Am I reading this wrong: While Paragon Chat uses the CoH Client, outside of artwork and animations nothing is running on work done originally by Cryptic and Paragon Studios? That means all powers and commands are being done from scratch. Nothing will move like it once did or act like it once did.
Sort of. City of Heroes was a somewhat cooperative game system, in which the client did things and the server did things. Some things only the server did, some things mostly only the client did, and some things required the server to ask the client to do things the client could do perfectly fine on its own, but simply had no specific notion of when to do them. For example, when you activated the power Eagle's Claw, one of the things the server did was send a signal to the client that basically said "start the eagle's claw preliminary animation." All by itself, the game client was capable of processing that command, loading a script that told it how to move your character's limbs in the right way to perform that animation, and *then* decide that the next movement you should do was another animation, and then another, until the "sequence" was complete. All of that would happen
even if the server instantly crashed and died after sending that command because the client understood how to carry on after that first message, to a degree.
However, the client had absolutely no idea what Eagle's Claw actually was. It did not know that when you activate that power if you hit the target it should also spawn some visual effects on the target for the "kapow" when you hit it. The client didn't even know there was such a thing as a target, or the notion of hitting it. The server determined that, rolled the dice, figured out the hit percentages, and told the client whether or not to generate a "kapow" in the right place at the right time. The client is capable of animating attackers, it can animate target reactions, it can spawn everything you see, but it doesn't know how to do that in the right order, and it doesn't know whether it should or not in the first place. The client is a puppet, and the server held the strings.
Almost everything you see in Paragon Chat is something the client is perfectly capable of doing, if only a game server tells it to do so. Paragon Chat is pretending to be a server, so the game client will happily run along doing what it says. But Paragon Chat is the Leonard Shelby of game servers. It has no idea how to do what the original game servers knew how to do with only a few exceptions, that being what Codewalker tattoos on its arms. It knows how to spawn an entity - player or NPC - onto a map. It knows how to pass the right messages to game clients to animate those NPCs, and it has a basic gravity, velocity, and movement model capable of moving entities around in a way consistent with them jogging (the base run players did in the game by default). It knows how to make certain kinds of doors work. It can teleport people from one zone to another.
It currently has no notion of what "powers" are, what attributes and attribmods are (in English: how one entity might affect another, and what kinds of things can you actually affect on an entity, like HitPoints). It is currently unaware of how movement modes work, which is why we currently cannot fly or superleap. It does not know how the original game used to put us into COMBAT mode in a logical way, which is why we cannot draw and present our weapons (the odd emote notwithstanding).
Now, hypothetically speaking, we know exactly how City of Heroes powers work, and I mean exactly. That information is theoretically within the data in the game client (which was used to feed the Real Numbers system among other things, but is information the game client didn't use for any mechanical purpose). Given the rules of how the powers system itself worked which existed only on the game servers but knowledgeable players exist that could reproduce them (I could, for example, as could Codewalker), the
knowledge of how to make powers work exactly precisely as they did in the original game exists. What's missing is a software engine that implemented those rules. And that's something that unfortunately is probably a significant time away from being realized.
Codewalker isn't working
totally from scratch. The problem he faces is he's trying to assemble an entire commercial building full of do it yourself furniture in which all the parts for all of the furniture have been put in a single pile, and all the instructions are in Navajo.