Ragdoll Physics Still Broken

All I see you saying is based on assumptions forming your supposition on what "might, could, maybe" be the problem within a problem caused by a problem when something is changed. As a customer, I do not want to hear that. I want to hear how the company I pay money to for their product will resolve this problem and when. I do not want excuses. I can get those from my kids!

UberGuy mentioned: I remember reading this somewhere. What you called a "patch" is not correct. An upgrade to a specific item is not a patch. A patch is repair. An upgrade means an improvement. Do not confuse the two.

Conversely, I am a paying customer. I pay for services that I expect to work efficiently to my satisfaction. I expect a quality product for my money; however, I do make allowances for some issues that can crop up from time to time. What I do not put up with is something that diminishes my satisfaction and enjoyment. The ragdoll affect does exactly that.
I want it fix in an expeditious manner.

As a paying customer, I have the right to demand quality, maintaining that quality, and an expedient resolution to problems exactly like this one. I do not enjoy watching enemies blown into walls, grounds, or whatever else in the immediate environment from knockback or watching them turn into boneless creatures after defeating them. Making up excuses for why they have not address this problem does not satisfy me. They are excuses. I want a solution and I want it as soon as reasonably possible. Just like the others who expressed the same sentiment. Hopefully, that too much to ask.

Ditto

That doesn't surprise me, since I think Nvidia is the only place they could get new versions of it. It seems weird though that they got new versions but they still seemingly rely on the old dedicated Ageia hardware. (Not only is the option greyed out for me, the label still says "(AGEIA) PhysX...".)

Enemies have been sticking in walls and floors and plants(or desks or whatever object) since the game started. I also believe they have been contorted into odd positions for the same amount of time.

This complaint is about then having trouble picking themselves up out of the floor.


I think you believe that the above are not intrinsically related, but they are.
At the very least, then staying down for a little longer(and contorted while doing so) isn't the only issue, nor the worst. They still get stuck in the environment and sometimes impossible to attack.

You're right. It was an upgrade to PhysX that did this. It provided us with better physics for things like knockback/down, but we received the annoying side-effect that position and height tracking in relation to ground level was broken such that they don't register as being on the ground(and not flying) or they register as being "in the ground" and thus stuck either way.

You are mistaken. This complaint is about a new, significantly more severe version of the issue. Foes get stuck in ragdoll on flat surfaces. Even when they do not get stuck, they contort in ways that are radically severe. This never happened to any appreciable degree until very recently. Yes, critters got occasionally stuck on railings, corners and other detailed geometries, and sometimes got propelled through walls and the like. This is not that problem. This is new. This changed in I21.

If I remember correctly, either that setting is a holdout from the old Ageia days(thus nonfunctional) or it requires a second Nvidia card to be designated as a dedicated PPU(physics processing unit, which Nvidia allows with even two dissimilar cards).

Thus, their tracking("am I on the ground or not? idk") was broken so that the ground now, all too often, has the same issue as the walls.


The most obvious explanation for the bug is the character tracking and collision detection functions now failing even more than they once did.

It's like the thugs Bruiser who would queue up a melee attack, run in, and stop just at maximum range without executing the attack. He just didn't know he was "within range" or actually stopped short.

The same seems to be happening with the collision detection checking "has NPCXXXXXXXX contacted the floor?" and receiving "error" or "no".

I'm one of them too. I want a solution.

I'm just making excuses because....
A) They aren't talking for whatever reason, and still haven't solved it
B) I've accepted some bugs about this game(so long as it performs well enough and is fun) because I know that the only way to solve them easily, once and for all, is to just start over with a new game.


I'm sorry.
I don't want to dash hopes of a solution. I just think we would be better served trying to think of "why is it broken" and thus "how it can be fixed" or accepting it and hoping and begging for City of Heroes 2.

What good do complaints about an issue they haven't figured out do when you could be offering "outside the box" ideas to solve it?
You could spark their imagination, resulting in them actually figuring it out and solving it a lot sooner than "are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there yet?..." to which the only response could be "we'll get there when we get there!!!".

I am not sure that really explains it, at least not fully. When foes die, the game knows they are on the ground. They usually land or stop sliding at the spots we'd more or less expect. But their limbs and torsos continue to twirl and bend in ways that are new. Both things changed in I21.

Regardless, what actually broke specifically isn't particularly relevant. We players are not likely to answer that question with any authority. What we know is that it broke recently, coincident with an upgrade to the PhysX engine. That matters because it deflates the argument that this is something that's going to take unraveling years of code to fix. This broke in this particular, new way quite recently. That doesn't mean its easy to fix - we can't know that. But it does mean the reason its hard to fix is not that they have to unravel ancient code going back to I6 or something. They broke this last issue.

Please do not waste everyone's time lurking in the tech issues forum trying to convince everyone that the right way to get bugs fixed is to campaign for a CoH2 that doesn't have them. There are other forums for discussing that tired topic.

1) Of course it doesn't fully explain it. I'm talking in general simple terms for something I can't quite articulate fully(especially clearly) and don't know the exact workings of.
If I did know that much then I could offer them a piece of code to solve it.

2) Actually, that supports the fact that it would take too much effort to fix.
If all they did was "upgrade PhysX"(probably correct) then the only way to fix it is to either revert the upgrade(if they can), and accept all the downsides to that, or go through it and recode how it works specifically for their own game.




And it doesn't really matter.
I am just trying to get you people thinking about "what is this actually doing?", "what is a possible direction to look for a solution" and to post your ideas.

You can easily send a bug report in game reporting it, but you went to the forums. Did you just want to say "FIX IT!!" even louder, or did you want to offer up ideas or spark a discussion that could result in ideas?

I'm not campaigning for it. I'm just stating the fact that this game is like swiss cheese with all the longstanding bugs.

Just look at the Investigator Whitworth gender-bender thread. That is definitely an easy quick fix(certainly compared to a lot of other things) and yet it still stands since GR beta.


I HAVE played games that have much fewer bugs and perform much better. I have played offline 3D games that perform MUCH better with barely any noticeable bugs. The ones I am thinking of are all as old or older than City of Heroes, and made with equal to or lesser budgets.
The ones I can think of with similar issues to City of Heroes are poorly made money-grab games, like Champions Online with Cryptic's "we can make a game in one year" claim.

This game performs well enough and is fun, but it's a mess too. That's a fact.

Dude, this is the technical issues forum. The devs do read this. Past track record has shown that sometimes they learn about things here that they never saw because of how the QA team handled the bug reports. While it's no guarantee anything posted here will be fixed sooner or ever, that teaches people that there is value in posting here.

Why do you care?

1) If this is such a big issue then there is a problem.
A) A lot of people report it and customer support sweeps it under the rug or it gets lost or whatever that signals a problem with customer support.
B) They know about it and don't have an idea that will fix it.
C) Nobody is reporting it.

You have already solved A and C, but B is the problem now. You need to come up with an idea.


2) I am coming up with ideas for causes and solutions, though my solutions(because of lesser direct knowledge than the developers) are extreme, based on the fact that games that are made better from the start tend to stay better and poorly made games tend to stay poorly made.

They can use my ideas for the cause of this to come up with a simpler solution, but it is unlikely given that this is exactly a "worsening of a longstanding issue". "They used to only get stuck in walls, but now they get stuck in their own shadow."


Something tells me this is a "progressive disease" that started from a small "tumor" in the original code.

You missed
D) They have seen all those reports, logged an issue to get it resolved but marketing have flagged up issues E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O.... which are all much higher priority as they generate a better financial return for the business.

Possibly but, performance is the most important thing when it comes to games(along with usability but usability requires good performance).

They can't add their cash shop purchases and expect them to go over well with bugs putting people off of them.

To you maybe - to others its appearance, to others still its gameplot, to others still its something else.

To the businessmen that allocate the development resourses its whatever generates the best financial return - that will be a balance of what everyone wants.

True, but I find it hard to believe that the developers would let it go unsolved with a solution present.

After all, there is the old argument that not every developer works on everything. There are artists and coders and even more divisions than that.

Chances are there would be somebody with the ability free to solve this, at least for enough time if they already have an answer, rather than all be devoted to adding another store purchase.

I had almost forgotten about how easy it now is to defeat some opponents who become hung up on obstacles or even stuck in the floor due to the currently broken (and play impacting) ragdoll physics. This bug is long overdue to be fixed by the Devs.

Again, I could not agree more. As paying costumers for a service we have the right to demand quality for what we pay for. Broken ragdoll physics that adversely impact game play is not quaility.

A response on this issue from a Dev would be much appreciated.

I still see a lot of bad ragdoll physics as of today.

I've had enemies flopping in air, after going over a ledge, like they're in a geyser or on a yo-yo, even when there is no object/scenery close enough to make them do that.
They still take a long time to get up, though less than they did before.

So yes, it may be "better", but the problem is still there.

One of the other odd bugs with the ragdoll animations is the "invisible bungee jump" -- if you defeat a mob, and they hang up on a railing or other edge-of-a-drop location, they will sometimes drop twenty or so feet, then spring back up into the air, and repeat this several times with their arms and legs flailing about. I keep wishing I had demorecord on when I've encountered it; it's quite funny to watch.