seebs

Heya, this thread looks relevant to my interests. I'm trying to run CoH on my Linux box, currently ubuntu 10.04. It's got an oldish GeForce 9800GT (512MB, I think). I accept that I can't get ultra mode, but I'm curious as to what I should expect to be able to get. FWIW, I currently have CrossOver Games 9.x (maybe things have changed, but back in the day the Cedega people were not good about cooperating with the open source community),

Right now, I'm at the stage where I found instructions for getting the downloader to stop crashing so much ("echo 8192 524288 3612672 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_wmem" -- the middle number may not need to be that big, but seems to vary), and it's very slowly downloading a .pigg sound file. I tried to copy over the coh directory from my Mac install, but that Did Not Work.

Where I've gotten so far:

1. Need to create a bottle, then set it to use a virtual desktop, because if it tries to go fullscreen, the CoH logo backdrop is drawn IN FRONT OF the installer windows, so you can't do anything.
2. Need to allow stupidly oversized packets or the app coredumps.
3. ... That's as far as I've gotten.

For comparison, the Mac I'm running on is a laptop with a GeForce 330M, which is a generation or so newer than the 9800, but MUCH weaker by every other standard I know of. The 9800 could run WoW at 20+ fps in just about any circumstances, with 8x antialiasing.

I'm not inalterably opposed to buying Cedega if it'll make a huge difference, but if it's going to be pretty similar, I'd rather just get things working this way, since I already have this.

ETA: Looks like I lose, it can't do anything at all in any way related to downloading "soundMusic1.pigg", the updater just sits there getting zero bytes. If I kick it and restart it, same thing. Can't touch that file at all. No diagnostics, no errors, it just says "Fixing files: piggs/soundMusic1.pigg" and then sits there doing nothing. Ugh.

ETA 2: Okay, copied all the .pigg files from my existing installation. It still redownloaded about 1.9GB of them (no idea why), but once it had done that, the updater completed. I can now get a screen with the word "loading" on it. That's it. It stops there, using a small amount of CPU time, with no diagnostics or logs. Since this app is described by other people as working reasonably well, I'm assuming this is abnormal...

ETA 3: D'oh! So when people said you had to use -renderthread 0 to run on multicore machines, they actually meant you should do that, rather than ignoring it. Looks like I can make it run.

I'm overwhelmed by my choices. For RP reasons, it's pretty important that I have hover/fly. (That, and I'm loving hover for a way to stay out of melee while being in a good spot to contribute). But there's too many powers, and options.

Thus far, despite everyone telling me that health/stamina is the best thing ever, I haven't actually run out of stamina much when grouped -- but swift/health/stamina has actually been pretty nice, especially because swift can be slotted to boost both fly and hover.

Basically, though, I'm just plain stumped. I don't seem to have enough slots to get all the must-have abilities unless I omit things like "attack powers of any sort".

FWIW, only level 26, so the details of the build past that are less crucial to me.

I am currently leaning towards roughly:

Level 1: Twighlight Grasp, Dark Blast
Level 2: Tar Patch
Level 4: Moonbeam
Level 6: Hover
Level 8: Howling Twilight
Level 10: Shadow Fall
Level 12: Fearsome Stare
Level 14: Fly
Level 16: Tenebrous Tentacles
Level 18: Swift
Level 20: Night Fall
Level 22: Health
Level 24: Stamina
Level 26: (one of Gloom, Darkest Night, or Dark Pit?)

But I really don't know what I'm doing. Halp!

Changing the tick rate could easily still be converted to "heals per second". I guess the real question would be to run in demo mode or something and watch how often health increases?

I don't think a cap is needed. Who cares whether people post "pathetic" prices? If they ever get sales, more money is taken out of the market because the total price was higher.

So, it seems to me that one of the big attractions of Defender is that you can just about always help people out. Whatever they want to do, a Defender makes it easier.

Which means you might spend a fair bit of time below your current level.

Are there cases in which the order you'd pick your powers in while levelling would be noticably different from the order you'd pick them in if you were freshly speccing in order to exemplar down well at a broad range of levels? If it matters, my build is dark/dark, and I'm only level 23, so this is only very marginally relevant. But, for instance, at 14, I took flight, because being able to fly is a huge win for me both in convenience and for RP purposes. But if I were in a team, I might not care whether I had flight; I might prefer some other power that I can use more within a mission. (Flight is a bit of an endurance hog to keep on during a mission.)

Thoughts?

Okay, that is really nice. Now all I want is to be able to access it in-game. :P

Playing around more, this actually goes beyond gender. There's a scarf chest detail (I think it's a chest detail?) that's in, e.g., the "student" female set -- looks like one of those neck scarves you see on schoolgirls in manga.

I have a character who is in an Enforcer Heavy suit (mostly), and I cannot for the life of me track down a way to get that scarf. (The character's name is Ko-gal Ultra, and yes, she has the little manga schoolgirl skirt on over her power armor. The scarf would really help complete the effect.)

About the only thing I've seen that I think would really be problematic to put on a different body type is the female witch chestpiece which consists entirely of a giant pair of boobs. I can see that being hard to make work on a male, unless it's a very pudgy male. Apart from that... I very much want tiaras for male characters, and dragon bracers (which I've only found for female?), and so on. In general, I think every item of clothing should be available for every build, and there should be a lot more room for combining things with stuff they don't seem like they'd go well with, because sometimes being superpowered comes at the expense of taste.

I have a lowish opinion of Sony, in that their hardware tends to be pretty but... I guess I'd say idiosyncratic. They tend to use weird non-standard parts and the support for them may be dodgy.

I've been not-miserable with HP in the distant past, but Carly sorta wrecked them, I don't know whether they've recovered.

Lenovo's apparently preserved a fair bit of the awesome that was the ThinkPad line, although obviously there are a lot of people saying it's not as good anymore. But then, people always say that about everything.

Had some pretty bad experiences with Dell in the past.

Have had decent luck with the eMachines part of Gateway; they weren't high-end machines, but they were okay. Had great luck with Toshiba hardware in the past but it hasn't been relevant to me for a couple-few years.

I am actually thinking about getting a desktop PC with specific intent to run CoH on it, but I am terrified of having to deal with Windows again. (I'm not a Windows guy, and the marginal cost of learning to maintain another operating system for a single application is pretty high.)

Oh, that's... that's evil. But brilliant.

I sooooo miss WoW's lua-based interface with well-supported user modifications.

I assume this is beyond the scope of what can be done in CoH, but maybe not. I am unable to remember which of my alts have which items either in inventory or in vault reserve. Is there some convenient way to have this information tracked or recorded, or do I just have to do it myself?

As to flipping: I do a ton of flipping in WoW. Less so in CoH, because I can't post 500-600 auctions at once.

I have seen no evidence that this generally increases prices, and indeed, it by definition reduces the total amount of money around in the game (because every repost costs listing fees, and every purchase takes gold out of the game for the AH's cut). What it does do is stabilize prices a bit. I can turn something from "some days there's one for 200g, some days there's one for 15000g, some days there's none at all" into "nearly every day, there's one for 8000g". Not many people will buy it at that price, but if you really want one, there's probably one available. This keeps things more predictable. People who want to get something today get it today. People who want to liquidate supplies today get to liquidate supplies today. I get pocket change I can use to equip characters. Everyone's happy.

I've done a fair bit of flipping of brass at WW. I typically leave a bid open at 500 inf, and have a few posted for sale at maybe 100k-200k. Both the bids and the sales go through. Am I raising the real price of brass? Not really. If you want to buy brass for 500, go ahead and put in a bid at 500, your chances are as good as mine, and you will get your brass after a few hours or a couple of days. If you are in a hurry to get brass and simply don't care (200k inf is less than you make sneezing in the general direction of some critters), it has no significant effect on you. Since there's no meaning or relevance to the "average" price, it's not clear that I'm significantly affecting the market, apart from reducing the total amount of inf in it by about 10-20k every time someone buys one of the high-priced brass.

I would love to see a stable, constantly-updated, emote list.

Actually, this is something that could be done with a bit of engine work. Standardize the representation of emotes, and instead of a list that has to be manually updated, you can have the actual list of available emotes, right now, in game, possibly with annotations.

This could take into account things like "do I have this emote unlocked on my current account", too.

So you could do something like:

name - animate? - loop? - description
dance - yes - yes - you dance
wave - yes - no - wave at any character

I'm so torn on the dance emotes. I love that there's more than one, but I'm used to WoW's 15-20 second dance loops, and the CoH dances are just tiny little loops.

Yeah, I just thought this would be a simple way to bulletproof the process and provide typo protection, etcetera.

I like the basic idea of "/em <word>" over wow-style slash commands, although those have the advantage that they allow a variety of puns to be made ("Hey, what happened to the /wrists emote?")

Sorry, more WoW refugee habits. On the WoW forums, any attempt to find old threads is regarded as "necroing" old threads, and the mods have allegedly asked that if you have a suggestion, you post it in a new thread without regard to whether other similar suggestions have been posted.

What I mean by "safe" is "if you pick a word that isn't a known animation, it doesn't show up as "<name> word". Right now, something (maybe it was the help?) suggested "/em warmup" for a martial arts warm-up -- but in fact, that's now "/em kata". If you "/em warmup", you generate the message "<name> warmup".

What would be neat would be something like:

/anim warmup

where this would just respond (to you only) "unknown emote: warmup".

Basically, separate out the generic-emote functionality ("<name> has a fever, and the only cure is more cowbell.") from the designed-animation functionality?

I would like to be able to, say, pick from a handful of flying-trails (feet only, feet and hands, diffuse cloud, etc.) for hover/fly, or change their color, or... well, hang on, it looks like there's a lot of powers that aren't in primary/secondary power sets, but have some kind of animation or display, and wouldn't it be cool if you could tweak them so they match your character?

So, I've been messing around with costumes a fair bit. And I'm finding something very frustrating: Many items seem to be gender-specific, and I can't always figure out why.

To add insult to injury, there's always the possibility that I'm simply not finding them, because in some cases, there's three pop-ups for a field, one category, one sub-type, and then a decoration, and I may not be able to figure out what sub-type I'm looking for. (For instance, it took me a long time to figure out that "bare feet" were a kind of "flat", rather than a top-level choice of boots.)

But as examples: I found a couple of wrist things, "dragon bracer" and "cloud bracer", which were available for a female build toon, but not a huge build toon. I don't know whether I'm just missing them or whether they're absent. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that the tiara I was using isn't available on huge toons. Most noticably, the mini-vest is apparently female-only.

In this particular case, there is actually a concrete reason to want the same costume on two different builds -- the character is a shape-changer, whose natural form is a djinni of one sort, but who can change into a ginormous efreeti, which moves from the female body type to the huge body type. But it'd be awesome if I could preserve the costume (including the belt with a jewel in the buckle, which I can't find for the huge type.)

I can see, perhaps, some reason to suggest that maybe male characters shouldn't wear a wedding dress in game, but one thing I'd point out is that all of the items I'm looking at above are things which are historically at least partially gender-neutral, and have been worn by both men and women. I'd prefer, of course, to just have everyone able to wear everything, and leave the assignment of gender norms to the players.

Oooh, I didn't realize enhancements stopped working when exemplared.

No wonder I suck so much when I'm temporarily lower-level. I guess it's made up for a little bit by having an extra power or two.