srmalloy

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Wolverines claws are much more unique than magnatism but then they don't even have a build in the game for his defense... 100% immune to smashing damage (unbreakable bones) but vulernable to lethal damage (cutting weapons). So you can't really make a clone of him in game either. Sad part is Marvel would could do with checking out CoH for some original heros as opposed to the clone of him they just released LOL.

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Not immune to smashing damage. Bone fractures are only one of the effects of blunt trauma; the other sequelae, such as bruising and internal bleeding, don't get any protection from his bones being unbreakable. And concussive trauma, where your brain is slammed back and forth inside your skull from impacts, isn't affected either. So while I'd be willing to concede 50% - 75% resistance to smashing damage, I wouldn't make him immune to it.

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The 'manager' of the Steel Canyon Icon is named Serge. He looks an awful lot like Bronson Pinchot, who played Serge, the 'manager' of the art gallery in Beverley Hills Cop.

Is this a coincidence, or are they related?

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'Serge' is a durable twill fabric, and 'serging' is the process of overcasting the edge of a piece of fabric to keep it from unravelling.

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I first encountered the term wetware in Shadowrun. It refers to bioware, cloned-type additions to the body, as opposed to cyberware, the typical hardware-type stuff.

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The term predates Shadowrun, and was the title of a novel by Rudy Rucker published in 1988, part of his 'Ware' series of novels: Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware; it was widely used in the computer community to refer to the people in a computer installation or their mental capacity.

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You could travel to The Frozen Wastelands for instance. It's all ice landscapes with some mountains, something that looks cool and different to what we are used to seeing. The people who live there are some kind of crazy eskimo types.

Through another portal..... Ancient Egypt. All sand. The inhabitants are the laser gun toting Incas.

Stuff like that.

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Not portals... instanced outdoor missions. Create a single zone that's an airport -- Family trying to control the baggage handlers, Freakshow trying to dismantle aircraft in the hangars, CoT kidnapping travellers for arcane rituals, etc. Place a Hero Corps contact in the zone, somewhere in the main terminal, who will hand out missions to anyone who comes to him with a group of four or more. These missions, built from a set of templates, represent Hero Corps sending you on an international mission, so you could have -- with enough graphics work to create different environments, you could get sent almost anywhere in the world (and it makes a relatively easy point to tack in new content).

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I NEVER give specific dates on anything because game development is a fickle thing. I do try to give at least an Issue #, because that provides a ballpark estimate for you guys.

Naturally, there are some who will criticize when we don't adhere to even that rough guess.

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Being a programmer myself, I can understand all too well how a SMOP (Small Matter Of Programming) can suddenly reveal itself to require a major rewrite. Of course, that goes both ways, in that I also look at a change and see that it should only require a tiny tweak to the code, without realizing that the 'tiny tweak' depends on the data structures for the program being set up in the way that _I_ would code them, without knowing how the program actually stores data.

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It also leaves us in the hitherto unusual position of needing to get help *during* a mission, since we have no way of knowing beforehand whether or not there's going to be a boss in there. That will be awkward in timed missions.

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Actually, if a boss will appear in a mission, the mission briefing mentions it. Check the text.

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Except for the missions that tell you the goal is to 'rescue N hostages', or 'find N glowies', and then when you get the last displayed objective, the mission objective changes to 'Defeat all X in wherever'... and you sleazed past three bosses to get to the last hostage/glowie... I remember my Scrapper having one mission against the Rikti where the mission goal was to find three containers of mutagen (or whatever), and after I'd found two canisters and mapped out the entire cave, I spent half an hour slipping around with Super Speed and Stealth trying to find the third canister, finally petitioning the mission and waiting around until a GM showed up, who told me that the mission was a 'defeat all' mission that wasn't mentioned anywhere in the mission description or in the displayed mission objectives; that mission had two Chief Solders and two Chief Mentalists in it when I did it solo.

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{ 2 } What you CAN NOT do. { 2 }

You can not do any of the following with chat bubbles:

--- Post a clickable URL within your bubble.
--- Change the text font within your bubble.
--- Change the text orientation (italic, bold, underline, etc.) within your bubble.
--- Make your text blink or animate within your text bubble.

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In a curious counterexample, of which I have yet to find out how it happened, I produce the following clip from a screenshot I made a while back. I have no idea how it happened -- whether it was a glitch in transmission, in my client software, or actually a capability of the game. I was on Peregrine Island, and one of the other heroes said something on the Request channel that came up as 'dlya' -- 'd', 'l', 'ya' -- in Cyrillic characters: Screenshot (full image available on request, so you can see it wasn't manipulated)

If anyone can duplicate the effect, I would be quite interested in how they did it; if it's something the game supports, even if it is complicated to do, it has the potential to enhance the chat functions significantly. Of course, if you can change the font of a chat message, you run into the same 'what happens if someone doesn't have that font on their system?' problem you do with web pages, which can ruin the effect.

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We will be revamping some of this stuff so crazy sitations like being put in an area that's WAAAAAYYYY too tough doesn't happen.

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Could you also look into whether it's possible to sanity-check where door missions are located? With my various alts, I've gotten a number of missions where the mission has been to go to some company's business offices, and the mission location is in a hazard zone. I thought part of the point of hazard zones was that they didn't have civilians in them because they were so dangerous. For example, an operating business with its offices in Boomtown, or an operating warehouse in Dark Astoria.

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We already implemented Time Travel...

Wait, we haven't yet? What year is this? 2004! Oh... um, ignore me.

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It's easy to tell whether a time machine has been invented or not -- if one has been invented, US Patent No. 1 will be for a time machine.

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Removing the accuracy penalty for melee attacks only from flight is very difficult to do. Since it's either no accuracy penalty or every attack gets an accuracy penalty, flight will be retaining its penalty on all atacks.

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Ahem.

Super Reflexes Scrappers have powers that only protect against melee attacks, and powers that only protect against ranged attacks. Clearly the engine distinguishes them at some level, why not on the player side?

-c.

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I thought of asking that, but then the discussion moved on. My guess is that's either A) a piece of spaghetti code that they wrote just for the SR scrappers and is therefore not easy to move elsewhere or B) the defense code is separate enough from the attack code that it's easier to apply a modification to defense than attacks. I'd lean towards the second of those.

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For single-target damage, you have a specific target against which the attack is directed, and pull that target's defenses to apply against the attack. For area-effect damage, you have a defined area of the attack's effect from a point (either the attacking character, for cones and PBAoEs, or a mob or location, for ranged AoEs), and iterate through all targets in the area, pulling that target's defenses to apply against the attack.

For outgoing attacks, you have the originating character and their target, regardless of whether it's a ranged or melee attack, and because all attacks are 'ranged' (to allow for netlag), even melee attacks, there's no way to tell the difference without adding a flag to each power in the database to indicate whether it's a melee or ranged attack, so that the code could apply different modifiers in the one case of a character having Fly active when throwing the attack. It's a question of cost vs. benefits; making an update that requires that one of the main data files be completely redownloaded just to let the game distinguish between ranged and melee attacks while flying ranks way down on the importance list.

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During the couple minutes I was on Justice before being disconnected again, I reached one door, and a bunch of Devouring Earth with pumpkins on their heads hopped out, and I noticed that their gang name was "Fir Bolg." I wasn't sure, but I knew I'd heard the named Firbolg before. Sounded Celtic, and when I checked their description, sure enough, it mentioned them being the third race of gods to inhabit Ireland, after the Tuatha Dé Danann. So! If anyone's interested:

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/f/fomorians.html

http://www.pantheon.org/articles/f/firbolg.html

Personally, I think it's pretty genius. It shows a lot of depth on the part of the developers. Thumbs up, guys!

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Third race to inhabit Ireland, throwing out the Fomorians, and being thrown out by the Tuatha Dé Danaan, as the website says, not following them. Eochaid Mac Eirc was the king of the Firbolg at the time of the invasion of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and Sreng (I can understand the devs adding the 't' to make it easier to pronounce) was the greatest warrior of the Firbolg at the time.

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The devs didn't think ahead, everybody exploited and it will probably be fixed next year.

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Um - actually, this is exactly how we planned it. We had fun with it. And people seem to be having fun with it (hence the several threads). So, um, no, this isn't exploiting, IMHO.

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I started a thread in the Suggestions forum with this idea; I don't know if it's practical to do as far as server load goes, but I think that removing the time limit and making each door knockable only once by a hero until they've knocked on all the other doors in the zone (skipping the cave entrances) would make for a more entertaining event, with the heroes running around madly trying to find all the doors, and getting to explore all of each zone, instead of only as much as they need for street sweeping and missions.

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While we're pointing out references thrown into CoH, I'll mention that the professor in City Hall, "St. John-Smythe", was a name that James Bond used when going undercover in View To a Kill (though he pronounced it more like "synjun smythe" in the movie.

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That's an artifact of British accent and dialect, in the same way that the name "Featherstone-Haugh" is pronounced "fanshaw".

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The Babbage Machine was a totally clockwork computing device. He designed but never built it, if I'm not mistaken. Kind of like Davinci and the helicoptor.

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Babbage did build a Difference Engine; however, his Analytical Engine was well beyond the technological limits of the period, and was never completed.

IIRC, Michael Flynn wrote a novel that revolved, at least partially, around a secret society that actually built Analytical Engines and used them for sociologial predictions, titled In the Country of the Blind. A fun read.

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There are numerous story arc/mission-related badges that I'm missing. I've received 4 so far and I've certainly completed a lot more than four of the requisite missions/arcs. I don't know exactly which ones are missing, but I'm certain there are several missing.

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FYI: There are NO story arc badges. None. Never were. Never will be. You have Souvenirs for that.

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How about the bug where you complete a story arc, get the screen that asks you to pick your reward enhancement, and after you've selected your reward, gives you nothing? I've had two separate story arcs do this to me, and in both cases I had at least three empty slots in my tray to receive the reward.

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Oh boy ladies and gentlemen... The latest (about a week old) from The Great and Almighty Positron Himself: |||||ll||ll||l|||l|lll|||, or something like that. See picture:

Positron's Latest Message

oOoo0oOo0oo.... WHO CAN BREAK IT?!?!?!?

Lol good luck, who knows what kind of code that is.

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I don't think it's a code; I suspect that what we're seeing is an 'undocumented feature'; I have a screenshot from CoH of a character saying "dlya" -- the 'd', 'l', and 'ya' characters in Cyrillic (Russian). If the chat window has the ability to change which font the text is drawn in, it opens up a whole new range of silly chat-bubble customizations. However, since I don't see the 'feature' being as simple as putting '<font face="Cyrillic">' in the chat text block, I expect that figuring out how to do it may take a while.

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I am a level 29 Science blaster and I don't think there are many devouring earths in brickstown..and I think a few in Founders. What are the good enemies for science level 30-40?
I am realizing that a science origin is not really a good origin to get more variety of villains for enhancements. I hardly get any science DO or SO. I think magic, or mutation are better

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A few in Founders' Falls? Go into FF, and follow the entrance road around to the right and down the west side of the zone. About halfway down the side, the mobs to your right will switch from Circle of Thorns to Devouring Earth. From there all the way around to the northeast corner, the rim area is full of Devouring Earth, running from about 30/31 where they start on the west side up to 40 in the northeast corner.

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I picked up aim at 35. I could have lived without it. Extra accuracy works fine for purps. Extra dmg is negligible since it's basically like popping a big dmg insp. If you are having a problem with leaving slivers of health (< 20%) on some AOE attacks, you should definately grab it.

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However, consider that, like Build Up, Aim is a continually-refreshing source of short-life inspirations. No matter how heavily you burn through your inspiration tray, and how bad the drops have been, Aim and Build Up will just recharge and give you more automatically. Unless you're chronically popping Insight and Rage, it to a great degree frees you from your dependency on those inspirations.

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Health is absolutely worthless. If you start taking consistent damage as a blaster, you're dead. Blaster health is pretty much an all or nothing proposition. Either you are barely taking damage, or you're getting wtfbbqttfnpwned.

The regen from health is pathetic in battle and of only marginal benefit for downtime. You'll get plenty health inspirations to handle your downtime.

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From the experience I've had playing an AR/En blaster up to 39 (currently; expect to tip over 40 tonight), I have to say you're wrong. From the point at which I six-slotted Full Auto up to the point where I outlevelled the 5th Column mobs on the southeast side of Brickstown, having Health made the difference between being able to hang down there whacking mobs and selling TO/DO enhancements to Bill Nye (in-joke; Holsten Armitage, the 30-40 Science 'store' -- "Bill Nye, the Science Guy") until I'd built up a full rack of non-Science SOs to sell in TI, and having to run off every ten or fifteen minutes to buy more Respites. With Full Auto and Build Up, I could hover over one of the groups of 6-12 5th Column, from white to orange minions, and put them all down with one attack -- but the return grenade fire before they went down would average dropping me to 50% health. With Health two-slotted with SOs, by the time I'd found another group big enough to use FA on (instead of sniping small groups out), I'd be back to full health without having to use any inspirations. I'd burn some Luck against yellow and orange groups to cut the damage I was taking, and Respites when I got hit hard and went down to 25%, but for the most part I could fly around attacking for several hours without using more than a quarter of my inspiration tray.

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Ihave question may answer. Do you know ho i could do a bind key that to select one after one the different member of my group. I mean without having to directly select them with the lshift + number key. a kind of "group member browser" bind ?

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The only way I know of to do this would be to do a toggle bind. Make files for ts1-ts8, then in each you would have something like (from ts2.txt):
<key> "team_select 2$$bind_load_file ts3.txt"
and in ts8:
<key> "team_select 8$$bind_load_file ts1.txt"

I have a more detailed version in my "Post your /bind's here" thread (not using my normal browser, so I don't have the URL available).

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Very good idea, and thx.
But what if there is only four members in my group for example ?

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Then you would only have four files, and file ts4.txt would have the text:
<key> "team_select 4$$bind_load_file ts1.txt"

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No, there's no PDF of 1.1 yet. I keep intending to make it and wind up playing CoH instead.

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Well, then, allow me.

The Incomplete and Unofficial Guide to /bind in PDF format

The raw HTML file that I made by combining Curveball's postings and cleaning them up is also available, if people are interested.