Ask a Dev: Matt Stults (The Television)
By
Aloenia,
Posted on: 2010-07-14 11:02 in Developers' Corner
Well this answers a few things... 
Playstation 3 - XBox 360 - Wii - PSP
Remember kids, crack is whack!
Samuel_Tow: Your avatar is... I think I like it
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Just CoV? |
Originally Posted by The Television
I love my job, and I love CoV
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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bob
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Originally Posted by The Television
b. What programming language is used for character management?
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My god.
There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.
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Is he? He's just a TV |
Originally Posted by DumpleBerry
My god.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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I hate when she posts exactly what I was about to write! |
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Just one:
That does raise the question of how the equipotential eigenstates of the various ranks resolved to intra-archetypal admittance Hamiltonian metrics hyperbolically related under Lorentzian normalization. |
Freedom: Blazing Larb, Fiery Fulcrum, Sardan Reborn, Arctic-Frenzy, Wasabi Sam, Mr Smashtastic.
Funny, I was just reading how high spatial resolution observations of the CO emission at 2.6mm in the protoplanetary nebula M1-92 (Minkowski''s Footprint), obtained with the Plateau de Bure interferometer. The total mass corresponding to the CO measured intensity is estimated to be large, of about 0.1–0.2 solar masses. The cartography is particularly rich and revealing. From the measured position-velocity distribution of brightness, we conclude that a strong dynamical interaction between the AGB and post-AGB winds is present.
50s: Inv/SS PB Emp/Dark Grav/FF DM/Regen TA/A Sonic/Elec MA/Regen Fire/Kin Sonic/Rad Ice/Kin Crab Fire/Cold NW Merc/Dark Emp/Sonic Rad/Psy Emp/Ice WP/DB FA/SM
Overlord of Dream Team and Nightmare Squad
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Meh. The Television is just lucky that pohsyb has chosen to remain silent in this thread. The Television knows that he cannot match up with the sheer awesomeness of the backwards bishop.
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Originally Posted by Casual_Player
Wow.
Dr. Aeon has just been seriously owned. That was the greatest Dev response ever! |
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
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how do we know that Pohsyb didn't knock Tele out and take over Tele's keyboard?
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Originally Posted by Texas Justice
Meh. The Television is just lucky that pohsyb has chosen to remain silent in this thread. The Television knows that he cannot match up with the sheer awesomeness of the backwards bishop.
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Flatfiles...
That. Explains. Everything.
:P
I feel a bit out of my depth here
@Damz Find me on the global channel Union Chat. One of the best "chat channels" ingame!
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Because Justice server hasn't let him out of his box.
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Originally Posted by je_saist
how do we know that Pohsyb didn't knock Tele out and take over Tele's keyboard?
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On Justice
Global @Desi Nova Twitter: @desi_nova Steam: Desi_nova. I don't do Xbox or PS3
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Excuse me while I pick the remnants of my brain off the walls and re-assemble it.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Just one:
That does raise the question of how the equipotential eigenstates of the various ranks resolved to intra-archetypal admittance Hamiltonian metrics hyperbolically related under Lorentzian normalization. |
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You win Captain-Electric's first Annual Scientific Genius Award for Reality Devourers!
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Originally Posted by The Television
Please let me know if the above raises any more questions.
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@Captain-Electric � Detective Marvel � The Sapien Spider � Moravec Man � The Old Norseman
Dark-Eyes � Doctor Serpentine � Stonecaster � Skymaiden � The Blue Jaguar
Guide to Altitis � A Comic for New Players � The Lore Project � Intro to extraterrestrials in CoH
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Thank you for 1) answering my question! and 2) answering it SO well |
Originally Posted by The Television
Technical questions
a. What kind of database does CoH use? (aka, relational, custom, open source like postgres etc, object oriented, flat files, some mix?) Is there a dev in charge of the data access layer of the code and if so, who is it? (I am particularly interested because in the early months of CoH, they did several data mining tasks that took ... exceedingly long times to run, and it made me curious to a degree that still has not much abated) When you joined the team and saw how they managed the data, what was your reaction? These questions are going to require some technical specificity, so please bear with me. Please also understand that I dont really know why data mining tasks used to take so long, but the following is better than accurate/true, so Im going with it. How we used to do it: Before what we now know as Mapservers, CoH used a set of machines called Minkowski Cartographs to store data and model characters interactions with the world. What is a Minkowski Cartograph? The Minkowski Cartographsor MCswere built in the early 1970s by a team of Nobel laureates in Mathematics and Cartography. (omitted more fantastic explanation of the MC for brevity) What happened to the MC devices? Due to the above and many other problems, the CoH team eventually realized that the Minkowski Cartographs were un-maintainable. Sadly, once dropped by the game, these great loomed-machines were inexplicably destroyed by a group of self-proclaimed neo-luddites. The same group of history-deniers has virtually erased all record of the machines by continuously deleting Wikipedia articles written about them. What we use now: Now our mapservers are written in C and use everything from SQL databases to various in-house flat file systems to represent our data. Characters are pretty much created and maintained by SQL queries, but the specifics of the queries are generated by C. |
In honor of you, Television, I am going to watch the entire run of Lost. I never saw any of it, so no spoilers. (It's available on Hulu till Dec 31 so I have that long...) I am up to episode 4 season 2 now...
edit: also wondering if you were recently reading "Against the Day"
best dev response ever.
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How embarrassing that The Television's reading choices would be so transparent. Yes, I was definitely thinking about Pynchon's style of "historiographic metafiction" and "Against the Day" in particular, though you'll notice I ended up leaving out some bits of his style like character development, magical-realism and, well, quality writing. Looking back, I hope it wasn't just the quaternion references that gave it away.|
Originally Posted by Retrogression
edit: also wondering if you were recently reading "Against the Day"
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Good catch, Retrogression.
To everyone else: I apologize for my use of the term "historiographic metafiction" above. It won't happen again.
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/faint
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Originally Posted by The Television
Good catch, Retrogression.
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You should give Retrogression a Custom Forum Title for that. |
Originally Posted by The Television
Good catch, Retrogression.
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Originally Posted by The Television
To everyone else: I apologize for my use of the term "historiographic metafiction" above. It won't happen again.
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[ ProTip: The banner is a link to art refs!! | The Khellection | The HBAS Repository | Brute Guides (4/16/10) | How To Post An Image - A Quick Guide ]
Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:
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i suggest the custom title "Thugg Lyfe" in order to emphasize the connection to Pynchon. |
Originally Posted by Kheldarn
You should give Retrogression a Custom Forum Title for that.
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Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
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I so called this back at launch.|
Originally Posted by The Television
...
These questions are going to require some technical specificity, so please bear with me. Please also understand that I dont really know why data mining tasks used to take so long, but the following is better than accurate/true, so Im going with it. How we used to do it: Before what we now know as Mapservers, CoH used a set of machines called Minkowski Cartographs to store data and model characters interactions with the world. What is a Minkowski Cartograph? The Minkowski Cartographsor MCswere built in the early 1970s by a team of Nobel laureates in Mathematics and Cartography. The teams goal was to build a functional map or road atlas of Minkowski Spacea pseudo-Riemannian manifold identified around 1907. Each MC is a room sized device constructed of thousands of independently sliding looms and millions of strings running between them. The strings are made of several tightly braided filaments composed of a patent blend of Polyolefin and Kevlar, inter-loom segments ranging in length anywhere between 10^-32 mm and 1 mm. Approximately half of the strings run between pernambuco-wood looms. The rest are incorporated into a vast conveyor mechanism that drags against the loom strings, causing them to vibrate at specific resonant frequencies, effectively playing them like millions of the worlds tiniest violins. When played, each string produces a unique four-space wave signature which resonates through its particular loom until it is converted by transducer into an electronic analog signal. Part of this signal is then recorded in a wax disk in much the same way as conventional sound is recorded by the displacement of the spiral groove in a LP record. The other part was filtered and sent through the network for real time exploration of the model by mathematical cartographers. When first created, this was the Network Control Program of the early ARPANET. Outcome of the MC experimentation of the 1970s: Though the MCs proved fairly unsuccessful in providing a functioning map of Minkowski space, the MC experiments resulted in two emergent and unpredicted consequences. First, they were very clearly the inspiration for String Theory. Second, as part of their efforts to map Minkowski space through the MCs, scientists began to uncover and chart what appeared to be various sections of a modern city complete with pedestrians and airship implied by the mathematical definition of Minkowski space as portrayed in the MC. Due to the use of hyperbolic quaternions in Minkowski space, physics as modeled by the MCs was significantly more flexible than what we experience. MC Use by early CoH: Intending to capitalize on the pre-existing city simulations provided by the MCs, City of Heroes purchased and reused the now renamed Mapservers to provide the persistent world of Paragon City. This created a number of problems. First: game engineers and even game administrators on the project required doctorates in math or physics as well as extensive textile industry experience just to maintain the Mapservers, let alone add new features. Second: due to the wear of continuous vibration in four-space, critical strings often broke or became snagged resulting in bugs and Lost Connection to Mapserver messages that were almost impossible to track down. Third: as you note, data collection was extremely time consuming as the entire mapservers had to be shut down and the wax recording disks carefully removed from each loom on every mapserver. What happened to the MC devices? Due to the above and many other problems, the CoH team eventually realized that the Minkowski Cartographs were un-maintainable. Sadly, once dropped by the game, these great loomed-machines were inexplicably destroyed by a group of self-proclaimed neo-luddites. The same group of history-deniers has virtually erased all record of the machines by continuously deleting Wikipedia articles written about them. What we use now: Now our mapservers are written in C and use everything from SQL databases to various in-house flat file systems to represent our data. Characters are pretty much created and maintained by SQL queries, but the specifics of the queries are generated by C. Please let me know if the above raises any more questions. |
Those posts of mine, of course, were mysteriously deleted...
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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They weren't deleted that where extratemporally relocated.|
Originally Posted by Electric-Knight
I so called this back at launch.
Those posts of mine, of course, were mysteriously deleted... |
Try checking on punch cards 1,235,843 to 1,235,891 in or around 1832.
Please come out with COH EXTREME!! very very soon. You know the blood and guts side of coh. When werewolves catch on fire scream and die. Or when a villains arm is blown off or is shriveled up by a finishing electrical blast oorrr when u freeze someone and they die they break in parts lol. ill pay an exttra 5 bucks a month for that Everyone ive asked about it in game LOVES the idea. Some thing to think about guys!!!
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Everyone huh, first I've herd about it. |
Originally Posted by IonMatrix
Please come out with COH EXTREME!! very very soon. You know the blood and guts side of coh. When werewolves catch on fire scream and die. Or when a villains arm is blown off or is shriveled up by a finishing electrical blast oorrr when u freeze someone and they die they break in parts lol. ill pay an exttra 5 bucks a month for that Everyone ive asked about it in game LOVES the idea. Some thing to think about guys!!!
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Personally considering that killing even a super villein is still considered against the law in practically every comic in existence probably means something. And that doing something like that to you're enemies would inevitably mean that they could do the same to you. Even to the point of killing you permanently.
Not to mention that no MMORPG anywhere has anything like that.
Or the fact that a major percentage of this games players are adolescents who probably shouldn't be seeing something like that.
Probably means that that idea is the stupidest thing I have ever herd.
I'm sorry but the very idea of something like that disgusts me to no end. And I'd drop this game in an instance if even the option of something like that were created.
Ohohohoo, that slaps me on the knee.
Necrobond - 50 BS/Inv Scrapper made in I1
Rickar - 50 Bots/FF Mastermind
Anti-Muon - 42 Warshade
Ivory Sicarius - 45 Crab Spider
Aber ja, nat�rlich Hans nass ist, er steht unter einem Wasserfall.