We're absolutely no worse off than ever, and I doubt there are too many old CoX players in 2017 still holding their breaths for an official NCSoft CoX rez. Paragon Studios tried, Mercedes, Quinch & Crew tried, Nate & Crew tried, and heck, from what C. Bruce (Back Alley Brawler) said at his fairly recent AMA on Reddit, even Cryptic tried (when Jack Emmert was still there) to get the game back after Paragon Studios failed to wrest it from NCSoft's iron grip.
NCSoft chose to stick Tyrant/Statesman's shambling zombie rez into Master X Master instead. Nuttin' we can do about it except keep an eye on the successor fan projects and Paragon Chat (which is rockin' hard these days!!) and see how those develop. I have never given NCSoft even a dime nor a moment of my gaming time since the CoX shutdown announcement came, though, nor will I ever. This I can be 100% sure of.
TBH - Sitting around waiting for someone else to make a Spiritual City of Heroes successor seems counter productive.
Im finally taking the time to teach myself how to use Lumberyard (Amazon's Free AAA engine (based on Cryengine))
I got tired of having all these ideas for games that felt like such great ideas, they made me sad because I realised that the games would never exist, unless I went and made them.
Having read parts of the documentation, and having seen some tutorial videos on youtube, I think its feasible to get a very basic game put together that could do some of the things that City of Heroes did.
TBH - I am more interested in doing it because I just want to play a game that has realistic physics and telekinesis implemented in a way that I would love.
I made my own Telekinesis Weapons in Garrys Mod which made gravity and physics into weapons and I would love that effect in an MMO.
I have this vision of implementing telekinesis and gravity effects differently to how CoH did it.
I want physics calculations to become a weapon that affects damage calculations.
Eg: Telekinetic/Propel might lift an explosive canister from nearby to attack the enemy, or it might fling a fork lift.
One causes an explosion, the other doesn't - They cause different damage types.
Also - I would like the ability to affect the environment more than CoH did.
Eg: See a skyscraper - shoot the side of it to break windows
Glass can then be picked up in wind,gravity,telekinetic effects and used as weapons.
No MMO has done it, but that's no reason to avoid trying it.
The only downside is that I wouldnt have a clue on how to get a costume creator up and running.
I plan on using royalty free assets and characters/animations from Mixamo.com
The animations are pretty much ready to go and perfect for a City of Heroes themed game.
The magic pack even has blocking animations - which would be great.
Have my own ideas for Blocking with telekinesis - actually catching or suspending Projectiles in the air while block is channeled - but your endurance/power is drained for each attack blocked, and your power regen is stunted significantly.
Movement in the game shouldn't be too hard - just need to decide how to implement flight.
WASD movement is easy, yet to figure out how do flight that is not rigid.
Eg: I imagine that once flight is turned on - I would need to turn the player into a physics object, and then apply velocity to them ,while maintaining their pose/animation/orientation.
That way - in tandem with air-brake/air resistance, pressing W while flying will move forward, but will eventually stop them moving forward once W is released. (Don't want to stop too abruptly)
I know a thousand pages back - Lumberyard was mentioned at its release time - but people said it wouldn't be feasible as a MMO engine.
https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/But based on what I've seen of it - I haven't seen anything that the original CoH game provided that could not be accomplished in Lumberyard.
Each map could be a standalone server application, and players are handed off to other standalone server applications on area transition.
Yes - seems wasteful I know to have an application per map, but thats how the original CoH worked - it had map servers for each area. I remember the good ol Disconnected from Map Server error message.
That would be the quickest, easiest albeit dirtiest way of getting an online city-scape server up and running.
Based on the map size allowed by the engine - I think this sort of map would be totally feasible.
https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/exterior/cityscape/city-1You could totally hide dozens if not hundreds of quest giving npcs and quest locations on that map, as well as NPC's.