500th post and topic: Graphics upgrade, but what kind do you want to see?

Now with Kung-Fu Grip!™

Okay, I didn't want to say it due to certain previous arguments, but yes.

And not a specific finger, Arcana.

Oh come on, has this ever stopped you before?

It has sometimes

Totally agree.
Having lighting outside would mean something, as would inside. I have been trying to pin whats not 'up to par' on CoH's graphics and I think you hit it right there with the lighting

A lighting engine revamp would be awesome. Imagine, going into a run down warehouse mission , and right in front of you its pitch black, but up head there is a side room with a light on shining light across the hallway, as you approach it you begin to see faint outlines of Trolls or Outcast as they lay in wait. You target one and set of a fire ball, the hallway is lit in bright orange (or any now ) light as the blast heads down the hallway to its intended target.

Well to be honest I was going off an old post from before the forum makeover, and my searchfu sucks, so my finding it is very unlikely. But I distinctly remember BaBs saying that it was damn near impossible/ would take up waaaayyyyy too much time to code unless there was some major change to make it easier. It was a quality of life thing that people had wanted for years, but the devs prioritized the issues/powerset proliferations/game content because (again, based on what I remember from the old most) they felt it wouldn't be an efficient use of their time back then.

well that all depends, which part? Some of it is speculation and word of mouth, and some of it is common sense (I think)

as far as the graphics upgrade goes, it makes sense, being as how the CoV has a higher performance/graphic requirement than CoH, so merging the two may necessitate making CoH equal with CoV. But this is only from word of mouth; until HeroCon we won't know for sure.

the part about the devs is the mix of common sense and opinion. If a large enough majority of the game populous (ex, the people who want their voice to be heard on the forums) request a particular thing to be done in game, it would make sense for the devs to at least consider it if it's within reason. why? because it would make/keep the masses happy. So for example, if enough people requested say, a bo staff or nunchakus or something along those lines for a new melee set, it would probably be considered and put on the proverbial list of "things to do" if enough people requested it and it was doable. When some time was freed up during/after their current schedule/plans for future issues, they might get around to toying with it.

Granted that it took a while, power customization happened(requested for years). Going Rogue is on the horizon and the idea of switching sides has been on the forums before. The same thing goes for dual pistols and a new mastermind set(demons in this case)

but like I said on my last post on this thread, my searchfu sucks and all my forum info came from before the forum upgrade, so I doubt that I'd be able to find the links related to this.

BABs specifically made it a point several times to explain that it was never hard or complicated, so much as it was a krappton of work. Every power's definitions would need to be hand-edited to accomodate power customization and the character creator would need to be redone to allow you to use that. He did a breakdown of how many effects scripts they had to fiddle with, and it ran well into the thousands, if not tens of thousands. It was just a lot of work, but if I recall correctly, fairly straight-forward work that just needed to be done.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sort of that was where my thinking was going, yes. Abandoned buildings ought to be dark, or at least darker, with us bringing our own lighting with us. It would make the whole game a lot more atmospheric. I mean, that sort of thing worked wonders in Diablo 2, much as I hate the game, as it really made magic fights in the dark look quite spectacular. Firing a fireball in the dark would look REALLY cool, I agree with you Kind of like how Gravity Control looks really cool around physics debris right now. Or how about lighting up a whole neighbourhood with Inferno? As soon as you nuke, you project a light with a HUGE radius, making it very obvious for everyone around After all, nukes are the sort of powers where, in comic books, a character would see across town and know something is going on.

Lighting right now is terrible. For the most part, characters are illuminated by some kind of awkward ambient light that gives barely any shading and doesn't seem to have a direction. The rest of the time they're illuminated by some globally uni-directional light where it doesn't matter WHERE you are, you'll always be illuminated from one side only. Very, VERY occasionally, you'll see a couple of omni-directional lights, largely in special locations like the Vanguard base, but by and large it's either ambient light or isometric uni-directional light.

If I had to tier my view of what extra lighting effects can entail, I'd go like this, from most important to least important:

1: Omni-directional dynamic lights.
2: Omni-directional dynamic COLOURED lights.
3: Cone-shaped dynamic coloured lights projectors.
4: Dynamic environment shadows.
5: Dynamic character shadows.
6: Partial character lighting.*
7: Volumeteric light. (your room with a light idea)

Personally, I'd be fine with going down only as far as 2 and 3, but going all the way to 4 and 5 would be G-r-r-r-r-rate! I wouldn't expect to see 6 and 7 at all.

*Right now, characters are always illuminated in their entirety from any light source they're subject to. What I mean by this is to be able to have a light illuminate, say, only your character's legs in green light, but not the rest of his body which would remain illuminated in generic white light. You can't get that right now. If you walk up to a pool of glowing green liquid, you are ALL green, even if you just poke your head into the light.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

BaBs never said it was impossible. At one point, he did suggest that the amount of work involved - both in terms of changing the game and the tools the devs use to add content to the game - would have been so high that it would more likely happen in a sequel of the game rather than the current game, but that was before the NCSoft buyout and the radical increase in development resources made available to the CoX team, and (to be honest) before BaB had sufficient information to judge the amount of code work involved (as I said back then and even BaB says then and now: BaB is an animator: his views on animation and visual resources is generally authoritative, his views on general infrastructure and systems are not).

The issue was always the workload issue, though, and not whether the game systems themselves were too primative or it was too difficult to figure out. The bottom line, though, is that essentially anything said by anyone regarding what is and is not feasible for CoX prior to November 2007 should be presumed to be no longer valid.

Its worth noting that as late as September 2007 BaB was saying power customization was too much work to be reasonable; by April 2008 he was already working on power customization. The NCSoft buyout basically changed everything.


I am still wondering, though:

who would have told you that the CoX engine is "harder to work with" within the context of power customization. It doesn't sound like something a red name would say, especially since as I mentioned the current power customization features didn't require any significant changes to the graphics engine (as far as I'm aware of, they didn't really require *any* changes beyond support for a set of tinting parameters). If a dev said that in a context I didn't catch (at a con, say) I'd be interested to know who it was, and what specifically they were referring to.

Also, I don't think anyone thinks things like flowing hair are easy.

As far as I'm aware (and I could be wrong), the Champions Online engine isn't actually brand new, but rather based on a (more or less) heavily altered version of the original Cryptic Engine, which is what City of Heroes uses. I'm not sure how much better or worse the Champions engine is (I wasn't impressed, but that's me), but I don't think painting it as some kind of future technology is a safe bet. I've already seen the CoH engine do things we were flat out told wouldn't happen.

Now if we could just see some further optimization and better hardware support...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

and for people skimming over(and before people with low end system get heart attacks), the upgrade is OPTIONAL, its a setting you activate to add the "ultra graphics mode", so the basic requirements for the game will stay the about the same as we have now.