appearance customization slot selection graphical anomaly
By
T_Immortalus,
Posted on: 2012-03-09 13:38 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
If I had to guess, it looks like City of Heroes takes a snapshot of your character(maybe NPCs as well), as if they were in the default center of a zone, when it loads up any picture of that character.
This would explain why there is so much latency/stuttering when the contact lists are opened for the first time during a play session, and the Seed of Hamidon aura graphics appearing when the Seed is in the proper position just north of the central building in First Ward.
This is similar to how CO saves and loads costume data as well.
It's very inefficient and may be causing more problems than the bugs I listed. I don't know.
This also happens with the costume change window when the Seed of Hamidon is north of the center of First Ward.
I post this here because it may be a symptom of a bigger problem. It also probably is not noticed by many people so not reported.
If you go to Grant Creston in First Ward and select "customize appearance", while the Seed of Hamidon is on the northern part of its path, then you can see the graphics of the big bubble aura the Seed has behind your character's portait, in front of the blue background, on the costume slot selection screen.
I have reproduced this.
Edit:
My character was also facing north at the time, standing slightly southwest of Grant Creston.
Nothing should "bleed through" from the zone into the costume slot selection window, especially something 0.5 kilometers away. This hints at a pretty big inefficiency with the graphics of this game.
Also, another bug I see is every time I open any contact tab for the first time on a character during a play session, my graphics stutter and reset like it is being overloaded by loading all the portraits of the contacts in the list. This seems related to the costume slot graphical bug above.
Edit 2:
The first thing above has been around since First Ward, but the bug in the first edit has been around at least since I can back from a break from the game with issue 18, when I was gone since issue 13.