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Posts
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Joined
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Quote: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.This is the essential take-away, I think. Regardless of what we do, everyone's expressing a similar interest in adding realism/modern textures to these costume pieces. So we could potentially do a few things:
--revamp original tights w/ subtle folds, seams
--add new tights w/ heavy folds
--add new tights w/ other basic textures (leather, etc.)
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. -
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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?
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I deleted a level 50 Katana/Regen Scrapper, who'd hit 50 both pre-ED and pre-click IH, and had been built to rely on Focused Accuracy for to-hit so he could slot his attacks 5 Dam/1 Acc and run all the Regen toggles continuously. I'd gotten reasonably good at estimating whether he'd be able to jump into a spawn and beat enough mobs to get ahead of the incoming damage before he ran out of hit points, with the result that he was one of the "comes out of a fight at 100%" characters that caused all the player creebing about how overpowered Regen was by people who didn't see them at 25% or less partway through the fight. The character was going to need a complete rebuild to be viable after ED and the last Regen jerkover, and I didn't want to relearn how to play Regen at level 50, rather than incrementally, so I deleted him. I never got around to recreating him, though; there were too many other concepts to chase.
Similarly, I'm contemplating deleting my level 39 Ice/Fire Tanker, who became even more of a one-trick pony after ED and the changes to Burn. It's not that the character isn't viable, but rather that she's become particularly boring to play. -
Also, if we could get the bubble helmet itself solid except for a transparent faceplate, like many of the spacesuit helmets from the 50s forward:
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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...
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Quote:One thing I've wanted is the ability to have tights / masks that aren't colored skin. If the tights and masks were seperate from the skin it seems to me we'd be able to have patterns sit on the tights rather than the skin, which means we could possibly put patterns onto costume options that include skin, without coloring both skin and tights.Quote:
Examples: Keyhole with the Fire Stipe pattern so the center is one color, the outer another color, with a jagged ege, but with skin showing through. Who's this coming from? Power Girl, for one. Or switch from the keyhole to the V-neck, and put the Fat Stripe vertical pattern on the tights but not the skin, and that's more heroines than I could name in ten minutes.
Blast tights with the shredding still there, but if we can add the usual patterns over that, without it coloring the skin too, we can have an alternate, battle-worn outfit. Our tights aren't as tough as we are in all cases.
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. -
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Quote: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.As for Value; first they changed the Hami raid, a social event which became replaced with the MSR (most servers), Now they are making the reward (the first real shiny) humdrum and if it becomes ineffective I doubt the Hami Raids that are still running won't be that much farther behind, look for a zone revamp like (the RWZ, Faultline, and soon the Nes Astoria,) just to name a few.
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Hey, I keep hoping they'll fix a graphics issue that has been around since the game released and make Paragon City compliant with the worldwide IALA Maritime Buoyage System (although I realize that it's a cosmetic issue that's way, way down on the priority list, and that there are probably less than a hundred people in the playerbase who can even tell that Paragon City is in violation of the MBS). Everyone needs a long-term goal.
(if you're curious, the International Association of Lighthouse Authorities [IALA] maintains the worldwide standard for the position and marking of navigational aids like buoys; the vertically-striped red-and-white buoy means 'deep water on all sides; deep-draft vessels can pass on any side', which looks wrong when it's parked ten feet away from a pier. I've learned to mostly ignore the buoys, but it's still a nagging itch whenever I see one -- except for the two or three that are appropriately placed) -
I ran into an odd situation in a mission this evening, where a pseudo-pet was acting like a guard.
I've run into cases where pets are guards -- if you are attacking the group guarding a hostage, and any one of them summons other mobs, the additional mobs are considered to be part of the guard on the hostage, and they won't move until all of the mobs, both original and summoned, are gone -- in missions where you have Carnies guarding, the Master Illusionist's summoned Illusionists, Phantasm, Dark Sentry, and Decoy Phantasm are all considered to be guards, and even if you defeat the Master Illusionist, until the last summoned mob goes down, the hostage stands pat.
I ran into a curious issue that reveals that pseudo-pets are also considered to be guards. I had a mission on my Brute where there were two Knives of Artemis guarding a hostage, and I tossed in a Ball Lightning to pull them closer, then ran in and started punching. They both went down quickly, but when I went to the hostage, he just stood there. He remained standing, motionless, until the caltrop area about twenty feet away vanished.
The way that pseudo-pets work makes them, for the most part, immune to anything characters can do about them (with the exception of lighting an Oil Slick, although lighting it just exchanges that pseudo-pet for a Burning Oil Slick pseudo-pet). Having them treated by the game as an additional guard seems to be counter-intuitive, because they're not an actual mob that can threaten the hostage. -
Quote: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.It's an upgrade in some cases in that on slopes and other conditions enemies will sometimes be locked into ragdolling for a much longer time making them less of a threat. To me the increased spasming and twisting makes defeated enemies look more like partially inflated parade balloons snagged on something during a windy day.
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Yesterday, I did the Hero Morality mission to change my Brute, Chernaya Molniya, from Rogue to Hero. Since the change, the character is, properly, unable to access the VG base. However, I am still getting the "Your supergroup owes..." messages, and out of curiosity, I went to Atlas Park, and discovered that -- while I can't use the base, and the base is somewhere in the Rogue Isles, the Paragon City Super Group Registrar in Atlas Park is perfectly willing to take my payment for the VG base upkeep.
This seems a bit odd. Not only should you not be able to pay VG base upkeep except to the contact in Port Oakes (and similarly for SG bases and the contact in Atlas), you shouldn't be able to pay upkeep for a base you no longer have the alignment to be able to use. -
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Since the last update, I have been experiencing problems with the in-game zone maps uncontrollably panning to the top of the map. It doesn't happen with all zones, but when it happens, the section of the map visible in the map display will slide inexorably downward until it shows the top edge of the map. When I move, the map recenters to my position, but it's obvious from the way the map jerks as I move that the movement recentering and the downward slide are fighting each other, and if I stop moving, the map resumes sliding downward. If I manually scroll the map back up, as soon as my finger comes off the mouse button the map starts sliding down again. This makes the map pretty much useless.
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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.
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Watching the process that the launcher goes through when you get a new update, it seems to me that it's inherently kind of stupid. You click on the 'UPDATE' button, and it downloads the update, installs the update, then gives you the option to play or continue. The first time you click on a 'PLAY' button after an update is installed, the launcher hides, you see the 'Loading' bar... and then everything stops, and you get a pop-up window that says, essentially "Hi! You've applied an update, so I'm going to stop everything I was doing and check to make sure the update was applied correctly", holding everything up while it checks the game files. Wouldn't it be better, as far as esthetics go, to check to see whether the update applied correctly immediately after it was applied, rather than waiting an indeterminate amount of time for the user to click 'play', and only then check to see whether the patch went in correctly? It seems to me that having a Windows-style notification box pop up breaks the style of the launcher and the game launch, as well as throwing a delay into the start of the game.
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Quote: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.One thing I've been thankful about this last year or so is the Meet n Greet format that doesn't require a con badge but still gives people a chance to get a code - that alone has saved me PAX membership and would have saved me SDCC membership this year if not for opting out of going to San Diego at all due to a sick kitty this year.
Quote:(that I almost never use - but darn it, I have them ALL and I'm going to find a way to keep getting them all because of my OCD completionist or collection-ist nature).
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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'...
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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.
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Quote: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:I love the think tank option! Can we PLEASE have additional tank styles so we can put it *over* standard heads? A tank full of water would be awesome to use for making aquatic characters who are able to escape the confines of their watery home!
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I'm not sure if this is directly related to what I was doing, or just a random crash, but in the 'investigate the Hellion cavern' mission you get as a follow-on from the 'rescue 4 civilians from the Hellions" introductory mission -- the one with the mission door under the bridge in Atlas Park where you find the mystical artifact -- I had reached the artifact (taking the straight-ahead tunnel, not either side tunnel) and clicked on it while holding down the 'S' key; the client popped up the message window border for the information about the artifact, then froze. After sitting frozen for approximately 30 seconds, the client crashed to desktop.
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If you update one of the CoH installs, then use the pull-down menu to the right of the install to verify the install, then start the game, it doesn't recognize that you've already run the verify -- it must do it itself; you still get the pop-up window saying that a repair or update has been detected and a verify will be performed.