Whoa, where did the power effects go in the character creator?

After reminding myself that I've had a TA/Rad concept on the burner for a while, I logged in this morning to see what costume and power color concepts might catch my eye... and discovered that I can't see any of the Rad powers in the creator. I just created a Fire/TA corruptor earlier this week and had no trouble customizing the Fire blasts, but today I can't see any of the blasts. I can see some of the effects hitting the invisible target (i switched to Ice Blast to see if it was just a Rad Blast issue, but no ice shooting across the screen, just chunks appearing on the invisible target), but other effects, like the blasts themselves, Ice Arrow's block of ice and Entangling Arrow's net, never appear.

I rotated the character to face an appropriate direction so I could see the graphics.

I tried changing the colors and color themes.

I tried changing the brightness.

I reset everything to default and tried everything again.

I logged out and restarted the client, just to be sure it wasn't a one time glitch.

I tried skipping steps in the creator.

I tried going through the creator step by step.

I tried heroes and villains.

I verified files.

I've tried it with different origins, different powersets, none of the blasts are showing up. I just logged back in and tested Fire Blast. Hands show fire graphics, invisible target shows fire splash, but the actual fire that's supposed to be shooting toward the invisible target doesn't appear. I can get the mushroom cloud from Neutron Bomb, but the whirling ball of energy never appears. None of the blasts are displaying for me. I've been logging in and out, testing this, for almost an hour now.

Anyone else not seeing blasts in the power customization part of the character creator? O_o

Did you update your video card drivers?

Are you running Windowed or Full-screen?

Are you using the Mac or Windows client?

Umm.... That's all I can think of for now.

I'm at work, so I can't log in, but I saw the blasts last time I tried customizing them, and I'm 99% positive that there hasn't been a patch since the last time I tried.

Odd. After seeing your post, I created a TA/Rad Defender just to see what happened.

I had 0 problems with seeing the powers. I see all of the blasts as they leave the body, on the way to the target, then the Hit effect. With Ice Arrow I see a small piece of Ice, which is what I'm used to seeing, but I can't see the block of ice on the Hit effect since it is offscreen. With Entangling Arrow, I see the net on the arrow before firing, I see it during flight to the target, but don't see the net on the Hit effect since it is offscreen. With the rad blasts, everything looks as it should.

I'm not sure what is/was causing the problem you experienced, but I can't replicate it here.

Sorry.

I saw, or rather didn't see, the same thing on a Cold/Ice Defender last night. This was a Tailor session rather than character creation though.

What I saw was the character doing the animation, the snowy aura around the character, the FX of the hit on the target, however the actual particle effect traveling from the character to the target were missing.

I'll keep an eye out for reoccurrences.

Do you have the "Suppress Close FX" option enabled on that character? If so, try turning it off and see if that helps.

A person in another thread had this issue, and had Suppress Close FX turned on. Disabling it corrected the issue.

Not sure what the difference is, but I'm still not seeing it. I realized after reading these posts that I'd lowered my graphics settings for a Hami Raid last night, so I set them back to normal just to make sure that it wasn't the lowered settings allowing me to see the blasts.

Same results as my previous posts. I see the blasts as they leave the body. I see the net on the Entangling Arrow, and I see it in flight. I see the small Ice piece on Ice Arrow, and I see it in flight.

Maybe if you post a CoH Helper it will let us see what your settings are to try to duplicate it. Or to see if it is an issue with a particular driver or video card.

Well, the only thing I can see, not having a current gen nVidia card, is that the driver isn't the newest. The 190.62 WHQL driver was released August 21.

can't remember for certain, but it seems that others were reporting some kind of problem with the 190.38 driver. Hopefully, someone that has a similar card and setup can try to replicate it. I can't come close to that with my ancient 6800 Ultra, even running Windows 7. The system just won't handle that high of a graphic setting. Well, at least not enough for me to consider it even slightly playable.

As for the earlier supposition that it might be caused by the Suppress FX When Close setting, this would be negated with a new character being created, as you noted the TA/Rad concept being new. That setting is Disabled by default, even on new characters, and loses it's settings fairly regularly on the same character.

EDIT: Well, I'm going to try to get as close to your video settings as I can with my antique 6800 Ultra. Albeit, it's on a Windows 7 32-bit system. Luckily, I have the 190.38 driver installed already. I'll report back once it's finished downloading the updates and I can test it.

Well, after updating my CoH install on my Windows 7 32-bit install on my old computer, I set the graphics settings in game to match yours and created a new TA/Rad character on Victory. When I set it for Bright I see the blasts, when I set it for Dark I see the blasts. I still see the net for Entangling Arrow and the Ice bit for Ice Arrow, as well as seeing the projectiles as they leave the bow all the way to the target. This is all on a computer with a 6800 Ultra installed.

Maybe someone that can more closely match your setup (especially the video card and OS combination) can try to replicate this since I can't seem to.

Sorry, I'm out of ideas at this point unless someone with a more similar setup can test it.

We don't want Castle trying to replicate it on HIS computer. It's apparently ... less than stellar ... might be a good description.

Must ... have ... more ... sharp ... pointy ... sticks ...

And the problem is back. Haven't logged in at all today until fifteen minutes ago, started putting together a TA/Rad on Liberty, got to the power customization screen and no graphics for Rad blasts. The pets for Disruption, Glue and PGA all disappear within 1-2s, no ice block with Ice Arrow, no net with Entangling Arrow...

Argh. It works, then it doesn't, then it does, then it doesn't... this is nuts.

Going to test the FX setting and see what happens.

I logged in to test my Fire/TA controller... it's fine.

Okay, back to the character creator to test TA/Rad again.

And now I've got no problem with the creator, either.

So, it's not the server, I've tested on three different servers and had it both work and fail on all three. It's not the Disable FX setting, I haven't changed that at all yet. No patches were released in the last few days. No OS patches within the last few days. No driver or hardware changes in the last few days.

No changes of any kind, but the bug manifests at random.

Maybe... I don't know, maybe creating a TA/Rad as the first action when logging in to the server selection screen? That's the only common point with the failures yesterday morning and tonight. The first thing I did after logging in was pick a server and start trying to create a TA/Rad, and discovered that I couldn't see the Rad blasts or various TA effects.

Feh. I'm dumping it in Castle's lap, he can forward it to QA for analysis.

I was having this problem the other day myself. Was at the Pocket D tailor and none of my power effects were showing up. Switched characters and everything was fine. Switched back to character #1 and the power effects were showing up again. Haven't encountered it since, not that I've done a crazy amount of power customization since. Definitely sounds like an intermittent bug though.