seebs

Okay, I am basically happy with dark/dark, but... totally stumped on how to build an effective tanker. In particular, I can't tell which powers I really need and which just sound good on paper.

I found a couple of builds that looked interesting in this thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=142296

Grey Squirrel posted:

No, no, these are clearly needs. If we do not get pirates as a mastermind primary, thousands of people will die of starvation and warfare*. (Which is to say, yeah, "needed" is perhaps a bit enthusiastic. But really, how can we consider this game complete without the ability to compare a pirate commanding ninjas to a ninja commanding pirates?)
[*] Not that I'm saying the pirates set would change this, mind.

Thanks a ton for the detailed advice, I haven't finished implementing it (haven't had cause to take the laptop out for a day or so), but I've got it partially done, and I'm loving it.

Almost certainly drivers, but I get weird pixellated outlines on far away things using an ATI HD5870. (Running something around Catalyst 9.12, because anything newer than that causes fatal crashes on this model of laptop, or so they say.)

Clipping issue on female toons with the "Jeweled" belt (and probably others) and maximum hip and waist sizes; just a little bit right on the left and right sides, turning the waist slider down about 15% made it disappear.

I got an ASUS G73JH from Best Buy, $1,299 before tax. Built-in screen 1600x900, decent quality display but not great. Card's an ATI 5870 mobility, and it drives a 1920x1200 display with just about everything on full (except ambient occlusion, because of driver issues) at 30-40fps and up. As-shipped, 6GB memory, Windows 7 Home Premium. Haven't tried to load Linux on it yet.

Plusses include:
* Actually runs decently cool, because it has big fan vents, and is also sorta quiet.
* Second drive bay so you could swap OS's around.
* Upgradable to 8GB quite easily.

Cons:
* Recovery DVDs have to be burned by you, and they SUCK -- you can't use them to reload on a smaller drive such as an SSD. (You can use special software, which may cost money, to move the image to an SSD, though.)
* DVD drive a bit annoying.
* No blu-ray in this configuration -- the blu-ray versions cost more.
* No clue about Linux compatibility yet. I've heard it's not great. That may have changed.
* HDMI port rather than DVI port, means extra cable hassle (perhaps trivial)
* RIGHT on the limit of your specified size limits. It's bigger than my 17" macbook pro.

On the other hand, it's $500 cheaper than you were looking at, it plays CoH beautifully, and it's possible to strip most of the provided crapware from it pretty easily. I'm happy with it so far, having had it for, oh, two or three days.

Just lemme say:

From an OOC perspective, I'm super happy about the merge.

As a roleplayer, I'm super happy to see that there's actually been some thought about the in-world explanation.

Thanks!

dogs/hunting rifle. You get various likely hunting dogs (bloodhounds, maybe? golden retrievers?), and you can dress your character like Elmer Fudd for extra fun.

pirates/: You get 3x Swabby, 2x Swashbuckler, and 1x Bosun. Your upgrades are called Plunder, Booty, and Treasure, because that's what you outfit your pirates from.

marketing/: You get 3x Door-to-Door, 2x Used Car, and 1x Executive. They do less damage than other minions but yield +inf when they interact with new targets. Upgrades are Catchy Jingle, Marketing Campaign, and Brand Loyalty.

cats/: You can't control them. But they're awesome, and also, they TOTALLY meant to do that.

1. We need a /ninjutsu secondary for masterminds, so ninja masterminds can be more ninja-like.
2. We need a pirates/ primary for masterminds, because we have pirate costumes, and hey, let's run with that.
3. We need a /piracy secondary.
4. We need an epic battle between pirates/ninjutsu and ninjas/piracy to see which mismatch is MORE AWESOME.

BTW, the huuuuge splash of the AoE minor damage effect is a big win for my purposes, because it makes the character even more obnoxiously bright. (His name is Captain Chroma, and he's in about the most highly-saturated rainbow power armor I was able to rarange in the game.)

I may go have a look at that. I did a dark/dark, and he's level 5, but I'll probably reroll because I made a poor color choice or two. Plays okay, runs out of blue really easily though. I'll review the invulnerability stuff; I seem to recall people saying invulnerability wasn't awesome, but honestly, everything in this game seems to be at least livable.

Thanks! I may try the -wdwload in the shortcut anyway on the off chance that it only crashed for you because it didn't really love you the way it loves me. ... This is actually exceedingly unlikely, but it'd be awesome if it worked.

Stone's colors often show up in ways that don't work with the costume, so it looks like dark is a big contender. Fire or elec might fit better thematically, and also have a fair amount of colorable shiny. I slightly dislike fire and stone melee for the conjured-weapon aspects -- I'd rather either have a weapon or not rather than having one appear and disappear. So I think elec, energy and dark are the big contenders there.

Dark/dark certainly has a fair bit of synergy, as does elec/elec. Both have tons of options for ludicrous brightness.

Okay, I bet this one's new.

So far as I can tell, just about any tanker build can be viable. So what I want to know is: What build will let me spam the most brightly-colored effects? I will be customizing power displays, and I want to be able to have as many different colorable effects going on during fights as possible. I'm pretty sure just about everything allows decent survivability. Just about everything has decent damage output. So, while I'm certainly interested in things that give me better options there, the big thing is that I want to have a ton of flashy powers.

So ice armor, for instance, is right out -- it restricts color choices severely. Shield defense isn't customizable, so it's out. My guess is that my options will be dark, electric, or fiery armor. I can rule out ice melee, war mace, dual blades, and battle axe as secondaries.

Obviously, ways to do this without really sucking are a plus.

In some future issue, it would be nice to change all the window settings type stuff, and saved window setting files, into a normalized format which automatically adjusts to window/screen size.

For instance, without loss of generality, declare that the top-left of the screen is "0,0", the rightmost point is "2048,0", and the bottom-most point on the right is "2048,2048".

Under this scheme, if you describe the minimap window as having points { { 1600, 0 }, { 2048,400 } }, it will ALWAYS take up roughly 1/5 of the screen's width and height, and be anchored firmly to the top-right corner of the screen, whether you are playing at 800x600, or 1920x1200, or what.

This would require some kind of tag for whether a given set of window settings was previously set up this way or not. (If not, a likely upwards-conversion would be to scale such that the rightmost point used equates to 2048, the leftmost to 0, and so on...)

If you do this, life will get easier for people who, say, change from one computer to another, or change from an external monitor to a laptop display. It should be a fairly trivial change, I'd think.

Even if it's just "the default file", I can hack around that, I think. Maybe.

Okay, so, True Confessions time: I know basically nothing about Windows. All my background is Macs and Unix.

What I'd presumably normally do would be to write a little tiny script which copies the appropriate window settings file in place, and then spawns the shortcut or whatever (or just executes the command directly). So far as I can tell, that should be doable under Windows, though I have no idea how. I have Cygwin, so if necessary, I can probably make a shell script to do it. :P

Is there an automatic "execute these commands at startup" file or something similar to handle loading window settings on login (assuming there's even a / command for that...)?

When my bots start to charge the enemy, I hit "follow". About two seconds later I hit "attack", and they make ranged attacks. It takes more time from me, but it produces amazing results.

I have a laptop now (woo). Here's the thing. I have a desktop monitor which roflstomps the laptop's display. And which is a different resolution.

Because of this, it makes a lot of sense for me to change resolution, window scale and window locations depending on whether I'm on the laptop or the desktop. Is there a reasonable way in-game to do this, or even remotely automate it? So far as I can tell, resolution is a registry entry, and I don't know of a reasonable way to automate those changes. And unfortunately, it appears that CoH stores window locations and sizes in absolute pixels rather than in some kind of scaling relative form, so if you change resolution, all your windows are screwed up. (One solution I've seen is to pick an arbitrary resolution, and simply declare that all window locations and values are intrinsically in that coordinate system, which then gets scaled appropriately when you change game resolution, so everything ends up in corresponding places... but that's a code-side thing.)

It seems like it might be possible to script this in some way, possibly by stashing a backup copy of the windows.txt file. On the other hand, that file is loaded explicitly; is there some other file which is loaded automatically on login that determines where windows are put, or is that information stored server-side for each character?

The concern I have is just that, since I'm likely to switch between the laptop display resolution and the monitor display resolution moderately often (and the monitor does not support the laptop's resolution, so even if I didn't mind the fuzziness it still wouldn't even be POSSIBLE to set it to that resolution), it seems like I'd want the process of switching between them to be as automated and automatic as possible.

Maybe make inf/prestige part of "standard rewards"? e.g., you can only get them from Dev's Choice missions?