je_saist

These scripting limitations pose a huge technical hurdle for a "flying pet". Contextual information on the status of the player such as flying / hovering would need to be passed to the pet. Contextual information on the enemy such as flying / groundbound would also need to be passed along to properly synch up Mastermind Pet positioning with Target positioning... neverminding that Mastermind positioning on the ground in just two dimensions is random.

This brings up another technical hurdle: Positioning

Players can use the GoTo command and other functions to direct their pets to any specific location. However, the reticule system in the game currently has no allowences for depth control. When the player places their reticule in an open space for a targeted power such as Rain of Arrows or Teleport the reticule is always set to maximum distance. There is no method that I am aware of to shorten the distance the reticule activates to when placed in open space.

This tech limitation is a major hurdle to the prospect of a flying pet. Not only does the player have to deal with a 3rd dimension, they don't have control over how that third dimension operates.

* * *

Now, to go ahead and nip this in the bud, no, animating the dragon pets to always look like they are flying when they are not actually flying is not an option. Here's what Tunnel Rat had to say on the subject of animating wings in non-flight modes: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...2&postcount=28

So, thanks for the idea Ravenick.... but without some major modifications to the underlying engine and animation systems, it is not going to happen.

No. That was not why they changed it.

They changed the system because it was impossible to balance around. A freeform power-system is quite simply bad MMO game design.

I think Sailboat nails the problem on the head quiet well. A freeform system works in an environment where certain caveats are met:

• The in-game situations can be randomized by a Game-Master
• The character must take penalties to their character to obtain certain feats or powers

City of Heroes implements the later of these caveats as best it can. Archetypes have different levels of health; different levels of native defenses and resistances; different levels of mez-mitigation; and different strengths relating to damage, debuff, buff, and control. However, a Free-form system allows players to effectively avoid these limitations, neverminding the limitations that can already be bypassed by using Inventions Enhancement Sets.

Which is where we get back to the lack of flexibility on the part of a game. The game situations have to be presented to a wide range of players with a wide range of capabilities. The game itself is not flexible and cannot adapt itself to the strengths or weaknesses of the player themselves.

The Cryptic developers found out very, very, very early on that a Freeform power-system was simply bad game design, and they threw the idea out the window pretty quickly, before City of Heroes ever launched. Which is why we get shock-horror at the launch of Champions Online which revived the Free-form power system... and... as we witnessed in the sales market... it was still broken and the Cryptic developers could not balance the game properly. Eventually the Cryptic development team had to give in and go back to the Archetype system. Just to make a fair point of it, there are some very good reasons Champions Online bombed, why Atari dropped Cryptic like a hot potato, and why Cryptic is now owned by a Chinese company that specializes in low-budget Micro-transaction games.

This game, City of Heroes, does not need to repeat the catastrophic mistakes made by Atari and Cryptic Studios.

um...

no.

Diamond Multimedia is it's own company: http://www.diamondmm.com/about.php

No part of their stock is, or has ever been, owned by AMD or ATi.

The extent of the relationship of Diamond MultiMedia to AMD is that DiamondMM is a purchaser and vendor of AMD's GPU parts, same as Asus, XFX, PowerColor, and HIS.

The only AMD card vendor with direct monetary investment from AMD is Sapphire Technology.

no.

Don't forget to hop over to the AMD forum link and post your experience there.

It does.

I've verified both the ./showfps and ./graphfps functions against FRAPS.

That is what we call a "Typo"

11.4 most likely.

Continue to hold off.

I got a hard-lock after about an hour or so standing around doing nothing.

Again, a thread is open on the AMD developer forums: http://forums.amd.com/devforum/messa...&enterthread=y

if you try the 11.8 drivers and experience a crash: PLEASE POST IN THE THREAD ON THE AMD FORUMS.

Point of note: the official Position from Positron (say that 5 times fast) has changed on Power-Set-Respecs. In a recent Ustream Positron stated that the ability to respec power-sets and or archtypes has been brought up internally (I'm assuming by NCSoft looking for something else to sell) and research into the possibility has been taken.

According to Positron a changing of Archtypes is Functionally impossible.

Power-Respecs are possible, but they still require a lot of work. Enough work that such a feature is not going to get worked on... and if it did get worked on... it would be a very expensive monetary pay-for option to cover the costs of implementing such a feature.

It still is a No to power-set and archtype respecs.

Part of the reason I think the developers have softened their view is that the level 50+ gameplay, the new incarnate gameplay, is made easier by players being able to gain attributes and abilities normally beholden to other archtypes. However, the incarnate content is built around the concepts of players having multiple Incarnate-Powers and swapping between those powers. For example, Keys Reactor places a focus on healing. If everybody on a 16-player raid has a Rebirth Incarnate power, it's fairly trivial to stagger rebirth bursts to cover teams working with each other.

As to the original posters idea: /unsigned

Here's another way to look at it: offering more builds, even those that can change patron / epic / pool powers at the drop of the hat, reduces the perception that players need to field more avatars.

Let me put this another way: It would give a F2P player less reasons to think about subscribing or buying character slots.

only works in 50+ content.

Does nothing if he exemps down to run the other 95% of the game.

Remember; don't rely on incarnate powers to achieve character goals unless you only want to play less than 5% of the game's content.

I'll pass on your comment about going back to a vendor that outright lies to it's customers, but to answer your actual question: A driver update may or may not have any value for you depending on your specific card.

In some cases a driver updates can increase performance. Where you might have had ~25fps before, you might manage a smoother ~30fps.

In some cases a driver update can fix game bugs. Let's say a newly released game is built for Nvidia, such as Batman: Arkham Asylum. A driver update from AMD could fix deliberate code sabotage made by Nvidia to that game. And no, that's not a hypothetical situation. Nvidia does deliberately sabotage games at the code level to make them break on competitors products.

In some cases a driver update can introduce new features. Case in point, OpenGL 4.2 was just ratified. A new driver update will expose new features in the OpenGL update to GPU's that support those updates. Both AMD and Nvidia have introduced new Anti-Aliasing solutions through their respective driver sets, features which improve rendered image quality.

In some cases a driver update can introduce new problems. Maybe there's a memory leak, or an API call isn't being translated correctly. Maybe there's a bit of legacy code that's kicking in, or maybe there's an unintentional buffer overflow.

This last reason is why Intel, AMD, Via/S3, Nvidia, Matrox, PowerVR, 3DFX, SiS, XGI, and Trident... you know... everybody who has ever made a graphics card compatible with Microsoft Windows... all have posted warnings to not update drivers unless you are having a problem.

In your case you probably should just stick with the 10.12 drivers if they work for you. The Catalyst 11 set isn't going to expose any useful features for you as the 48xx series are an OpenGL 3.3 architecture.

So... what happens if you aren't doing level 50 content?

Oh yeah, that's right... you don't HAVE Judgement powers.

Not... really.

There is a break point. in resolution to memory size, normally based around four factors:

• GPU Clock speed
• Memory Controller Clock Speed
• Memory Controller Bitwidth
• Memory speed

Just to pick on Nvidia for a second: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88&pgno=7 :: http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88&pgno=6

Nvidia had 4 different versions of the GT 440. Two models featured a 128-bit interface. The other two models had a 192-bit interface. The memory bandwidth difference between the versions is well.. astounding.

The Model with the highest memory performance was the consumer 512mb version which utilized GDDR5 memory and hit a bandwidth of 51.2gb/s

The 1gb consumer model could only manage 28.8gb/s memory bandwidth, and that extra 512mb was not enough to add any performance.

Throwing more memory at a card will only affect resolution if that memory retains the same clock-speed and memory controller..

Thank you for giving all of the concerned players an update.

Strong sentiments. Basically, I don't know what to tell you.

Ghost Falcon used to be a primary point of contact, but with his promotion, the task of dealing with Transgaming fell to Skippy Sidekick and Doc Delilah, who also have other tasks to accomplish within Paragon Studios. The lack of a known primary point contact raises a barrier between the players and the developers.

Whether or not anything is done about the problems posted about here on the forums largely comes down to whether or not the developers here read the forums, and/or whether or not the Moderators / Community Reps of the forums pass along threads of interest to the developers that the developers may have missed or skipped.

Ultimately, what we need before we can go any further... is more information. We, as subscribers of City of Heroes, need to know what the relationship between Transgaming and Paragon Studios is. We need to know whether or not Paragon Studios is doing the portage work in-house using tech from Transgaming; or if Paragon Studios hands Transgaming the completed source code that compiles for Microsoft Windows Operating Systems and Transgaming does all of the work on the Cider/G.T.L. tech on their end, then hands the modified packages back to Paragon Studios.

We, as City of Heroes subscribers, need to know whom we need to contact for bug reports. We need to know whom is responsible for getting those bugs addressed. Is it a Paragon Studios employee, or is it a Transgaming employee?

At the end of it all, I don't know what to tell you if you don't know how to enable debug mode, run the game under a Code Analyzer like Xcode-Shark, or read log-files. I went into this... somewhere...

For those of us not using Microsoft Windows Operating Systems, we really need better tools made available to help us track down the problems. Enabling users to run the game client with a -verbose logging option would go a long way towards gathering useful information that can be used to find and fix the existing bugs... again... providing we know who to send that information to.

Warning: semi-rambling rant, bear with it.

I'd agree that NCSoft should re-evaluate their relationship with Transgaming. On the surface, Transgaming has a history of taking on "too many" projects and simply not having enough resources to address specific problems. E.G., Cedega 8 series was in a beta stage for almost close to 2 years before it was converted into G.T.L. Up to the present the G.T.L. files are available for download, but there's still no support structure such as the one we, speaking as Cedega beta testers, had with the Cedega beta's.

We, speaking as City of Heroes subscribers, have never been informed of exactly what the relationship between Transgaming and NCSoft entails. For all we know NCSoft has to pay for each and every specific bug that needs to be addressed... and it's possible that NCSoft won't pay to fix bugs that don't break the game... meaning that updates to fix bugs only come when Transgaming updates their internal Cider/Cedega builds..

Now, given Transgaming's track-record, they have proved that they know what they are doing when it comes to emulating Windows clients in *nix-type operating systems, partially because Transgaming does use proprietary-licensed software if it will translate into better compatibility.

As a general rule of thumb, I tend to question the need for an emulation environment to begin with. Going back to my specific point of contention on the "new" NCSoft launcher, had NCSoft used a platform-neutral toolkit with a platform-neutral API, the launcher would have likely been a non-issue for users not using a Microsoft Windows Operating System. On some level NCSoft has to understand the benefits of platform neutral tools given that several open-source software packages are used by the company. In the case of the new launcher, it leverages a GPL'd software package known as Xdelta. Ergo, somebody in NCSoft had to have understood the requirements of Xdelta's license and on some level somebody in NCSoft had to sign off on the use of a GPL software'd product.

My opinion, as somebody external to the actual development, is that NCSoft / Paragon Studios would be best served in the long run by getting the game-client itself running natively on OSX and Linux in addition to running natively on Windows. I don't think a mis-understanding of licenses such as the GPL that is generally attributed to a lack of Linux ports from commercial developers would apply to a company that apparently does understand those license's.

However, as somebody external to that actual development, I can't imagine such a conversion to be an easy task. The game's engine architecture was developed back in 2001 and 2002, a year before Mepis Linux would revolutionize the Linux LiveCD market, and at least two years before Mark Shuttleworth would poor Money into Ubuntu and capitalize on the ground Mepis Linux broke. 2001 / 2002 would have also placed development of the game before Apple's Ipod Renaissance.

Given the development timeline that I am aware of, I would have to assume that the game-client was originally built with several assumptions about the operating system in use, and that getting the game-client to compile and run natively on other operating systems is likely functionally impossible.

In that aspect, an emulation-wrapper may have been the only realistic method of getting City of Heroes to run on other platforms, neverminding the associated costs with having to hire or train developers to work on OSX and Linux platforms.

Could I make an argument for NCSoft to simply do what Google did with Picasa, and pull directly from W.I.N.E. and build their own emulation-wrappers around the game-client and simply run their own builds internally?

While such a method would indeed be more cost-efficient than getting the engine working directly on OSX and Linux, given that the game is already 99% supported through the W.I.N.E. base, it would require hiring or training developers to work with W.I.N.E.

Could I make an argument to NCSoft to pay for a "new" client for the game that is content compatible but easily portable from platform to platform?

A brand-new binary-engine client would likely be able to resolve several performance and / or legacy issues. The disadvantage to a new game-client is determining what is kept in and what is kept out of the client. For example, let's say the new client scraps all of the rendering information that isn't required for Ultra-Mode graphics? Well, now how do we deal with everybody who doesn't have computer systems that can't drive Ultra-Mode graphics?

The point I'm leading to here is that a re-evaluation of the relationship with Transgaming opens up hard-questions about what to do with the game itself. Given the costs that could be associated with some of the potential solutions outlined here, it is possible that NCSoft could conclude that the best re-evaluation result is a simple termination.

03-14-2007, 12:55 PM

gav@transgaming.com - transgaming CTO
matt.robinson@transgaming.com I forget what he does
daniel@transgaming.com - Senior Graphics Architect

I'd pop an email to these guys since the limitation appears to be in the Cider/G.T.L. code-base.

As far as player-pop goes, remember, statistics can say many things. There's no way of knowing how many subscribers have OSX systems and don't use those OSX systems to login because of on-going bugs and errors with the OSX Cider-client. There's also no way of knowing how many players have OSX systems that don't know they can download the OSX-Cider wrapper from their NCsoft account even if they did not buy the "Mac Booster" from the store.

Kinda wanted to re-emphasize this point since I don't think I made it strong enough in my other post.

We might be the most visible players who advocate/support/help *nix users run CoH.

We can't be the only ones "stepping up to the plate" though. We need other players to be pro-active, not re-active.

And yes, to get one point out of the way, the specific bug in question right now, the Paragon Market crash, should have been caught internally by anybody at Paragon Studios... which raises the question of why wasn't anybody in Paragon Studios running the Beta atop OSX to begin with.

Now I'll make the argument that Paragon Studios needs to be running Windows, OSX+Cider, and Linux+GTL (or WINE, but GTL is transgaming's product) internally. Even if NCSoft isn't paying Transgaming to wrap the game under G.T.L. and make a separate binary download, running those three combinations of operating systems still gives the developers more reference points for potential bugs in the system. Badly written or sloppy code that may compile fine and run on Windows might trigger an error on Cider/G.T.L. The more points of data the developers have on hand to see how the code actually works is more information that can be used to clean up and optimize that code, and the greater the chances are that critical bugs will be found earlier in the development process... before those bugs make their way into public releases.