That would be very cool! They are destroyable targets in Mayhem Missions, why not throw-able too? Make sense to me and it honors classic comicbook tradition!
And this brings up the age-old problem of "what do you throw when there are no throwable objects, otherwise known as the Museum level in Half-Life 2. Games where objects can be thrown are burdened with the need to design not just levels, but levels with objects to thrown, which increases overhead, slows things down and inevitably produces instances where said powers plain don't work.
Darksiders, at the latest, allowed you to throw cars and trucks and, sure enough, the city was littered with them. For a while. As soon as you walked into the first dungeon, you quickly ran out of things to throw, simply because there WERE no things to even grab. And it just got worse and worse from there. Granted, by the point you ran out of things to throw, your weapons and skills were much more powerful than environment objects anyway, but the point remains - such a skill relies on the existence of objects someone needs to manually put into the game.
And that's a problem.
Quote:
|
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.
|
Picking up unlikely improvised weapons is a staple of superheroics that I want this game to eventually be able to deliver.
Winner of Players' Choice Best Villainous Arc 2010: Fear and Loathing on Striga; ID #350522
The Other Superhero MMO managed it.
And you know what?
In my opinion it sucked.
Yes, I said it. Our powersets work fine as they are (with a few bugs and outliers, granted)
Something for a theoretical CoH2? Sure.
But putting it in this game? As is? That'd be like taking away rooting; horrible.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
 |
As much as I'd like to have it, I suspect that letting us pick up objects would take a ton of development work. They've said we can't have things like two-person dancing emotes because there's no way to really control two different characters' positions in relation to each other, and I expect throwing things would fall into the same situation.
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
Quote:
Not to say that it isn't a problem, but in open maps where there are already parked cars, why not just add a couple more cars that are tossable, maybe an extra dumpster or two.
|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
And this brings up the age-old problem of "what do you throw when there are no throwable objects, otherwise known as the Museum level in Half-Life 2. Games where objects can be thrown are burdened with the need to design not just levels, but levels with objects to thrown, which increases overhead, slows things down and inevitably produces instances where said powers plain don't work.
Darksiders, at the latest, allowed you to throw cars and trucks and, sure enough, the city was littered with them. For a while. As soon as you walked into the first dungeon, you quickly ran out of things to throw, simply because there WERE no things to even grab. And it just got worse and worse from there. Granted, by the point you ran out of things to throw, your weapons and skills were much more powerful than environment objects anyway, but the point remains - such a skill relies on the existence of objects someone needs to manually put into the game. And that's a problem. |
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
I wish there was a way to do a demo of what it would look like in this game. Using that other game as an example is really not very comparable.
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
Quote:
this is pretty much it. There is a large technical limitation that pretty much prevents this feature from ever being included in City of Heroes, that limitation being performance. To frame this limiation one needs to understand exactly how City of Heroes works in terms of animations.|
Originally Posted by Kelenar
As much as I'd like to have it, I suspect that letting us pick up objects would take a ton of development work. They've said we can't have things like two-person dancing emotes because there's no way to really control two different characters' positions in relation to each other, and I expect throwing things would fall into the same situation.
|
City of Heroes is essentially a sprite based game, similar to something you would find on the Super Nintendo or Playstation 1. All character animations ranging from weapon attacks to flying capes are essentially hard-coded into the display playback system. At some point somebody has to individually draw out each frame of any given animation. Think of it like a Stop-Motion Movie if that helps.
Another comparison that might help frame how the game works is Don Bluth's old Dragon Lair's video game. Pressing a button at the right time triggers a different sequence of animated events to occur. This is why players can kite some enemies by leaping past the enemy, triggering the attack, and then have the attack animation play out while the player is in mid-leap, or at the end of the leap.
City of Heroes is largely able to retain it's performance profiles on older computers due to these canned animations. Implementing a real-time skeletal-frame based system that changes animations on context, is performance expensive, as evidenced by the system requirement differences between different versions of Cryptic's in-house engine.
What this means is that in order for a player to pick up a car, or any other object, in the City of Heroes game, is that somebody has to individually animate each frame. At some point some physical person is going to have to sit in a chair and animate each individual frame for each skeletal type (3 of them: Male, Female, Huge) performing the act of reaching down, grasping an object, picking the object up, shifting the weight of that object, and then launching that object...
Even if one completely forgoes any physical properties of that object... say like throwing a car down the street with the hood half-buried in the ground because a really short avatar threw the car, that's still a large amount of work that probably would be better spent on say... creating new power-sets.
Creating an object throwing animation for players would actually require just as much animation work, if not more animation work, than the whip power-set. There is a reason that the gravity power-set cheats on the propel power, creating an object throwing point out and away from the player giving the developers plenty of space in which to put large objects for throwing. Somebody else brought up Half-Life 2, which stands as another good example of developers cheating to get around having to make exact animations for grasping and manipulating items.
Now, if somebody wants to claim that the game should have car throwing because the Cryptic developed engine can do it, and because a previous lead designer said it would be done... well... those are both really weak excuses.
As already pointed out, the implementation of the Cryptic developed Engine that enabled object throwing did a lousy job of it, in addition to requiring far more system resources. It also is not unknown for the development staff to say that something could be done before actually thinking it through. Case in recent point being the Super Speed on top of water. It was a good idea, right up until the developers actually tried to figure out how the engine could support it... and realized that in order to support player travel to begin with, the engine was already making several hard-coded assumptions about the player and the state of the player, that made Super Speed on top of water functionally impossible on the current revision of the engine.
* * *
Now, one of the big questions is whether or not a new processing engine could resolve some of these issues.
Well, yes. An updated processing engine that utilizes more resources could indeed perform the raw calculations to make some of these wishes a reality. A skeletal-frame system with rag-doll physics, such as the current Unreal Engine, Valve Source, or IDTech5, would probably be able to handle the real-time skeletal changing and animation triggers to support players interacting with in-game objects in a dynamic manner. There's a very good reason none of the latest games on these engines do that yet: it's still bloody performance expensive.
Quote:
Because throwing some poor schmucks car at a villain is so very Heroic...|
Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
Not to say that it isn't a problem, but in open maps where there are already parked cars, why not just add a couple more cars that are tossable, maybe an extra dumpster or two.
|
Just sayin' >_>
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Because throwing some poor schmucks car at a villain is so very Heroic...
Just sayin' >_> |
I see your point.
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
Quote:
Actually, Saist has a point, because this is pretty much what BABs has told us. It's not "sprite-based" in that a sprite is a 2D shape, but it employs a system very much reminiscent of a sprite-based game like Knights of the Round or Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or pretty much every other old arcade game. An animator does not need to animate EVERY single frame, but an animator must very much sit down and define each KEY frame in an animation by hand. In BABs own words, City of Heroes has no capacity for animation blending. At all.|
Originally Posted by Synical
Words alone cannot express the stupidity in your post je_saist...
|
Each of our animations is standalone, and it is up to the animator to ensure that the previous animation ends in such a stance that the next animation won't have to "snap" to a new stance to begin, and that said animation would end in such a stance that the next one can flow out of it. This is what necessitates that we have default stances in the first place - all of our combat animations flow out of a particular combat stance and then end in a particular combat stance, with animations for swapping between them. Everything is done by hand, per character, per power, per animation sequence. Pretty much like it would be for a sprite-based game.
Quote:
|
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.
|
Quote:
Open maps, yes. But would the power suddenly cease functioning when you walked indoors? That's the problem - you can't grab objects "from the environment," you can only grab objects from a specific list of throwable objects that have to be placed in the map by hand. In EVERY map. And even then you only get to throw the objects once, because I highly doubt the game can track a thrown object so you can pick it up again later.|
Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
Not to say that it isn't a problem, but in open maps where there are already parked cars, why not just add a couple more cars that are tossable, maybe an extra dumpster or two.
|
Almost all powers in this game are designed to work "by default," in that even situational powers don't need the developers to specifically programme situations where they can be used. You don't have specific circles on the ground in which you can place a Time Bomb, you don't have only specific maps where you can fly (thank you WoW!), you don't need to find ammo crates to shoot your gun. You click on the power and it activates regardless of where you are or what you're fighting against.
The only exception to this is flight, in that certain powers require you to be on the ground and certain others that your enemy be on the ground. And you can see how often the developers resort to pure aerial combat, thanks to this precise problem. And even then, they have to provide jet packs, because... What if you didn't take a travel power? And these days, not everyone does.
I agree with the notion that the game should have some way to allow us to chuck cars, crates and lamp posts at our enemies. I very much disagree that taking those from the environment is the right solution. I have gone on the record as suggesting that Super Strength's Hurl ditch its insultingly small chunk of concrete and replace it with a subset of Propel's thrown objects, namely the larger ones - forklift, car, air compressor, pool table, statue, etc.
Animation is a problem, but the animation for pulling a boulder out of the ground exists, and theoretically, replacing the boulder with anything of a similar or larger size would make sense. Would it be awkward to pull out and toss a junk car in the middle of a high-tech lab? Oh, sure! Isn't it odd that you can pull an asphalt pavement slab out of a thin metal catwalk, though? Or that you can pull that out of the top of a metal shipping container? Or that you can pull that out of the glass roof of Wentworth's Fine Consignments?
I agree that the inability to throw cars is a problem. I agree that a solution probably exists. I disagree that this is it.
Quote:
|
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.
|
Okay maybe not the answer you may be looking for, but just as grav trollers can manifest pool tables, fork lifts etc. and hurl them, why not let the SS tanks or brutes hurl the same, instead of the chunk of reappearing floor. At least it would fit thematically.
Oops just seen your post above Sam.
so I agree with you there. sign me up for this
The problem's nothing to do with performance (saist, you really outdid yourself there...) or the lack of animation blending.
How is the animation for bending down and picking up an object different from a generic attack animation? Both require starting and ending in a neutral pose in order to flow onto the next action.
The major problem with picking up and throwing things in CoX is tracking these objects across the network. Propel and Hurl are just animated FX in the same way a fireball is, and do not synch. This is why I can throw a forklift but you see a coffin or gargoyle with Propel.
Picking up a car thats parked in Kings Row is quite different - the base object has to dissappear, and synch this state to all other players, and then respawn at some point. If two of you try to pick up the same car, one of you has to get there first.
This is of course possible in an MMO, CO proves that, but it wouldn't surprise me if retro-fitting this to CoX would be a lot of work if the network code wasn't designed to do this. As far as I can tell, the network code only synchs characters and static objects like glowies and mayhem destructables.
All of this is my idle speculation, of course, but I've been making games professionally for over ten year, so at least its an educated guess.
And speaking of opinions, throwing cars at supervillains utterly rocks! I'd love to do it in this game one day.
Ok a couple of points here. First, when I kick up leaves or garbage with a storm power, does everyone see those objects? If so, then they are being synced to everyone. Secondly, why can't the power be triggered by clicking the object, activating the "launch car" power or "launch truck" power that is hard-coded like energy blast that everyone sees as a specific a specific animation aimed at a specific target? At the end of the attack, an object is spawned like destroying a parked car in a mayhem mission. The power becomes several powers based on the object selected, but we see it as just pick up and throw stuff. I don't presume to know anything mors about coding than what I have heard here on the boards in the past, so if I am missing something, I really want to know.
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
Quote:
I would guess the answer is actually no. We will all see that you are kicking up leaves but everyone will see a different pattern as it's generated on the individual machines. Same as Propel does. Everyone sees you are using propel but what they see you propelling is different.
|
Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
Ok a couple of points here. First, when I kick up leaves or garbage with a storm power, does everyone see those objects? If so, then they are being synced to everyone.
|
Quote:
Still just guessing, but I think that "activate Tornado at point X" is synched across the network. All the visual effects of this, the particles and any physics simulation debris and so on are purely local.|
Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
Ok a couple of points here. First, when I kick up leaves or garbage with a storm power, does everyone see those objects? If so, then they are being synced to everyone. Secondly, why can't the power be triggered by clicking the object, activating the "launch car" power or "launch truck" power that is hard-coded like energy blast that everyone sees as a specific a specific animation aimed at a specific target? At the end of the attack, an object is spawned like destroying a parked car in a mayhem mission. The power becomes several powers based on the object selected, but we see it as just pick up and throw stuff. I don't presume to know anything mors about coding than what I have heard here on the boards in the past, so if I am missing something, I really want to know.
|
In other words, individual leaves or pieces of debris are not synched.
The way you describe the thrown car being synched sounds about right. It would be enough to send a few messages like "StrongDude lifts car X", "StrongDude throws car X", "Car X hits Hellion #34" and then perform the animations and visual FX locally, just like existing powers do. This is pretty much standard practice for any network game code to minimise the amount of traffic.
The question is if the existing CoX code supports this or not, and how much needs to be changed to accomodate this. Those questions are very specific to the individual system, so I've no idea.
Quote:
What you describe might work, but it begs the question of why you need to click on a car to do so. You don't need to click on a paved road to Hurl a paved road chunk. You can rip that out of soil, water, ice, metal, glass and suspended power cables. You can rip a piece of paved road out of the top of a flagpole. So why not just activate the power which tosses a car without needing that specific car to be nearby? That way the game doesn't have to sync up what kind of car you throw between different players, allowing for diversity.|
Originally Posted by Anti_Proton
Ok a couple of points here. First, when I kick up leaves or garbage with a storm power, does everyone see those objects? If so, then they are being synced to everyone. Secondly, why can't the power be triggered by clicking the object, activating the "launch car" power or "launch truck" power that is hard-coded like energy blast that everyone sees as a specific a specific animation aimed at a specific target? At the end of the attack, an object is spawned like destroying a parked car in a mayhem mission. The power becomes several powers based on the object selected, but we see it as just pick up and throw stuff. I don't presume to know anything mors about coding than what I have heard here on the boards in the past, so if I am missing something, I really want to know.
|
Let me explain.
Babs once explained that power effects are hard-coded into the powers themselves. That was before power customization, but even power customization doesn't let you alternate effects without a visit to the tailor. What you are describing will let you hurl one type of car and one type of car only, because the hurled car, just like the hurled boulder, is an effect. By making Hurl just cycle through random objects, you get variety, and you no longer need to sync this over the net. You could throw a Camaro while the guy next to you sees you chuck a Capri, while the guy across the street sees you toss a Sideloader.
Again, I understand the desire to use environment objects as weapons. I just don't see the need for those objects to actually come from the environment, as long as they look like they did.
Quote:
|
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.
|
The thing with using the randomness of propel with hurl is the randon things that need to be thrown, need to have different animations. This works in propel because you never touch the objects and, like you mentioned in hurl, no matter where you are, you are still throwing the same chunk of concrete. This leaves you in the same animation quagmire. My idea is similar to the "change clips" power, but the change of animation and effects aren't triggered by clicking the power (as seen in the original version of the power), but by clicking a specific object. Just like everyone sees the toxic bullets, everyone sees the Buick. As the Devs add more objects, they would be adding more options to the overall power.
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
This shiny green car begs to be smashed in the face of the nearest Freakshow!
If it ever happens, I had some ideas as to how to make it something both heroes and villains can do. It has been suggested that weaponizing objects would be something like a pool power, where more slots allow you to lift and throw larger objects with more accuracy. I like this idea, but it seems we are becoming pool-saturated. To clear up the targeting clutter, I suggest that these objects will only show a reticle when in close melee range. Certain object (cars, trucks) also have a good chance to explode with secondary fire damage added, but these object would have a longer interruptible animation to compensate.
Looking at the picture above, I like the idea of not having the object become transparent when lifted, especially since we have very good camera perspectives. As long as the target reticle is visible from every angle, the object could remain solid. On the subject of vehicles, I think parked vehicles are fair game to both sides, but vehicles in motion would require heroes to allow NPCs to exit them before they could be used, where as villains could just toss them without regard. A small bonus to heroes could be given to heroes that roll chance to catch a thrown vehicle, saving the NPCs inside.
This idea has been tossed around (pun intended) for years and I know it will never happen in the open world, but new instanced-mission maps (tip missions particularly) could be created as a start and weaponizable objects could be added to current area maps without having to radically change the environments. I still hold out hope that someday this will see the light-of-day, but until then, I will keep looking at all those shiny cars begging to be thrown.
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."