srmalloy

What I would _really_ like to see is to have all costume pieces get texture, separated into primary/secondary when there is a division. By 'texture' I mean a surface treatment that affects the way the base costume part displays, like 'flat', 'shiny', 'dull metal', 'shiny metal', 'shiny leather', and various textures like the hexagon pattern on the 'Stealth' costume pieces and the 'mesh' effect on the 'Defense' and 'Tech Sleek' pieces.

Unfortunately, this would require completely redoing all of the costume pieces, as the database structure would have to add two additional fields for the surface parameters, and change the rendering code for costumes, in order to have it check for the additional data and render appropriately. This makes doing this only slightly more likely to happen than for the art department to go through Paragon and the Rogue Isles and make all of the buoys compliant with the IALA Maritime Buoyage System (according to Positron, I'm apparently the only one who's been bothered enough by it to complain about it since the game released), so I'm not holding my breath.

And others are so far into the closet they're in Narnia...

So who are you going to get? Someone from the Praetorian masses, who's been fully inculcated with the 'Emperor Cole is your Saviour' bushwa and is going to be completely overshadowed by him, someone from the Praetorian Resistance, who'll look at it as a way to get close to Marcus Cole to be able to off him and free Praetoria, or someone from another Earth, who'll be there constantly reminding him that there are other worlds not under his 'benevolent' control?

As long as you make the gloves and boots with two options, one with and one without the rings, so that we can have just the regular hardsuit if we want, C.

That's about as funny as the shot someone posted early in the game's history with a screenshot of the 'info' popup for a level 768 SO, where the screen was telling him he couldn't use the enhancement until he reached level 765...

Unfortunately, as Positron explained the way costumes work, a body part has two color 'slots', a 'model' slot, and a 'pattern' slot which defines how the two colors are applied to the model. When you choose one of the 'tight with skin' costume pieces, the skin color occupies one of the two color slots, and the pattern slot defines the demarcation between the skin color and the single costume color. As we've seen from the 'XXX Plus' costume pieces, it is possible to apply a texture to the costume, so it would be possible for the CoX art department to go through costume pieces and create surface textures for them. But it's not possible with the current costume data structure to have a 'tight with skin' costume piece that has more than one color on the costume part of the piece.

One thing that I asked him about, and which is possible under the existing costume data structure, is to create additional effects using the 'uncolorable' flag. There are some costume pieces where you are unable to modify the color on parts of the costume piece -- the yellow decoration across the front of the Praetorian Police chest detail, for example. This is handled by making that part of the costume piece model uncolorable, so whatever color is 'baked in' to the piece is how it is rendered.

There are also some costume pieces where, if you take the costume piece and apply the same-named pattern, the costume piece divides itself up into two distinct components -- the pads and the undersuit for the 'Stealth' costume pieces, the armor plates and the mesh joint material for the 'Tech Sleek' costume pieces, and the armor sections and joints of the 'Tech Crey' and 'Tech Wired' costume pieces, for example. Right now, if you apply a pattern like 'camouflage' to the Tech Sleek costume pieces, the camouflage effect is applied across both the armor plates and the mesh. Positron confirmed that it would be possible with the existing costume data structure to take a pattern, like Tech Sleek, and designate one part as uncolorable; if this was done, you wouldn't be able to color that part of the armor -- it would be whatever the art department set for it -- but you would be able to select patterns that would apply only to the rest of the costume piece. For example, with the Tech Sleek pieces, the picture below shows, on the left, Tech Sleek with the Tech Sleek Pattern in white and black; on the right, Tech Sleek with the Camouflage pattern in white and black. And in the middle is Tech Sleek where the mesh joint material, broken out by the Tech Sleek pattern on the left, was made uncolorable, then the Camouflage pattern in white and black was applied, which only affected the parts of the costume pieces not marked uncolorable.


It wouldn't be possible to do this with all the costume pieces; most of them don't have an appropriate division like this. But for the ones that do, doing this would create new visuals for the costume pieces without requiring huge amounts of art department time.

However, it does still require work on their part to copy the costume pieces and rework their coloring this way, so whether it does get done depends on their other workload and how many people would want something like this.

It's still a social event, and it has other rewards -- the merit reward, and the arguably less-than-stellar four incarnate shards. It's not the gangbang it used to be, with a hundred or more heroes wandering the goo in one clump under an umbrella of healing to take out the mitos, then standing around snarking while holds got dumped on Hamidon, then everyone rushing in to pound him into protoplasm, with the 'yellow dawn' the reward for getting overconfident, but it's still entertaining.

This explains the oddity I've been noticing in PI; I've been going around hunting Fake Nemesis for Unveiler, and it seems that about half the time I use Air Superiority, rather than flipping and landing on its back, the Fake Nemesis winds up curled up sobbing at my feet, sometimes failing to get up before I finish beating it down.

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? The mezzes are too dam long!

I suspect that one of the decisions leading to blowing Galaxy City into rubble was to get around either a) having new players *****, moan, and whine about how crappy Galaxy City looked compared to Atlas Park if they picked it for their starting zone, or b) having to expend the same amount of work they put into the Atlas Park revamp to rework Galaxy City before the issue released.

...or just make the whole thing moot by making the present spawns use the invasion code to autolevel, so the minion-level spawns are always even-level to everyone.

And that aspect of the Meet & Greets will allow me to continue to attend them in San Diego even after, as it looks now, 2012 being my last year attending, due both to the changes in the convention itself (having attended since 1977, as well as being on the concom for a number of years and watched it change from a convention about comics by comics fans into a bloated movie-and-TV media convention that has some comic-related material tucked into the corners) and in the utterly brain-dead process that they used this year to sell memberships for next year.

Sounds as if you need the CDO shirt:

Although that would make an entertaining jokename character -- take your pick of archetypes/powersets that would be appropriate for a soldier, make up the body with the typical soldier's uniform, with the bell-jar head, and name them 'Jarhead'...

Tried that; at least for Glow, the eye glow is not only positioned outside the jar, but it's not even aligned with the eyes in the jar.

Not to mention having the bubble for making a sealed environment suit for someone requiring a particular environment -- a classic example being Dr. Victor Fries, one of Batman's opponents: