form useful to this character, but since she lacks a sense of touch, it isn't. Her very design is of someone who lacks ANY physical sense at all, not just sight. That's a large reason why I didn't want to go with a common variant on blindness - it's not JUST blindness, but blindness would be the most directly obvious symptom. And, yes, even though Cecicy is a pretty obscure synonym of blindness (not nearly as obscure as I made it out to be, though), it's obscure enough to sound strange, which is the defining feature of this character's concept. I started out looking for blindness derivatives, but I found something that was just that, yet was still more interesting.Quote:Anyway, the first thing that came to mind for me when you described the character was "Needs to work Braille into the name."
Yeah, and if I did that I'd never be able to look at myself in the mirror again. I'm not above using compound names like you suggest (I already have a woman going by callsight and last name and a girl that goes by name and abstract letter), but I completely refuse to cop out and write an obvious plot device into a character's name. I don't care if it's tradition. It's a BAD tradition that I do not wish to carry on.Quote:Cecity, combined with a normal last name would work as part of the hero's "civilian" name though, since that is an old trend in comics (the hero's normal name just happens to foreshadow his or her powers...like say, Edward Nigma or Nygma as The Riddler, or Johnny Blaze as the 70s Ghost Rider for example). -
Quote:Well, I take a very relaxed attitude towards these, as every time I ask for name or costume help, I get a lot of feedback, but not a lot that's an exact fit for my very narrow, very specific brand of taste. So I end up Frankensteining a name or concept at the end and I can still call it my own. I look at other people's guides, advice and general help the same way I look at online encyclopaedias and dictionaries - resources to draw on. Provided people offer their help with no commitment in return, why not just draw on what you enjoy and draw from a lot of people?Originally Posted by EU_Damz
Personally i'ld be insulted if somebody pointed me in the direction of one of those guides but thats just me. Sure might be good for you lot, but all my characters are MY OWN CREATION. If i have to have any sort of help with any of them, they no longer feel like i made them, which is the main draw to me to making new characters. Making them my own.
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Actually, I want to clarify something. I didn't do the google search to marvel at my own good fortune in finding a name no-one would spot, but rather to ensure I wasn't copying an established character. These days, almost any common word you pick to use will have a character attached to it. I mentioned Parallax, whom I found while I was searching for the meaning of the word, but there are others. In fact, you can make a game out of naming common words and seeing how many get a hit on a hero or a villain.
Just off the top of my head, things like shard, steel, blade, rock, ring... I'm just guessing out here. Hell, I have a character I gave a completely made-up name I thought of on the spot. Not 20 minutes in, I get a random tell asking me "Oh, hey! Billy Drake like the race driver?" Wha? So it goes. These days I always google my names before I finalise them just to make sure I'm not ripping off something famous. -
Quote:Points O, B and A lie on the xz plane, which is perpendicular to the viewing plane by definition (e.i. I defined the viewing plane to be perpendicular to the z axis). I define the coordinate system of the viewing plane to have its origin where it intersects the z axis and have its x' and y' prime axes be parallel to the x and y axes, respectively. That puts its x' axis into the zx pane. This means that OA, being that it it's drawn over the z axis, intersects the viewing plane through the origin of its coordinate system (again, by definition) and OB lies in the zx plane. This means that the points where OA and OB intersect the viewing plane - A' and B' respectively - form a line between them that lies directly on top of the x' axis of the viewing plane (that square I drew on there).Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
You lost me here. How, exactly, is that so?
Why is that x', then? I neglected to explain, but I define point P's image as the point where OP intersects the viewing plane. However, I can find this image not by tracing it exactly, but by where its image on the zx plane intersects the x' axis, and where its image on the zy plane intersects the y' axis. If I have both, I can extrapolate the the location of the point on the viewing plane by simply adding them up.
If you want, I can prove this geometrically. The whole thing comes down to a pyramid with one edge I didn't draw (because it would have made things REALLY cluttered) that has a base defined by the point, its image on the zx plane, its image on the zy plane and its image on the z axis, and with a peak at the origin O of the 3D coordinate system. This base is perpendicular to the z axis, which is also perpendicular to the viewing plane, which makes the base plane and a viewing plane parallel. As such, the calculations ought to be obvious via trivial proof, combined with a definition I honestly forgot to include.
Erm... Isn't that what I just said?Quote:And we told you there's no sphere involved... 
There is no sphere to be had in this model, but this isn't my original model that I used (that one was similar, but more complicated). This one projects directly onto a flat surface via a central translation, whereas the one I originally wanted to go with projected onto a sphere, which then projected onto a flat surface.
As well, this model uses simple coordinates, whereas the one I originally wanted to use used central coordinates because I didn't want to define a horizon on the view. I could describe that as well, if you want, though I doubt it would be interesting outside of unrelated curiosity, which few have when it comes to mathematics, as far as I've seen. Mathematicians, especially
Perhaps "distortion" is not the right word. What I meant was that as you move away from the centre of the view point and as you increase the field of view, the things you see become increasingly more warped and bizarre, and the actual "normal" portion of the view field shrinks towards the centre. If you'll note when playing Quake 3 Arena with a FOV of, say, 120-150 (I've seen people who do that, for some reason), very little looks like what you'd expect it to look like. It's all out of some bizzarro world that men were not meant to tread. By comparison, the spherical model of that picture someone that scrolled off my thread preview posted (spherical because it's refracted through a round lens) looks unusual, but only in so much as you can't actually pinpoint where the camera is actually looking (hint: it's looking everywhere at the same time), but any one section of the picture taken by itself does look like something a human could actually see and recognise as vision. It's only taken as a whole that it's confusing, but taken in part, it isn't. A flat model produces a "believable" view in the centre and in the centre only. Cropping a section from the upper left corner produce BIZARRE results, believe me.Quote:I'm not sure what distortion you're referring to? -
Quote:Good names are subjective, but when people ask for a "good" name, what they typically mean is an "obvious" name. To my mind, I picked a theme that was obvious and gave it a name that did not deviate from it or use any sort of typological trick to get around the restrictions, nor did I have to include a personal name. In essence, I picked a theme name and I got a theme name. Short of getting EXACTLY the EXACT name I want EXACTLY, I don't see a better outcome as even possible. I wanted "Blindness" and I got "another word for Blindness." If that's not enough, then I judge that to be asking too much.Originally Posted by Biowraith
A "good name" is subjective, very much personal taste and preference. I know when these threads get going and people post their name lists as evidence of just how many good names are available, I rarely find (m)any among them that I'd want to use for my own characters. And I have no doubt they'd feel similarly about my own name choices.
As for whether "Cecity" is a good name, I can say two things. One, I like it, and since it's my character, that's all that really matters. Two, it's a name not unlike what I'd expect to see on a comic book cover, and certainly not any more strange than, for instance, "Jubilee," which is a word I have still yet to see used in colloquial language AT ALL, and is a word that I, to this day, do not know the exact meaning of (not least of all because no-one ever uses it as a word).
When it comes to meaning, yes, it is an obscure word that most people wouldn't know the meaning to offhand. So? How many people know what the name of Parallax means? I certainly didn't until I heard the word off somewhere, looked it up online and did a not insignificant amount of research, part of which is documented here on the forums. That doesn't stop it from being a good name. Here's another one: How many of you can tell me the significance of D: Bloodlust villainess Carmilla? How many, without googling it?
And as far as it possibly being a silly name because of how it sounds... I guess. Then again, Linkara brings us the "Dunkelkinder" from his Scarlett #1 review, and I just so happen to be aware of a powerful villainess called Granny Goodness. And, of course, need I mention Green Lantern? Whether or not the character himself is cool, that is an incredibly goofy name. It may be cool within context, but then I've given no context to my character, so you guys can't really know if it makes up for it, can you?
Point is, in any objective way I can measure this, it measures up. People don't have to like that one specific name, but the point remains that the process by which I found it can produce others, potentially more appealing names to the people searching. And I'm not talking about compromising by going real name (say, like my own namesake) or made-up words (like my own Morten). I'm talking about real words, admittedly with a somewhat obscure meaning, used in a context not entirely different from that of established famous comic book characters. -
OK, OK, this is a stupid reason to start a new thread, but... Well, when has that ever stopped me? You know, for the past five years I've been listening to the same tired old argument - all the good character names are already taken, woe is me. On the one hand, I don't buy that, because I know they're not, but on the other hand, there's always that niggling little thought at the back of my mind: "Yeah, I'm making fun of these people and dismissing their concerns, but what if it happens to me?"
What if it happens to me, indeed? Suppose there was a character I just HAD to give a descriptive name, where giving her two names or a personal name would just have been a step down? What if all the descriptive names I could come up with are taken? What if... Well, it finally happened.
See, for a while now I've been throwing around a concept for a character who is blind (and deaf and lacks any sense of smell, taste or touch), but has alternate methods to see. "Daredevil" was out of the question, obviously, but I wanted to go with something that meant "blindness." "Blindness" itself wouldn't do, again very obviously, and I've tried both "nearsigted" and "shortsighted" before, and both were taken, as well as, let's be frank here, not being terribly good names. Being that English is not my first language and I hadn't dealt with blindness much before, that's where my synonyms ran out. What is one to do, then? I've seen a lot of people post thesaurus sites, but like an arrogant *****, I just ignored them, proudly thinking to myself "I would never need such a thing! My vocabulary is far too vast for me to worry about it!" Yeah, apparently not vast enough.
But there's still the 'net, obviously, and doing something as simple as googling "blindness synonym" (and that's straight out of my search history) presented me with a couple of user-unfriendly dictionary sites that gave me such odd suggestions like "sightlessness" and "blindness" o.O. But among them were good suggestions, such as "myopia," which I never actually knew the meaning of, but it turns out to be a medical term for near-sightedness. "Cool!" I thought. "That... Sounds like a really crappy name, but maybe it's free!" Nope. No dice. Someone thought of it first, and perplexingly decided to use it. Huh. Well, people are typically smarter than me, and there are, like, a hundred thousand of them consuming, like, 30 names each, so they pretty much have to be.
Moving down the list, I found the word "cecity," which is apparently SUCH a rare word for blindness that a google search for it reveals nothing and asks me if I actually meant "city" (it does show ONE sight that has it, though), and Wikipedia has no articles of that name, or with that word in their titles. Huh. Here I thought it was a word that meant some kind of specific blindness condition, or an eye disease of some sort, but apparently it literally means blindness in all sense of the word. Imagine that.
Of course, before I did any of those additional searches, I tried the word as a character name. Surely someone smarter than me, with a better vocabulary and English as a native language would have thought of such a curious word and it would be taken. After all, all the obvious names are taken, a "blindness by another name" is very much as obvious as it gets. Nope. "This character name is available." Huh... I did not expect that, but I'll take it! So I sit around, making a character for around five minutes (I had the costume all planned out beforehand), get to the name selection field and type the name in. Just to be sure (and out of disbelief), I hit Check Name. "This name could not be checked." Son of a... Hit again, cannot be checked again. Why, I don't know, but I decided to give the name check system the finger and go ahead with it anyway. Name went through and the game popped me up into Outbreak.
Still in disbelief, I checked to make sure I'd spelled the name right. My /infoself name field says "CECITY," that's C E C I T Y. Looks the same as what I'm seeing in my google serches. I can't copy my name off my infoscreen, so I do a /whoall (I'm the only one in Outbreak on Victory at the moment), copy my name out of there (in the process closing my chat window ARGH!!!), plop it down into google and I get a confirmation from The Free Dictionary explaining that my search term meant "(Medicine / Pathology) a rare word for blindness." Well, I guess I spelled it right, I'm in the game with the right name, it has the right meaning, and apparently either no-one thought of the name or no-one liked it. Huh...
Finding the word to use as a name took me somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3-4 minutes, give or take. I've been typing up this post talking about it for the past 15-20 minutes. That ought to give you some context as to how hard it was to find.
Good character names are running out, huh? -
Bug: The falling dorward animation with a shield and a weapon out plays the running animation for the most part. I'll explain.
Character: Female Broadsword/Shield Defence Scrapper
Relevant powers: Any Shield Defence toggle plus the sword out. I'm using the regular Romulus sword from the ITF. Super Jump, just for emphasis.
Bug Description: As I've seen a character jumping forward (especially when super jumping) goes through two animations, one for ascent in typically a "crouched" position, and one for descent, typically with the arms at the sides. Shield Defence has long since had a rather different animation for these when both the shield and a right hand weapon are out, which is basically jumping normally, but falling with the shield had up front and the weapon held back and to the side, at least for falling FORWARD. This no longer plays, instead showing my character jogging through the air.
Here's a good reproduction description:
1. Activate any Shield Defence power (I typically have all toggles running at the same time)
2. Hit a Broadsword power to force the sword out. Make sure it doesn't despawn.
3. Simply jump forward and wait for the apex of the jump.
4. As soon as you start dropping down, note that you are, in fact, running in the air.
There's something else to note - this happens only directly after a jump, as you transition from ascent into descent. If you strafe while falling, the animation switches to the correct one, which will remain active for the duration of the fall. However, most normal jumps do not require, or indeed work well with strafing, so under normal circumstances, this rarely happens.
This has to be a bug. -
Quote:Here's an interesting question for you, then. How would you bodyslam a Storm Elemental and how much damage would it do?Originally Posted by CryoTech
Well i was referring to Ion's post about how a "Body Slam" power would look odd when attacking something like a GM so i was referring to a way to allow it to make a little more sense, but you are right in that my post was merley facetious.
*note* This is the in-game equivalent to asking you how you would bodyslam a cloud. That seems like an interesting proposition. -
Quote:Interesting... Here's a relevant question, then: What's the relation between knockback magnitude and knockback distance? For instance, would a (final) mad 10 knockback punt something, say, 100 feet, or is there some kind of non-linear equation describing this?Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Damage is a magnitude effect, so it obeys the first formula. Most mez is coded as a duration effect, so mez tends to obey the second formula. KB is generally coded as a magnitude effect. That's also why slotting KB increases the magnitude of the KB, but slotting Hold tends to increase the duration of the hold: same reason: KB is a magnitude effect and thus slotting increases its magnitude; hold is generally a duration effect and thus slotting increases its duration.
As well, I've seen knockback "stacked" when two people use knockback powers almost simultaneously. Is there some duration during which the knockback magnitude is held consistent before it "clears" when the effect wears off? Specifically, how does that work when something resists the knockback effect? -
Quote:In a mission that you need (or at least needed) to do in order to gain what heroes get for picking their noses... Is that honestly the right place to introduce challenge-slash-cheese?Originally Posted by Dr_HR
I actually want them to stay, i find them a refreshing challenge compared to other missions.
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Quote:Cell phones are given at first relationship upgrade (and suddenly I feel like I'm describing a dating sim...), which is pretty much a fact for almost all contacts. When you reach that first level isn't always static, because it's a percentage of completed objectives, and some contacts just have an assload of missions, so it takes longer.Originally Posted by konshu
Yes, I think we should be able to make some fairly easy changes in the old arcs, such as changing when the contact gives the player the cellphone button. I would be sincerely surprised if it isn't just a matter of going to each contact and putting the command to display the cellphone button earlier in the contact's mission list. We see arcs that give cellphone at all different times; surely this is because it is hand-coded as to when the cellphone will be given.
See, the thing is... Some of the old content is WRETCHED. And not just low-level content. Things like Unai Keme's "Search dimensions 1, 2 and 3" plethora of missions and Maria Jenkins' atrocious spelling and crappy narrative are direct eyesores. Plenty of old missions are defeat-alls for no real reason, and, in fact, Tina McIntyre's mission against Bobcat is a defeat-all in an outdoor map with patrols. What sadistic meanie designed THAT particular mission?Quote:Fixing the cellphone issue is completely different from going in and making changes to spawning points on specific old maps, or developing completely new artwork, or whatever it is that people are associating negatively with the term "revamp."
To me, a reasonable revamp of the lower levels and under-utilized zones simply involves adding new, optional content.
A lot of the ways the old content needs to be redesigned don't involve new graphics, tilesets or enemy design. It involves cleaning up embarrassingly bad writing and purging utterly pointless missions that add nothing to the plot. I am sick of story arcs consisting of a few important mission and a good dozen "Your princess is in another castle!" Some need shortening, some need spell-checking, some need an actual WRITER to look through them and set all the terrible exposition straight, and some just need their needlessly sinister objectives reviewed.
And this needs to happen, because these missions and arcs honestly ARE a blight upon the game. -
Quote:Like I said, I'm not up to par. It just seems, to me at least, that as long as you are not expressly permitted to sell what is still a company's own online property, then making money off of it ought to be illegal. Granted, I don't know what the legal implications of "ownership" of virtual goods really are, but as they are not physical, it seems to me that "ownership" ought to pass only by permission, which I don't recall many MMO designers giving.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Ownership is a fluid concept. You might not "own" the digital money, but you might have a right to use it which has a real life value notwithstanding any various agreements you might have made.
It's not an easy issue. These digital worlds have Terms of Service written to try and deal with this issue, but the more that companies engender a sense of ownership in these items, the more that they will have to deal with issues like this.
For example, SOE allows direct selling of characters and such on their (pretty fun) F2P game Free Realms. The claim that they own everything on the servers would seem to ring hollow to me. I would love to see how an appellate court would deal with the issue. -
Quote:Um... Do you per chance have a source for this info?Originally Posted by ShadowNate
The answer is no, there will be no new AT's introduced with going rogue. What will be new is the Demon summoning and Duel pistols sets, anything else set wise will be poliferated power sets and there is no promise that will happen.
And I gotta' say, "Will there be new ATs?" is a question not answered, but asked pretty much all the time, by me at the very least. I'd really like to see five more ATs because we have a few combos left over that could really make the game a lot more interesting. Like...
Assault/Defence, let's just get that out there.
Melee/Support, because people keep asking for it.
Summon/Melee, or at least a melee/defence secondary. Support sets play a major role in Mastermind power, so the change would be interesting.
And that's just off the top of my head. -
Quote:This is kind of a one-sided view of the problem, really. People WILL grind, no matter what you do, and they will always look for the path of least resistance. You could have the world's greatest MMO and someone will still find a way to take all the fun out of it just so he can progress faster. It's not really just about boring content, or even simple and boring. It could be the best content in the world, but if it's simple enough it WILL be farmed and it WILL be made boring. That's why bots are banned, exploits patched up and farming discouraged, as much as that is possible.Originally Posted by Katie V
This leads to one of the best pieces of MMO design advice I've ever seen:
Widespread use of bots is a sign that you, as a game designer, have made a major mistake. If there is content in your game that is both simple enough for a bot to play, and boring enough that many people will use a bot to play it, you need to re-think things.
Personally, I see it as protecting people from themselves.
As far as bots in City of Heroes goes, though, I don't believe they're really relevant for technical reasons. Specifically, the same technical reasons that deny us running attacks and restrict us to teleporting attacks that mimic those. Our terrain is chaos architecture on a very fine-detail level. It's incredibly easy to get hung up on a chair, trapped behind crates, hung op on a torch, walk off a tall platform, get stuck by a low ceiling and any manner of other impediments that a real, thinking human often has trouble navigating around, let alone a bot.
Most traditional MMOs tend to consist of large open areas with a flat terrain, or at least bumpy terrain you can run over. Our game is chock-full of benches, parked cars, street lights, trash cans, fences, walls, pits, shrubs, trees and all manner of other crap that gets in your way. Hell, OUR OWN AI has trouble navigating terrain a lot of the way, and we're talking about writing a user-made AI that'll do better? I have strong doubts about that, superficially since I've seen how limited bots can be. A friend of mine was trying to use something called an L2Walker, a bot for Lineage 2 (his egg to stand on, not my problem), and that thing was just silly. Sometimes it worked right, sometimes it lost its mind, and overall it was unreliable.
Besides, City of Heroes features respawning enemies which repawn only when you move away, so you can't park down in a moor and kill stuff till the sky falls over, because sooner or later you won't see any enemies when you look around. And even then, proper farming happens on missions where enemies don't respawn at all.
I don't see it here. -
Quote:You'll not those have always been on a "don't tell us if you're using them and we won't bug you about them" basis. As long as they're benign, the powers that be have saw it fit to look the other way, but these things have been and are against the rules nevertheless.Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
HeroStats
City Info Tracker
Mids' Hero Designer
>.>
<.<
I'm a baaaad man!
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OK, I'm clearly out of my depth running on just memory here. Let me try and explain, instead, things as I would look at them.
I'll be working off the following picture:
Here, I have the viewing plane aligned to the origin of the coordinate system, such that it's perpendicular to the z axis and in-line with the x and y axes. I've further defined a two-dimensional coordinate system on the plane with an origin where z intersects the plane and with x' and y' coordinate axes (which I forgot to note down, oops!) parallel to the x and y axes of the space. From here on out, I picked a point P defined by its central vector (e.i. defined as P(x,y,z)), and have marked out the physical representations of its coordinates as down on the chart. Red is z, blue is y and green is X. The A, B, A' and B' points I'm using just so that I can call things more easily, and despite having noted the angle between the Z axis and the image of the O->P vector in the xz plane, I probably won't call it by name.
Oh, and before I forget, I've positioned the distance of the viewing plane away from the origin as 1 unit, just to simplify the calculations I'm doing by hand.
Here's what I have in mind: First let's find the image of the O->P vector in the xz plane. That would be OB (noting it as a fixed-length line, lacking a better English term) as B is the image of P on xz. Furthermore, the image of point B onto the z axis is point A. This gives us a triangle OAB, with a right (90 degree) angle at point A. It may not look like that's where it is, but remember - both OA and BA are images of the coordinate axes, which are perpendicular between each other.
By virtue of this being a right angle triangle, I can calculate the tangent of angle BOA, which comes to AB/OA (again, defined just as length values, not as vectors). But because AB = x and OA = z, the tangent of the angle comes up to x/z. Now, because the viewing plane is perpendicular to the x and y axes, and A' and B' are intersection points of OA and OB with the plane, the OA'B' triangle is, in fact, similar to OAB, and because it shares an angle to which we already know the tangent, we can recalculate. Specifically, within triangle OA'B', the tangent of angle B'OA' can be calculated as A'B'/OA'. However, A'B' is actually the x' value of point P by the coordinate system of the viewing plane, and OA' is the distance to the viewing plane, which I defined as 1. This gives us a tan(B'OA') = x'/1 = x'. What's more, because we're looking at the same tangent, that gives us x' = x/z.
I can do an identical process and find out that y' = y/z. I don't want to bore you with it, it's nothing interesting to describe.
This gives me the 3D to 2D transformation of
|x' = x/z
|y' = y/z
For a coordinate system Ox'y' as defined in the viewing plane.
This also tells me one easy thing: A line parallel to the viewing direction will be directed towards the middle of the "screen," crossing it in infinity. The easy answer as to why is that both horizontal and vertical coordinates will decrease, as x and y remain constant, but z (the denominator) increases, causing each subsequent point on the line to converge on the centre as the distance increases. You can also look at it as the angle decreasing, inclining its tangent off centre towards zero, though that's a less interesting way of putting it.
Also, because y' is not affected by the x coordinate of the point, a line parallel to the horizon (where y and z are constant) will transcribe into a line "on screen." Moreover, x' will increase linearly, giving me the function of a line, which I don't feel like bothering to define. It isn't relevant either way.
Basically, that disproves my original claim that lines parallel to the horizon would converge in infinity left and right, necessitating that they be drawn curved, but it does so at the cost of redefining my original model which required refracting through a sphere (and a rather more complicated calculation, involving square roots and variables squared).
Nevertheless, this "flat" model still produces noticeable distortion as you progress away from its centre, only its distortion is angular, rather than curved. I'm not sure which would be more appropriate to describing human eyesight as perceived by the brain, but from the look of things, the flat model is remarkably easier to calculate, which would make it remarkably more suitable for real-time rendering.
*edit*
And again - I graduated from degree a few years ago, and this particular field I studied at the beginning of the course, so it's quite possible I've forgotten a lot, or single-handedly bastardised analysis and geometry. Possibly both. -
Quote:You mentioned this when explaining it in that you needed the product of the two vectors, which I assumed you needed to confirm a right angle. Upon reflection, I shouldn't have been confused.[/QUOTE]Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
I'm not sure where I specifically said, the product of two vectors, but yes, I'm generally using scalar/dot product in the equations. There are a few occasions where I use matrix product between a row and column vector, and of course I also use normal multiplication.
But defined as what? That's my question. See... Let me explain via another quote:Quote:It doesn't matter. Pnew is just the point where EP intersects the plane.
It should be obvious to me, but this is what keeps throwing me off. Purely technically speaking "point" and "vector" (specifically, central vector) ought to be interchangeable, as you're using what has to be defined as a vector space. In a vector space, each point is defined via a central vector, but when you call them "points," my brain shoots to the right and I have to reload.Quote:The difference between two points is a vector between the two points (A - B = v; v extends from B to A)
The sum of a point and a vector is a point translated by a vector (A + v = B; B is A translated by v)
E - P is a vector. c is a scalar. Scalar times a vector is a vector in the same direction with greater magnitude. So, E - P = v1 (a vector), c v1 = v2 (another vector), P + v2 = Pnew (a point)
I know what you're talking about, I just thought the particular subtraction you chose produced a vector in the direction opposite to the one you assumed (which would have honestly did nothing more than make your scalar negative), but since I lacked sufficient knowledge to actually follow the algorithm to the end, it's very likely I just didn't know what you intended to use in the end. Hence why it may not matter.
Huh... OK, I can work with that, I suppose, though that really strikes me as something I'd use for an analytical physics exercise. I used to be pretty good at that, up until it came to differential equations (hate that side of maths), so I could have a closer look with this in mind.Quote:It may be easier to consider it as a mass-point. {x, y, z, w} is a point {x, y, z}, with mass w. In R3, points have a mass of 1, and vectors have a mass of 0.
I'm suddenly reminded why it always took me so long to study for maths exams
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I'm surprised any court would rule in favour of selling property you don't actually own, but then I'm not too up to day on my legal mumbo jumbo.
Either way, I don't see what this has to do with fighting gold farmers in the game, as the in-game world is policed by PlayNC's house rules, not Korea's stance on gold farmers, and as long as PlayNC choose to fight gold farmers, they are within their right to do so. Unless we're talking about the number of goldfarmers somehow booming after this (which I doubt, since I'd be surprised if anyone ever got convicted in the first place, call me cynical), then it doesn't seem relevant to the in-house fight against their influence, pun not intended. -
Quote:Huh... OK, I can recognise this as a printout from Mathematica, so I can assume how it ought to be orientated. If I'm reading this correctly, the plane you are projecting TO lies on the other side of point P from the viewpoint E, is that correct? I always assumed it was the other way around, that the plane we were imprinting on was between the eye and the point, and we were imprinting on it "backwards towards the eye. Either way, I can work with this. The graph helps.Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
The image of a point P under perspective projection from the eye point E to the plane defined by point Q and normal n is the intersection of the line defined by E and P with the plane:
Perspective projection is not well-defined for every point (if the line EP is orthogonal to n, then it will never intersect the plane), and it is not well defined for every vector (vectors store direction, not position).
One quick note. You mention the "product" of two vectors, but neglect to mention whether you're talking about vector or scalar product, which threw me off at first. Where I come from, we denote basic number multiplication with just a dot (e.i., just .), so what you originally posted I read to be number multiplication, which confused me when you mentioned a vector product. I've read up on it before, so I know that what I call a "scalar product" you'd likely call a "dot product," by virtue of it being denoted by the dot operator. That makes sense of things when you mention that the dot product of a vector belonging to a plane and that plane's normal vector should be zero. If my geometry is correct, the dot product of two perpendicular vectors ought to give one's length times the other's length times the cosinus (which I assume you'd call "cosine") between the two vectors, which for a 90 degree angle would be zero. OK, that much makes sense.
OK... I'm a bit confused here, though I'm not sure it really matters. What I'm getting out of your notation is that every vector mentioned purely by itself is a radial vector, such as O->P (I lack the ability to put the arrow over the letters, so this will have to do). Now, from mentioning they are part of the same line, I assume you mean the image equals the old line plus itself times a scalar. However, as it's noted, it turns into O->Pnew = O->P + c(O->E - O->P), which would actually give you Pnew = P + c(P->E). First of all, wouldn't you want the vector E->P instead (or did I good up somewhere) and secondly... I honestly don't quite follow how that follows from their being on the same line. Technically, that would, to my mind, entail that E->Pnew = E->P +c*E->P. That, of course, doesn't discount what you described, but maybe I'm just too rust to properly follow.Quote:Since Pnew lies on the line EP, there is some constant c such that Pnew = P + c (E - P)
As for why it may not matter...
GOD I hate this! I know this will make me sound like Peter Venkman at the end of Ghostbusters (e.i. like a complete idiot surrounded by incredibly smart people), but I really, honestly HATE working with homogenous coordinates. I basically passed all my exams by avoiding having to, and sticking to the basics. I know they help immensely setting up complex transformations exactly like this one, but if I want to have any shot at reading them, I'm going to have to sit down and do some serious reading. I just don't remember anything about that particular notation. I'll see what I can make out this tomorrow when it's not 1 AM and maybe I'll be able to follow your logic even without a full grasp of the theory behind it.Quote:Homogenous coordinates {x, y, z, w} represent the rectangular coordinates {x / w, y / w, z / w}. Given point P = {x, y, z} and 4x4 transformation matrix A = aij:
Yeah, I wasn't a stellar pupil in university, but at least I tried Honestly, I'd have stuck to much more basic trigonometry that would have given me answers based on the points coordinates, but... Say, here's something:
From what I can glean, you end up with the location of Pnew in three dimensions as it lies on the view plane. However, what we want after printout is the coordinates of that point as seen within the 2D plane itself from an origin that is the orthogonal image of point E (our viewpoint) down onto the plane itself. I honestly don't know (not without probably a full day's worth of thought) how this could be done without even more transformations, but transforming the space to tralnslate and rotate its basis to match the origin of the perspective might help a great deal, both in cutting out a step in vector subtractions and in actually allowing us to use coordinate values as actual line lengths (something which is highly unwieldy with vectors, as it produces the square root of a sum of squares) as well as in allowing us to come to direct values for x and and y which we can directly plot onto a flat without transformation.
I'll see if I can't work on that if I get some free time at work tomorrow. -
Quote:Well, as far as I've seen, we don't actually use the term "fact" in mathematics at all. Only ever proof, as a logical extrapolation from what is given into what we want to prove. As long as the logical chain is not broken, an assumption (or, if you're taking an exam, a theorem) is thus proven.Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
Ah, right. I forgot that common sense is often thrown out the window when it comes to giving names to things in science. Like how a "fact" doesn't necessarily have to be true...
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Quote:I guess I was kind of unsure what kind of space you were dealing with. As far as I'm aware, any space with vectors in it can be treated as a vector space, so each point in it is defined via a central vector, which is why I used that notation in my questions. I can see what you mean now, however, and I can understand your notation, so I'll see if I can go with that.Originally Posted by Fleeting Whisper
E, Q, and O are points; n is a vector. You'll notice in my matrix that I use things such as E.x and n.z; this is how I'm denoting the various components of the structure. O, as the origin, is generally considered {0, 0, 0}, but origin is really arbitrary.
I'm not sure why you consider origin to be arbitrary, since it gives you your base vectors by which everything in the space is defined, but I suppose you could just mean that it's easy enough to transform the space by shifting the origin to match the orientation and size of the given "camera."
OK, I see what you mean here. You're defining a plane via point plus normal vector. I'll have to brush up on my analytical geometry to see exactly what that entails in terms of properties, as I was looking at this in more a trigonometry context. I can't see you defining boundaries for the viewable plane, though. Are we talking just the principle of projection that can just be bounded and cropped in addition? I can work with that.Quote:Point B subtracted from point A results in a vector from A to B. I use E - Q, E - O, and Q - O in my matrix. The eqn, en, and qn variables are just in my post to prevent horizontal scrolling in the code box. If O is in fact {0, 0, 0} (in most systems that's a given, but it's not required for the projection math), then E - O is a vector containing the coordinates of E, but vectors and points are not the same thing.
I'm assuming that either you mean "three points" in the primary, or you're neglecting one of the simplest ways to define one. Just two points between them define a whole cluster of possible planes, essentially rotated around the line between the two points. As far as number two goes, if you're talking about a point in the plane and a vector originating from that point, you run into the same problem - more than one plane can fit that description. I can see a point and normal vector, as that gives, in actual practice, three parameters - two points and an angle, allowing you to define a plane as parallel to a line. Granted, it's been, what... 8 years since I fiddled with these definitions so I might have forgotten something.Quote:There are three ways to define a plane:
1. Two points in the plane (with the implicit vector between the two points; see #2)
2. A point in the plane and a vector in the plane (giving the location and orientation of the plane)
3. A point in the plane and a vector normal to the plane (again, giving the location and orientation of the plane)
See, this is what's been tripping me up from the very start. I can't wrap my head around this matrix, as I'm not sure what it actually means. Your subsequent explanation does make some more sense, but I still lack a notation for what the variables actually mean. I can kind of see what you're talking about in how you break it down, basically as a 3x3 element followed by a 3x1 element on the first row and a 1x3 element followed by a 1x1 element on the second row. The problem is you define three out of the four elements in the description, and even then only as their natures, rather than what they are intended to represent.Quote:The matrix I posted is the expanded form of a more common representation, which is displayed as a 2x2 matrix (rather than the 4x4 matrix I posted), where the first element of the first row is a 3x3 matrix, the second element of the first row is a column vector in R3, and the first element of the second row is a row vector in R3.
I apologise if I'm dragging this out or becoming irritating, but this is actually interesting to me