Power Pool: Size manipulation

Power Overview

Size manipulation
Tier 1: Body Expansion [Toggle]
Tier 2: Body Reduction [Toggle]
Tier:3: Reduction Wave [Cone AoE]
Tier 4: Expansion Wave [Cone AoE]

• Body expansion when activated will enlarge the user by a certain scale, their greater height and mass increases the power of their attacks, with relatively increased movement and jumping height-speeds. However their enlarged size makes them slower and easier to hit, as well as being more of a threat to others.

• Body reduction causes the opposite and shrinks the user by a certain scale. Their smaller size reduces the power of their attacks as well as their movement. But their small size makes it harder for their opponents to hit them, as well as making them harder to spot.

• Shrink radiation is a Cone AoE with a wide angle and short range. ANYTHING hit is affected with similar effects to Body Reduction, this effects characters and critters. Shrink radiation has a duration that lasts for a short time but can be nullified by Growth radiation or reversed one level with Body Expansion.

• Growth radiation acts similar to Shrink radiation except that it causes all targets hit to be affected by Body Expansion instead.

• Body Expansion buffs the character with
  +Damage, +Range, +Resistance, -Knockback, +Run and +Jump
  
  However the character is debuffed by
  -ToHit, -Defence, -Stealth, +Threat and -Recharge

• Body Reduction buffs the character with
  +Defence, +Stealth, +ToHit, +Recharge and +Recovery
  
  While it debuffs the character with
  -Damage, -Range, -Resistance, -Knockback, -Run and -Jump

• The Wave powers are AoE cones with a short range but possess a very wide angle of effect, 90-140 degrees possibly. As they are cone AoEs the users must be in close range of the main target before they can fire it off, ANY other person in range of the AoE will be affected by the size-changing effect, even critters.

• Body Expansion/Reduction are toggles and thus don't have a proper accuracy, however the Expansion/Reduction Wave powers do have an accuracy rate against critters and affected by the con system. Team-mates are NOT affected by accuracy and will have the same success rate as normal buffs. (100%)

• Critters affected by sizechanging may have their con level altered to match the increased or decreased difficulty of spawns. Enlarged critters receive most of the buff effects of the power, while reduced critters recieve most of the debuff effects. This effectively makes enlarged critters much more powerful and reduced critters much weaker. Depending on the rank and con level of the critter, the duration may be longer or shorter.

• The amount a character grows or shrinks is relative to their normal size. If a 4ft character grows, they won't be as big as if a 6ft or 8ft character uses it. This effectively means that if an entire team expands or reduces, they should end up the same relative sizes as before, except their environment would be smaller in perspective. Same applies to reduced characters, where smaller characters end up smaller while larger ones won't be as small.

Even though this was a result of unauthorised hacking, the fact a tech-savvy used was able to make a really big character at least shows that having oversized characters is possible.

As for the engine not being able to create a powerset over it, I'll just have to sit and wait for a change there. It's like what I said before, today's explitic is tomorrow's possibility.

By that logic, which isn't much of logic, Giant Monster's are not possible either.

Also by the same logic, Granite Armor and Dwarf forms wouldn't be possible either.

There's a big difference between setting a static costume form or setting a basic size for a creature, and being able to scale that skeletal base in the engine.

While there's no question that a growth powerset could work, the question is how computationally expensive the procedure would be. Could it fit within the same animation and processing envelopes as existing powers? Could the engine modifications to the animation systems and power systems still fit within the same performance envelopes?

The short version is: probably not

So ideas like this, as cool as they might sound, aren't going to be a tomorrows possibility without changing the underlying processing engine. They are going to remain an explicit no.

Gah! I keep forgetting how easy it is to completely overcome fundamental problems with the game engine with simple insistence that it will happen eventually.

The removal of redraw is actually something that has been requested for a long time, so you can't just claim it "wasn't in epic demand". The removal of redraw in combat and the ability to recolor powers has been around for almost the entire duration of the game. In fact, redraw has been altered at least twice over the lifetime of the game to account for this very fact. Power colorization and customization follow the same suit: people have been asking for it for a long time and it spent a long time in development.

Assuming that just because you want a power pool that allows you to alter the size of a character upon demand (which is the problem, that character was made by overcoming the size limitations for a costume slot rather than having the size be a variable attribute) and then simultaneously assuming that it will eventually happen even though it's a niche powerset, would require Castle to do all kinds of power tweaking on the first two, and be completely impossible for the second two (because you can't simply change the level, con, and reward of a target based on an arbitrary assignment from a power, even if it would be even close to balanced), completely ignoring the fact that it would require a great deal of resource expenditure for a rather small payoff.

It's not going to happen because the benefit of adding it to the game is too small to account for the costs of implementing it. I'm reasonably sure that it would be possible for BABs and pohsyb to go through all of the code to make it so that height had a variable scalar attached to it, but it's not going to happen unless a lot of stuff changes simply because it would require an amount of coding on par with power colorization, possibly more (i.e. changing fundamental engine attributes to be changed to account for specific new variables).

Haha. Thats amazing, hacking, but amazing.
I support this idea, granted it will take quite a time to wait for the system to support this.
So many things were said to be impossible but later accomplished.
Give it time and maybe some day we can see it accomplished.

We already know giant-sized entities can exist. Giant Monsters have been in the game since launch. However, they exist in very specific situations (either outdoors or in very large indoor areas), have a very small selection of powers, and still have issues (due to oddities with their hitboxes, they can have problems with flying enemies). The number of issues to deal with before giant-sized players can exist is vast.

In order for power customization to be possible, it took over a year of work, and that affected every powerset for every AT in the game. To get an engine change that would allow for drastic size changes, it would likely take a similar amount of work, and that would only apply for one (limited in scope) powerset. You can try wishing away that work all you want, but it still exists, and it's still not cost-effective.

Actually, he's said that he can't make it work.

If you're going to dismiss everything short of a direct answer from a dev, don't bother posting a thread. PM them directly. Any one of them will be able to answer, either with a direct response or a direction to who can better respond.

We're going to tell exactly what we've been told before: it doesn't work. There are too many problems with the idea to implement. If you're not going to believe us, then you're wasting both our time and yours by making us repeat this song and dance every time.

Hack whatever that is really cool and who ever did it must be a so smart I wonder how long it took ncsoft to ban the account.

There's a difference between setting the scale of an entity and changing the scale of an entity...much less doing that via the powers system.

I can make a 400 foot tall fire imp in about 10 seconds by changing a couple of values in a script. But I can't do that via a power, I can't make the imp actually grow to be 400 foot, there's nothing to prevent me from doing that in an office map or while standing under an overpass, and there's nothing to fix the dozens of different problems that come from having a giant anything in the game...much less a giant something that's player controlled.

Ah I see now!

I see that Size manipulation is ready for the trashcan, better to try and fail than not at all I suppose.

Thank you for your feedback everybody

Some folks surely would find its a useless powerset if it doesnt allow you the damage buffing because the room is too small to grow...
Also: Why can only people that have size power be bigger than 8 foot and smaller than 4? Why does size make a difference on them, while otherwise size and body mass of a character never effects anything? What about shrunken ones and PvP? Will they be much harder to see? Will they be able to fit trough openings that normal-sized chars dont? Will they be stuck at invisible walls all the time instead?

I can very much see that. The game and the world simply weren't built to check how big a character is.

You heard it first here, folks: BABs is working on a 400 ft Fire Imp as the next Giant Monster!

You know... one of these days, we're gonna say something silly like this, and then Brawler's gonna go ahead and do it, just to spite us... >.>

I call dibs on filming it! I swear, it would totally be worth it to see this Godzilla-sized fire imp go stomping through Atlas Park.

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We can even have some PPD fighting it

Does this mean we can raid it's nest full of baby Fire Imps?

Disregarding clipping issues, is it possible to take a snapshot of a characters costume, then play a costume change-esque animation, swapping the character model out for a larger version of itself that's wearing the same costume?

Which would be incredibly awesome in Atlas Plaza on a Saturday afternoon.

I used to fiddle with my back feet music for a black onyx. My entire room absorbed every echo. The music was . . . thud like. The music was . . . thud like. I usually played such things as rough-neck and thug. Opaque melodies that would bug most people. Music from the other side of the fence.

... you mean besides being the choice tool for killing Godzilla?

Problems like what? Accidentally activating it in the elevator. Look it's tuna man. :P
Make a great shield. Just block up the hallway with your corpse. Run out and eat hamadon.
Still you could mock up something a little simpler if it weren't for the time limit on switching costumes.

Now, from the way you phrase your post, you are indicating some mean spirited intent on the part of the devs. Another take is that you are indicating some kind of conspiracy. I'm afraid reality is a bit separated to those points of view.

Why talk about power sets or gauge the interest in game options if there's no actual intent to follow through? Well, lets look at HeroCon and the suggestion to allow Super-Speeders to run onto of the water level. Posi said something to the effect of "Lets Do It" after a quick vote during HeroCon. When the animators and coders actually sat down and thought about that example, it was realized that the idea wasn't actually that feasible on the current engine revisions with the current performance profiles. If you check out BaB's post history, he goes over just some of the technical hurdles.

The other thing that you have to keep in mind is that the polls and surveys that go out... Do Not Guarantee The Results. Hard to believe, but it's true. The reason why the results are not guaranteed is that sometimes stuff just doesn't work out. Sometimes an idea that looks great on paper winds up being a complete hash once coded into the game. Case in point, that idiotic massive fear on Burn. Looked great on paper to be used as a power to enforce the teaming aspect of the game. Wound up being one of the worst powers, ever, once the changes were actually implemented.

Now, stuff like growth has been demonstrated in Champions Online, and much like the water zone, players say, "Cryptic Made it work, why can't Paragon Studios make it work?" Well point of fact, Cryptic hasn't made it work. A couple of CO players who also play CoH have commented that Lemuria is one of the biggest ... um... screwups... ever to come out of a professional design team. The growth system as well generated a string of odd bugs, as evidenced by this particular post on a CO Wiki.

The other objective lesson is to examine the min system requirements, the performance envelope that I like to keep harping on about. CO's processor and graphics minimum envelope requires three times the computational power of the City of Heroes engine, circa launch of City of Villains. One of the big deals with our upcoming Going Rogue expansion is that the underlying processing engine isn't being changed, so, if you've got an older computer, or your looking at a Google ChromeOS netbook, chances are you'll still be able to play City of Heroes and the Going Rogue expansion.

With a heftier engine requirements, and a larger performance envelope to work with, Cryptic still couldn't get some of those design ideas correct. So, it's not a matter of a development team being tacky. Sometimes ideas are given before any real work is done to see whether or not that idea is actually feasible.

Someone did - someone said "You heard it here first, folks - a giant Jello salad in the game next issue! And thus was Hami born.