Samuel_Tow

Then I misunderstood the context within which you said it, because it sounded to me like you meant that a straight line traces as a straight line on a sphere. It doesn't, but if this isn't what you meant, that's irrelevant. I am entirely unprepared to discuss the parsing of visual input in the brain, myself, so I can only limit myself to the geometrical side of things, which is why I make the seemingly odd claims that I do - they are true in a general geometric sense, but they may well not be true in the practical sense of what we think we see.

One thing I CAN state as a fact is that the difference between what our eyes actually detect and what our brain perceives from that information are not really necessarily directly related. By and large, the brain sees by recognising, such that the visual information only suggests what might be there, with the brain forming a picture of what it THINKS is there, and there are a whole variety of infinitely curious disorders that depicts the depths to which this difference can pronounce itself. All of that is to say that I am willing to admit that we perceive straight lines as straight, even if we do not necessarily SEE them as straight.


As I said, I'm not good enough on English terminology, but as far as I have my terms straight, it's fairly trivial to have a continuous function that nevertheless features discontinuity. "Continuous," in this case, is used as the opposite of "discrete," describing a function as defined over an uncountable set. Your typical fractional function (e.i. f(y)=1/x) is, as far as I have my terms straight, continuous, yet it is not only discontinuous at x=0, but it has a non-removable discontinuity, inclining towards minus infinity for x->-0 and towards plus infinity for x->+0, to give the notation I was taught in university, if not necessarily explained with the same words.

What you are suggesting is that they add enemies which specifically target these weaknesses and yet avoid having any sort of knockback and you consider that to be a good idea in the slightest? How do you think people would react if, suddenly, the entire expansion were chock-full of enemies that made their entire defence sets obsolete? I rather doubt it would be with cheers and applause. The thing about crucial weaknesses that makes them interesting from a game perspective is that they are serious, but they are also RARE. The solution is not to make other weaknesses more common, like in some crappy story where Kryptonite is everywhere, it's to either reduce the needless quantity of enemy knockback to only enemies which would be expected to deal it (e.i. larger or stronger ones) or to give people protection from it. Ideally, protection IN their own self-protection sets.

That's called a "straw man," and I'd advise you to avoid using it. It convinces no-one and it looks really bad from a distance.

Yeah, except you keep forgetting that Dull Pain increases your total hit points pool by about 1000, which gives you effective resistance by a lot, significantly increases regeneration AND it heals you for even more than that. It's not only insincere to ignore that, but it borders on hypocrisy, and I don't throw that claim around lightly. You act like Fiery Arua gets a hideously superior heal and that's why it lacks knockback protection, but in actual fact the heals are just about balanced with each other, which DOES NOT call for further balancing. In fact, Fiery Aura's heal is somewhat better than Reconstruction, but that is a change which was done to it AFTER the set was shown to underperform (once the developers got over the old days of farming, of course).

If you want to go ahead and claim that Fiery Aura is more survivable than, say, Invulnerability or Willpower and THAT is why it has to suffer elsewhere, then by all means, do so. That wouldn't be a very strong argument. But if you don't want to commit to that, your argument boils down to "but they get a comparatively balanced heal, so they must suffer drawbacks!" never you mind that both Dark Armour and Fiery Aura already suffer PLENTY of other drawbacks as it is.



I'm not sure if you're honestly clueless about this or if you're just making ludicrous assertions just to make an unfounded point, but let me put it like this: Dull Pain is a significantly larger heal AND a significant hit points increase, whereas Healing Flames is a comparatively smaller heal with no hit points increase. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that if you were able to make Dull Pain recharge as fast as Healing Flames, that would be anything short of absurdly unbalanced?

And again - if you're trying to balance around inventions, you lose by default because the official standpoint is that they will not balance sets and powers with the expectation that people will indulge in inventions. And even then, the knockback hole is hardly the only way Fiery Aura and Dark Armour fall behind.

Yeah, by this point, I'm calling this pure hypocrisy and I'm done dealing with it. You're obviously convinced that recharge is the only thing that matters and only if a vastly more potent power recharges as fast as a vastly inferior one will the sets ever be in competition. That is, to put it bluntly, false on its face.

How many attacks do you intend to put in a Manipulation set?

What you're describing is grappling, and I'm surprised I need to explain why that won't work. Think of the very easiest, direct example for why it's problematic - go ahead and describe how you're going to cuff a Storm Elemental. Now try and describe cuffing a Rikti Drone. Or, heck, a Zeus Class Titan. Not a good idea.

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Basically, from what I'm getting out of this, you're trying to make a Devices clone, but with melee attacks? Do you intend to make the same mistakes? As in, I don't see you including Build Up anywhere in the set, and trust me, this becomes a death trap when you pair it up with Assault Rifle. I know that for a fact.

Secondly, you're gonna' want a LOT more support or control in this. By my count, you have six out of your nine powers reserved for attacks, which pretty much makes this useless as support, while simultaneously making it even worse than Fire Manipulation, in that you don't have as much outgoing AoE. I'd cut down on the baton fetish and restrict that to one attack at most (and switch the baton for something that looks meaningful against, say, a tank, like a some kind of energy stick, at least), reserve your tackle (and you need to tackle without moving, so think about that) and possibly something else, like a stun rod, keep the taser, the gas grenade and add in a flashbang and, personally, I'd switch the shield CHARGE to some kind of shield DEFENCE power, like a small defence or resistance toggle to physical attacks plus maybe some kind of exotic protection... Like knockback.

I'd probably put that down to you managing to kill their stats, as I hear Poison is literally made to do, but my problem is that they deal a LOT of AoE damage REALLY fast and it's all psi. I can't think of a support set that protects against psi offhand, I just know forcefields of any kind don't catch it. The problem all they use is one GIANT AoE they activate at a longer range than you can shoot at them from and, at least for me, that attack could one-shot minion-level henchmen and two-shot everything else, me included. Anything with a lot of AoE is going to suck for a Mastermind, but this is just going too far on the psi damage.

I wouldn't be opposed to Energy Manipulation used as a basis for Blaster "melee" powersets, but Energy Manipulation is nothing in the slightest like your typical melee set. At a stretch, it might be likened to the very ATYPICAL melee set that is Dark Melee, but even then. The set has only three real attacks, no AoE of any sort and is chock full of the kind of self-buffs that melee folk usually get in their defence sets, not their melee sets.

Why do I say only three attacks? Simple - only Energy Punch, Bone Smasher and Total Focus really count. You may be inclined to believe that Power Thrust is a decent attack, but the fact is it has crappy DPS, a VERY steep cost for what it actually does, and is generally not balanced as an attack, just a rather damaging utility power. Beyond that, you have Stun, which really shouldn't have any place being counted as an attack. So on top of these three attacks, half an attack and utility power, you have a raw four self buffs, in the face of Build Up, Power Boost, Conserve Energy and Boost Range.

This is not a melee set. Not in the slightest. It has melee attacks in it, granted, but then so does Energy Assault, and that's probably as much a melee set. That's the big thing - while Blaster Manipulation sets do contain melee attacks (sometimes more than others), the melee attacks are never the actual focus of the set. Yeah, even for Energy Manipulation. So, sure. If we're going to take the time to gut Scrapper and Tanker melee sets to redesign them as Manipulation sets, I have no qualms. But that's hardly "Melee Secondaries for Blasters."

One small note - people keep bringing up Energy Manipulation as some kind of quasi-melee set, yet conveniently forget that Electrical Manipulation has it beat in the melee category hands down. With four GENUINE melee attacks, there's just no question.You have Charged Brawl and Havoc Punch which correspond directly to Energy Punch and Bone Smasher, as well as Thunder Strike which, while not as strong as Total Focus, has a rather large AoE radius around the target. And then you have Shocking Grasp, which is both a serious hold and deals respectable damage. All of that, and you still manage to cram in a damage aura that also drains enemies like nobody's business. Yeah.

Yeah, look - if you so much as mention Defender and Corruptor damage, you're gonna' lose me right on the spot. That's a key reason why I wouldn't be caught dead playing either, and I'd like a new AT to have somewhat more respectable damage than that.

I gave a very rough, simplistic explanation of what was originally a much more elaborate system. Let me put it this way - it's a system that rewards you for periodically moving out to range and then moving back into melee. Realistically speaking, anything less kills the point of having ranged attacks at all, as people will just fire their ranged attacks point-blank if they have the defences to stand being in melee.

Again, I want to see some sort of penalty for using ranged attacks in direct melee. I'd like to say I want a benefit for using melee attacks in melee, but being that you can't use them at range anyway, that'd be pointless to talk about. Let's say we give them good melee and ranged modifiers, but they debuff their own ranged damage if they're not at range? How does that sound? Rather than an inherent that gives only under certain conditions, it's an inherent that gives a lot, but only takes away under certain conditions. You can even word it as a "bonus if and a bonus if" to avoid people complaining about penalties.

And, no, I do not wish anything like the old Defiance mechanic. It did nothing but promote stupid, suicidal play. Even with defences, staying one hit away from death IS NOT SMART. Being coerced into doing it by the game is just bad design. Really, you're dreaming about the old Defiance on a Tanker. When's the last time you saw a tanker spend the bulk of his time in the deep red a punch away from death, yet didn't have people yelling at him when he died a stupid death? When, specifically, with no-one rushing over to save him from that?

Do you honestly want to come back to Jack's stupid comment of "ask the healer not to heal you" or the absurd practice of hurling yourself from great height into spawns of enemies? No. Just no. Any system which makes the player hurt himself or his team-mates for a buff is just bad, specifically if it's intended to be a class-defining mechanic. Yes, that includes Negligence, even though I'm in favour of self-resurrect powers.

Yeah... Would you like those heals to also lose their max hit points buff and cost 40 endurance points, too? Don't act like these sets get powers for free.

That's what it comes down to. Knockback is easily THE most common negative effect in the entire game. Practically everything post-40 has knockback, many thing in spades. Even simple things like Banished Pantheon clubs or simple monster slaps have a lot of knockback to them. People keep bringing up the Psi and Toxic holes, but let's be realistic here. What does psi and toxic damage, especially in the later game? Only rare Carnie bosses do psi, and only some Arachnos, which you don't even meet in City of Heroes for the most part. The Psychic Clockwork exist in something like three missions in the entire game, and that's practically it. Toxic damage exists mainly for the Hydra, which are very rare, and while Arachnos troops DO use it, it's rare to find an enemy which uses enough of it to matter, which practically comes down to Toxic Tarantulas. AND Toxic resistance is present in large quantities in pretty much every heal.

And let's be fair here - how many enemies have any meaningful endurance drain on them? That's pretty much restricted to Sappers on both sides and Mu Strikers, and nothing is other than Malta Sappers is significant enough to be unkillable before it makes a difference. And, no, endurance drain protection does not save you from the Mask of Vitiation, which is a recovery debuff.

Basically, making someone vulnerable to knockback is the equivalent to making someone vulnerable to BEING HIT. It's disruptive, it can sometimes be pretty dangerous, it's easily the most annoying effect in the entire game and it's BLOODY EVERYWHERE! I really, really hope that sets without knockback protection get at least a few points, enough to resist simple things like clubs and slaps. I can live with a giant Greater Devoured knocking me back, but I really ought to be able to push back a backhand from a skinny walking mushroom.

See, that's a good explanation of why this problem doesn't occur. While an object moving horizontally across the screen very much DOES change its distance from the POINT of the observer, and as such ought to suffer more than just parallax displacement, the difference is so minute in the very narrow field of view most games present that simply NOT rendering it loses nothing that would be visible either way. Your example of standing at the base of something really big (or rather, why it doesn't work) is the root of the problem - games don't give you a wide enough angle to see what happens to something really big as it goes too far up. Looking up doesn't count, as that just rotates the centre of your view, which isn't the point. It's what happens OFF that centre that's intriguing, and we just don't have a wide enough angle, in games or in real life, to really be able to tell.

As far as I'm concerned, Basilisk's pic comes the closest to how things ought to look IF we had a wide enough field of view. Remember - that pic sees everything. It sees both the shooter's feet and the sky directly above, as well as both ends of the pier the shooter is standing on. That is some SERIOUS perspective. It demonstrates what I was getting at - lines that parallel to the horizon very much do converge in infinity on BOTH sides of the camera, and I have a bit of a hard time seeing how a brain could interpret an image like that as straight lines. But then again, that's a curved imprint projected to a flat surface, a brain interpreting the curve directly may try and rationalise straight lines as straight. The problem is... How do you rationalise two straight lines intersecting in two places and still see them as straight?

I'm not sure it's entirely relevant, but I know for a fact that the "sky" around the Shadow Shard zones is a sphere that's just too large to properly see any texture anomalies on. However, there is a specific spot in the Cascades Archipelago (more specifically, the end of the One Way Path) that places you so high that if you climb the remaining few floating rocks, it's pretty easy to spot the curvature of the sky. It's actually pretty bizarre, as what we're led to believe is islands floating in infinite space feels more like a "Hollow Earth" model of islands floating inside of a giant sphere.

I use "ray tracing" as a general term, though I suppose I use it incorrectly. I assume you posted the correct calculation, but I'm afraid I'm wholly incapable of reading it, as I'm not sure I can parse your definitions quite correctly. Let me explain:

You define E as a position in R3, or three-dimensional space, for the eye, yet a position in three-dimensional space requires three variables. Even if we read E as a three-dimensional vector, you still need to note its coordinates with something. Same for Q, N and O, by the way, as I assume they're all treated as vectors, but no parameters for their coordinates are given. And, to be honest, I'm actually a little lost as to what you'd need a normal vector for in this, as to the best of my knowledge, that's mostly useful in an analytical context where shapes are given as continuous formulas, rather than discrete collections of points in a 3D space.

It's probably my lack of understanding of your notation, combined with a language barrier as I am, admittedly, less familiar with mathematical terms in English than I ought to be, that causes me to fail to read your equation. I'm assuming you're talking about either a basis/origin shift of the the entire 3D space, or some kind of relative coordinate system, for which there was a theorem I never managed to quite fully remember, that's basically a linear shift followed by I believe three specific rotations. I'm assuming that's where the Normal comes into play, to align the "third" axis against, but I'm completely unable to follow the calculation itself.

On a side note, I only mention tracing to a sphere and then to a flat as a convenience of explanation. I can give you a completely algebraic function to translate between the coordinates of a point in 3D space and the image of this point exactly as I have described, though the calculation I have might not be very friendly to real-time computation. However, doing this would require a LOT of work on my part to put it in a presentable fashion and write up enough description, to where I'd rather not do it unless someone really cares to know. Hence why I say I use the term "raytracing" only loosely, as it comes down to a singular, rather unsightly function of three variables. Simple, but unsightly.

The point I was trying to make by invoking map unfolding procedures was to illustrate how, no matter the method used, unfolding a sphere onto a flat plane will distort SOMETHING. It's just a matter of distorting what you don't actually need out of the map, but there is no good way to translate what's on a curved surface into what's on a flat surface without some concessions.

Err... Where does my Fire/Fire Blaster feature in that world view?

To be serious for a moment, I do see your point, but I feel you overestimate the degree of mitigation found in secondaries. I've already been beaten over the head with Siren's Song (which is in a primary, actually) and I freely admit that Ice Manipulation is VERY good at it. But by and large, secondaries don't really offer enough mitigation by a long shot. Fire has NOTHING, Energy has one knockback and the world's slowest stun, Electricity has, I think, one hold... Yeah, mitigation is there, but it's nothing in the slightest like what you'd get with a full set of, say, Invulnerability. And mind you, Blasters have about Scrapper defensive modifiers, they just don't have powers to use them. They also have pretty much almost Scrapper health. Just dumping a Scrapper set on a Blaster will give them, if not the same, then at least somewhat comparable survivability, and THAT IS SCARY.

Look at it from the other side, though - if you had the ability to survive in melee, yet didn't have powers to actually use in melee... Wouldn't that be kind of a bummer? I mean, a lot of Blasters can deliver some SERIOUS hurt in melee, especially Electrical and Energy Manipulation, but if you yank their secondaries, all they have is ranged attacks. To me, that's kind of underwhelming for an AT that'll end up capable of scrapping it up. That's a lot of the reason why I enjoyed Dominators despite the AT being built against my preferences - because they had a selection of REALLY solid attacks covering a lot of bases. I'll admit it - part of the reason I'm asking for an Assault/Defence AT is because I think assault just looks cooler when you don't HAVE to stay at range or die.

Personally, I've suggested a couple of things. One was to boost ranged damage when at range and melee damage while in melee, but Castle told me (to my face, no less ) that that's not gonna' happen due to technical difficulties. Since then, I've toyed with defence. Let me explain.

As I envision such an AT, you'd get about equal measure ranged and melee attacks in your set. You start out with a naturally strong defence to ranged (and AoE) attacks, and for every enemy in melee, you lose some ranged defence and gain some melee defence. Additionally, each time you use a melee attack, you lose some melee defence and gain some ranged defence, and each ranged attack costs you some ranged defence and earns you some melee defence. The point of the inherent was both to reward you for using melee powers in melee and ranged powers at range AND to incite you to move from melee to range to melee dynamically.

I'm not sure if defence is the right way to go about it, other than some kind of damage buff, but general drive remains.

Look, I don't want to get into this. Not yet again. Suffice it to say that there are more reasons than just "duel me" spam to levy against the idea, chief among which is I DO NOT WANT TO BE EXPOSED TO IT. I don't want potential adversaries running around, I don't want the potential to be exposed to a match, or even witness it. I know Arena invitations are currently possible in exactly this way, but I'd rather not bring any more attention to this. And even then, when matches do occur, they still take place where I can't see them.

I don't consider the zone "ruined," as it's good in completely different ways. I merely believe they missed a GREAT opportunity to create what could have been the coolest zone in the game. If they'd just left the cracks in the ground as is and simply placed walkways above them and elevators to get out easier, they would have retained the vistas AND made it easier to navigate. The only reason I bring this up is because I don't believe they had to flood it. They already have the lifts and the walkways, the flooding is just overkill.

My original rant was indeed against the flooding because I hate it, but my actual point is about "Updating an old zone takes as much resources as creating a new one, so we won't update the old ones." comment. Given how much they try to change old zones, they are indeed as laborious as making new zones. I just don't believe they HAVE to be.

Yeah, we'll probably have to disagree here. I like the old Hazard zones just fine. Sure, Boomtown may not be very inspiring when you're flying over it for the umpteenth time, but it has something that's unique to it - devastation on a colossal scale. This isn't the out-of-the-way run-down area in an otherwise decent zone, it's not just one block of devastation among others of prosperity. This is an entire, gigantic zone, mile after mile of complete and utter ruin. Boomtown is the perfect disaster zone. It isn't interesting, because disasters aren't artsy. It's just a wasteland with nothing but the wind and the sound of (the inexplicably perpetual) fires. In many ways, this is what make Fallout 3 good - the fact that the wasteland was both a wasteland and the fact that it was pretty damn BIG! It's kind of like in those disaster movies where the protagonists emerge from their hole, only to see the city utterly destroyed as far as the eye can see in all directions.

If there's one thing the game actually lacks, it's a sense of size and scale. The CoV zones are especially bad about this, with everything in them small, smushed onto a tiny footprint and crammed alongside the other dozen or so themes per zone. It's like Future Land next to Car Land next to Pot Land. The old CoH hazard zones are just the thing, in this case - large, expansive, impressive and, most importantly, an already spent sunk cost. I sincerely do not want to see them "fixed" to be less like what they are. I like the fact that there's a themed area that's more than 100 feet across.

And the flip side of this is that, maybe, if they didn't bother changing the zones, they could probably actually get around to update them.

OK, then I'm missing something crucial about how these things are raytraced onto the screen. In a no-perspective, isomorphic view, each point is translated towards the plane of the screen linearly, and we see only what lands on the area of the screen. In a perspective viewpoint, however, each point is translated centrally through the position of our eye, and then raytraced onto SOMETHING. I always assumed it was traced, at least mathematically, onto a sphere which was then plotted onto a flat. That would produce curved lines like I would expect to see. If, however, it is instead raytraced centrally onto a flat, then I can clearly see why straight lines would translate into straight lines. However, this is not realistic.

It further opens the question of variables. Other than field of view angel (or angles - horizontal and vertical), you'd also need to account for the distance between the central point and the flat. Practically speaking, this distance may or may not be irrelevant, as a central raytrace onto a perpendicular plane should scale without distortion, but placing the flat too far from the centre runs the risk of placing it in front of geometry you really ought to be able to see. Which, by the way, explains why it's possible to shove your face through objects in some less refined FPS games. Hmm...

Here, I cannot agree in the slightest. First of all, as light can be classed as both a wave and a particle, then a beam of light is, at least to my understanding, more appropriate to model as a vector originating from the point we are interested in and passing through the centre of the "eyeball." Obviously, in real life light never reflects quite as perfectly as it does in ideal models, and as such scatters, needing for the lens to focus it onto a single spot. That's why our eyes need to focus and can't really focus on multiple things at the same time. Computer software only really models ideal reflection, and as such no-one has the need to focus on anything. Even in games that do feature focusing, such as F.E.A.R. 2, that's still done via pixel shaders and full screen effects, rather than as a part of raytracing verticals.

Furthermore, I cannot accept the proposition that a straight line traced onto a sphere's surface translates into a straight line. There can be no straight lines on the surface of a sphere, because the entirety of a sphere's surface is curved, so by the very definition of the shape, all you have is curves. Granted, in radial coordinates, those CAN be formulated as straight lines, but even if you traced multiple straight lines onto a sphere, even centrally through its core, they would still look like curves from the outside, and the only time they would ever look like straight lines would be if you looked from the very centre of the sphere outwards. However, as we've already discounted wraparound bubble screens as awesome but impractical, we're back to the stand-by of linearly tracing what's on a sphere onto a flat surface, such as that of a computer screen.

As anyone who's done any work whatsoever with maps knows, stretching the map of the spherical globe over a flat square sheet causes significant distortion. In the case of maps, the stretching is axial, stretching the points at the poles into rings the size of the equator and essentially stretching the globular map into a cylindrical map, which then incised and slplit. European maps tend to split mid-Pacific, with the Americas on the left, Europe and Africa in the middle and Asia on the right, and American maps I've seen tend to put the US in the middle and the rest of the world off to the right.

Point is, as humans, we see light in the form of beams traced through the centre of our eyeballs and imprinted upside down and back-to-front on the back of the eyeball. Anything you trace onto a sphere can no longer be called "straight," as such straight lines transcribe into curves. Transcribing that to a flat sheet linearly retains those curves and draws them as arcs on the flat. This is demonstrabe, and it is mathematically provable.

But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that we don't sit inside our own eyes, looking at the projections on the back. We take the signals as they land, and how we interpret them is, thereafter, not a subject of mathematics, but much more so of neurology. The actual question is - do WE see lines as actual lines, with our brains taking the kinks out of the curves as they land in post, or do we actually see them curved, but can't notice it because the curves are too far in our imprecise peripheral vision?

At this point, I'm willing to concede it's probably the former, which is why central rendering onto a flat surface may be a more realistic representation of WHAT we see, even if it's not in the slightest similar to HOW we see (because those lines that ought to converge on the other side simply won't, even if they should). As such, and as with any simulation, it's not a question of simulating mechanics, but rather emulating an experience. An acceptable break from reality, perhaps?

I love that picture To be honest, though, if you look at it and cut off a square somewhere in the middle, you'll actually cut out a section that is not heavily distorted. In fact, it's a section that's distorted so little, lines might pass for straight. I guess that's why the convention exists.

That actually brings up an interesting point - it's not always a matter of what's right for a setup that counts, but rather what looks right. This came up when I was talking with a friend of mine today, and it depicts an interesting... Convention, so to speak.

Practically speaking, in a perspective, EVERY set of parallel lines appear to converge into infinity on both ends of the lines. The trick is that, for any lines NOT parallel to the plane of the viewer (e.i. the plane between the horizon and the vertical), one convergence spot is in front of the viewer and the other behind. Since the game only ever renders the front of the viewer, it doesn't need to worry about where lines would intersect in the back, so it draws them straight and converging in the one point you CAN see. Lines parallel to the plane of the viewer do converge in two spots which should be at the edge of the visible angle, but since most games don't render anything even close to panoramic view, you never get to see those points of convergence, so these lines are drawn straight, not worrying about them ever converging anywhere.

This could also be a convention because of how minuscule the curve produced by this would be. Without going into too much mathematics, with a view angle of 90 degrees (or 45 degres off centre), you see 1/8 of what you'd see with a 180 degree field of view. As well, the fact that distortions increase as you go off-centre means that the distortions in the small field you actually get to see are fairly benign. Benign enough to just ignore, as that means you just calculate the relative displacement of points and then draw straight lines between them, whereas otherwise you'd have to draw entire curves, point by point, which I assume would be vastly more costly in terms of resources.

I'd actually sit down and write this up, but I'm sure other, smarter people have written it up before me better than I ever could with my knowledge and capability.

But that still doesn't answer the primary question, though - is this convention done because that's how our eyes see (e.i. we don't see this displacement) or is it done because it's easier to render?

*edit*
I should revise my last calculation. A 90 degree field of view does indeed come up to half of a 180 degree arc, but I should not that not all games use a FOV of 90. Still, a lot of games do use lower values (the 90 I got was from Quake 3 Arena), and even then, that's still a small part of the total screen area.

You're talking about depth perception by virtue of binocular vision which, as far as I can tell, is actually entirely based on parallax displacement between what each eye sees. Short of some kind of fake 3D like you get with the (headache inducing) 3D glasses you get at cinemas, there really is no good way to simulate depth perception even on a curved screen. Every time you project an image onto a shape, be it flat or spherical, you lose one dimension. Because everything is on a single plane, there is no parallax displacement for items farther away from the viewer, as you are looking at, essentially, a painting.

Realistically speaking, the only way to achieve true depth perception is to make it so that each eye sees the same scene from a slightly different angle, allowing the brain to calculate parallax and assume distance. Again, 3D glasses are one way, but a very BAD one. I believe the Virtual Boy tried something like this, but its abysmal commercial history would not suggest great success. Pretty much short of true 3D holographic projection or Matrix-style direct brain feed (neither of which seems to be anywhere near existence), we'll have to do with a 3D projected image onto a 2D screen. Mind you, a "2D screen" doesn't have to mean flat. Radial coordinates are easily capable of producing surfaces that are described in 2D, but are shaped as spheres in 3D space.

I agree that the lack of peripheral vision does have to come into play for any true 3-d surround kind of effect. I think that I see your point and the viewing surface would need to be curved in order to facilitate true surround 3-d. I fear that this would mean that each viewer/user would have to have their own surround 3-d monitor (for lack of a better word) in order to see the 3-d surround world as intended; as any viewer that was not in the exact point of optimal viewing would have a distortion of the optical effect.[/quote]

I have, actually, heard of people attempting to simulate immersive 3D by actually sticking the viewer in the centre of hemispherical screen and projecting a panoramic view on the whole thing. Point of fact, the boys at Prototype This used that in their "virtual diving" prototype. However, this comes with several... Problems. For one, when we look, our "centre of vision" is wherever our eyes point, whereas when we look at a screen, that centre is the centre of a screen. That's why we don't see severe 3D distortion in real life - our clear vision is in the centre of the eye and the sides where distortion takes effect aren't as sensitive.

However, when a screen goes much beyond 45 degrees off centre, the distortion begins to get REALLY nasty. In fact, old players of Quake 2 and Quake 3 might have seen the so-called "fish eye effect," where you push your FOV (Field Of View, I believe) much past 90. The area of clear, undistorted view becomes small and smushed in the centre, with large, distorted, stretched images filling much of the rest of the screen. It makes it pretty hard to actually SEE anything in detail, but it gives you great peripheral vision, helping the spastic twitch players react better or something. I tend to turn back after the "hard to see in" part.

That's an interesting question. As I have it modelled, extending your view past 180 degrees (or 90 degrees of centre) would actually have you writing over your own view surface, such that things BEHIND the viewer would write onto things in front of him, leading to a right mess. There ARE ways to translate this, of course, but they are complex and would, undoubtedly, lead to even greater distortion, which is why I tend to restrict field of view to 90 degrees off centre and no more. It skips a tedious step that wouldn't produce images worth looking at, anyway.

And your answer is to lie to people to trick them into getting into less populated servers, directly against their wishes and possibly being very dissatisfied? I can't stand behind this.

That depends on what kind of text format we're talking here. If we're just looking at ASCII, then each symbol takes up exactly one byte, factoring in spaces and carriage returns. If we take "floppy disk" to refer to the device most commonly used towards the end of the floppy disc days, that would be the 3½-inch HD, which held 1440 KB of memory, which comes up to about 1 474 560 bytes, or just as many symbols. Now, as best I can find, a single page contains between 2622 and 3818 characters, depending on spacing and word usage with a typical font size of 12. If we take the average of the two and go with 3220 symbols per page, then the size of a floppy disk would give us around about 457 pages.

That... Would be a pretty small library.

You should have left the disclaimer out, to be perfectly blunt.

No. Just plain no. I do not PvP, do not want to start PvPing and do not want to so much as be exposed to PvP. I do not want it in my zones, I do not want to be hassled to PvP someone because he didn't like me being mouthy and I just want the thing kept away in its own zones. Furthermore, PvP is already spread out catastrophically as it is. The few times I've been in PvP zones, you can never run into another person in there at all. If anything, PvP needs to be more concentrated, not less. Really, just see the /duel argument on this one.

Not to mention the fact that powers work differently in PvP and PvE zones, making this mechanically impossible without yanking the PvP game out of the game altogether.

I don't see why this has to happen outside of the Arena. Just suggest an extra feature for it - that you be able to choose your map from a large pool of possibilities. And even then, most instances wouldn't be appropriate.

Warburg already dose this. I'm not sure if the Arena has any restrictions on this, but I don't see a problem with lifting that restriction. I DO, however, see a problem with just dropping alignments altogether, as I do not enjoy being attacked by someone immune to the turrets on my side.

A level playing field is the point. Unless you want to hideously complicate the process of engaging in PvP, ensuring that I will never engage in it again, I would keep off all of those extra special cases. PvP is already a pain to build for, with entirely different rules and specific build requirements. It doesn't need a more complicated set-up. Moreover, it doesn't need a non-equal playing field.

That already exists in most PvP zones as the zone's "thing." Furthermore, what you're suggesting sounds a whole lot like Arena maps to me, but you don't seem to make any distinction between Zone PvP and Arena PvP, so it's incredibly difficult to follow. The two situations are vastly different and require different approaches, but if all you're asking for is new "capture the flag" style arena scenarios, then I have no problem with that.

As far as I'm aware, that's already how the Arena interface plays out.

This is already an option and acts exactly as you described it. To the last detail.

You mean like a summon power? This opens up the field for a LOT of problems that would need a lot of balancing to work around, since some of those gladiators are incredibly nasty. Personally, I'd rather stick to just powerset pets, as Gladiators take the punch out of pet powersets.

I suspect the Arena might already offer that, but again - are you talking about the Arena, where matches are set up beforehand, or Zone PvP, where people just run up to each other and fight? Not really a bad idea, but life-limited matches are not as fun as you think. Unreal Tournament offered this, and what ended up happening was most of the people spent five out of each ten minutes just spectating. And that's no fun when you logged in to play. This is the chief reason why I hate Counter-Strike.

Now, I don't PvP, and I never will, but even so, this list is just confusing. A lot of the things are already in place, some things contradict each other and I'm still not sure whether you want to outright remove zone PvP or if you're just not taking it into account or what. Sure, some of the ideas are pretty good for the Arena, but then some of them just make me cringe, like opening up PvP-on-demand everywhere. And in the end, you miss what I feel is the biggest problem with PvP - the density of participants. No good PvP can ever be had with players as scattered as they are these days. The solution is not to spread them out even more or reduce it to just PvP-on-demand. The solution is to figure out some way to lump them all together in tighter quarters where it's not just an occasional gank. For all its faults, WoW does this pretty well.

I'm sure they can be balanced out, but I'm also sure that balancing point will be very low, certainly not at the 1.125 randed damage mod of a Blaster with Defiance on top of that, which is what defence sets on a Blaster would do. It just feels to me like they just won't give decent protection to an AT which didn't have to go into melee for at least SOME of its attacks, hence why I feel an Assault/Defence AT is much more likely to happen.

Granted, I wouldn't refuse a Ranged/Defence AT, but then I'd probably just reroll all of my Blasters as that, which is why I find to be a potential problem.

That would be a sure-fire way to get me to never, ever play the AT. Khelians are bad enough with their team-dependent inherent. I really do not want any more ATs being designed like this. Benefits for teaming are fine, but not at a steep cost to solo performance.