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Paragon Chat => Development => Topic started by: Codewalker on July 13, 2015, 04:14:25 PM

Title: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 13, 2015, 04:14:25 PM
Important: All of this is preliminary and is subject to change!
There are probably a number of things I'm forgetting about and will be added to this list as I remember them.

Target Milestone: 1.1.x
Estimated Completion: In a bit


Target Milestone: 1.2
Estimated Completion: A while


Target Milestone: 1.3
Estimated Completion: Longer than a while


Target Milestone: Future, near to mid term
Estimated Completion: Sometime after 1.3


Target Milestone: Future, long term
Estimated Completion: Whenever


Wishlist
May be inserted into the roadmap as time allows or technical feasibility is determined


Scrapped

Completed Items
Estimated Completion: Yesterday

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: AmberOfDzu on July 13, 2015, 04:39:32 PM
Looks great!

I just hope you all pace yourselves and don't let us push you into feeling burnt out.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 13, 2015, 05:28:46 PM
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on July 13, 2015, 07:33:19 PM
My favorite part of those posts are the estimated completion field. lol
He really has the spirit of the Paragon Studio devs.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eoraptor on July 13, 2015, 08:29:08 PM
Tis great to see the roadmap, Codewalker, but I am ominously reminded of the old Parable; "If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans"
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 13, 2015, 08:42:53 PM
I kinda like acrobatics in Dcuo and co. Super speed is fun in Dcuo for world exploring (farming exobytes/feats is as addictive as badging in cox but with an added purpose) and flight is ok in both...

... But man nothing combines them all like cox did. Acro or Sj with ss was brilliant. Co's leaping is horrifically bad.

The fact they'll be simulated here I fear that we won't be able to combine them.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: TheFlea on July 13, 2015, 09:23:58 PM
Suffice to say.... Walk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN1zAsS3hyo) would make me happy. If only cause the forced not quite run feels awkward. But patience is a virtue.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: duane on July 13, 2015, 09:26:40 PM
I cannot believe the fun I have had just playing "dress up" and going to Atlas Park and Pocket D.

Thanks for letting me relive the good old days.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: laufeyjarson on July 13, 2015, 09:33:18 PM
All this is awesome, CW.  Let us know how we can help.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 13, 2015, 11:58:44 PM
Suffice to say.... Walk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN1zAsS3hyo) would make me happy. If only cause the forced not quite run feels awkward. But patience is a virtue.

It's a RP server.

Patience is Codewalker.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Kassandros on July 14, 2015, 04:58:45 AM
Travel modes emulating Fly,

 ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

Thanks for the timeline!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: healix on July 14, 2015, 07:11:58 AM
I still feel like I am dreaming. I can't believe I can finally be in Atlas again, dance in PD and talk to friends!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can wait for other goodies to happen....
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on July 14, 2015, 07:17:14 AM
Important: All of this is preliminary and is subject to change!

Exploration badges. Depends on if they can be done algorithmically, or if they depend on serverside data that would have to be reconstructed by hand.



Badges  ;D Pleaseeeeeeeeeeeee
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 14, 2015, 07:25:15 AM
This roadmap makes perfect, logical sense to me, and it's pretty damn exciting!  The only thing I'd be curious about adding or looking into would be any way to implement Supergroups--even if not for bases, but as another form of custom channel & listing of select characters.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: BitLoadR on July 14, 2015, 09:16:15 AM
  • Simulated self-affecting powers such as armor toggles
So, bubbles? self-heal? healing aura's? rock armor? fire shield? ... nova?

  • Costume change emotes
It's on the wishlist, it's been mentioned before, I so hope it's possible to implement that. *fingers crossed*

Further more: Yeey!
and: omgomgomgomgomgomgzomg!!!!111011eleventyoneohone
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Antipode on July 14, 2015, 09:44:41 AM
I'm not sure if we're allowed to add to the wishlist or request things or what have you, but I have what I hope might be a tiny QoL change to request - can we opt in/out of the developer console being enabled somehow or possibly remap what key it's set to?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Leandro on July 14, 2015, 11:11:54 AM
The console is enabled by the same thing that enables /mapmenu to work, so I don't think you can be disable one while leaving the other active.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Void Huntress on July 14, 2015, 11:32:05 AM
The console is enabled by the same thing that enables /mapmenu to work, so I don't think you can be disable one while leaving the other active.

... can we actually do that on the end-user side? Because I found /mapmenu to be pretty horrific as UIs go, and have just stuck with the popmenu approach.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Shadowe on July 14, 2015, 11:46:02 AM
I have a small (ish) QoL improvement suggestion for Paragon Chat itself: make hitting Enter in the password field trigger Launch City of Heroes. Every time I've logged in so far, I've done this, and then remembered that I have to click or tab down to the button.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 14, 2015, 07:25:33 PM
I was secretly wishing for a 'Timeline' for Paragon Chat's development.

Very excited to see this.  It gives people an idea of where we're going with this, what to expect and when.  'Hope.'  People can 'buy' into this.  Who would have thought that the CoH chat window would be running from 'Xmap' as I call it?  After testing the waters with Icon.  We now have Paragon Chat.  Round 2!  DING!  DING!!

Logical development and progression...with some very exciting features on the road map.  Even little 'quality of life' things like persistence of user interface items e.g..  Where I put my map or my chat balloon colour...

Team chat.  Door animations.  SGs.  Travel powers?  Bases.  Power simulation?  A 'hand off...' of PVP and arena combat to...?  Non combat NPC AI?  Lua?  (The latter of which is VERY intriguing...)  Basically, we're getting 'most' or sizeable chunks of the game back.  And that's just from Paragon Chat and not 'other' said projects which it might contribute to...

At the rate the legendary Codewalker is knocking out patches we could be reasonably far along those patch milestones by the 3rd closure anniversary.  ...and THAT I'd very happy with...more so than all the successor projects thrown into a cocked hat.

Codewalker's steely determination is noted.  Like some kind of 'unholy' war.  No quarter asked.  No quarter given.  He was described by 'some' latterly as an 'Adamantium Dragon.' 

'Quite.'

Azrael.

PS.  Codewalker.  The idea of using NPC 'dummies' for power simulations...'testing' or facsimile 'combat'.  I had an idea...  You know the 'lollipop' spawn/NPC points in the developer preview mode?

I KNOW you can insert 'persistent' NPCs.  (Re: the 'easter egg' NPCs currently in Paragon Chat.)  Is there any chance you could take the 'code' for the lollipops NPCs (which must translate into a particular 'mob' type...) and 'spawn' them as 'persistent' 'still life' NPCs where they USED to spawn.  Sure.  They'd be just statues at this stage of the project.  BUT think about how dramatic that would be!  To have a city wide 'tableau' of all the NPCs.  'Frozen' in time.  With the prospect...that maybe...just maybe...one day...they come alive!!!!

Maybe it's something some of the community could help with unbundling.  You could 'pop menu' the lollipops of the developer preview into a zone ward spawn!  Sure.  We couldn't fight them.  But imagine flying past them...or walking up to them.  Looking them in the eye.  Asking the question...'what if...?'
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Noyjitat on July 14, 2015, 07:45:27 PM
well well well... What do we have here? :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 14, 2015, 08:11:40 PM
well well well... What do we have here? :)

A time line...

*Smiles.  :D

Azrael.

PS.  'Is our action not just?'
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Leandro on July 14, 2015, 09:43:30 PM
I have a small (ish) QoL improvement suggestion for Paragon Chat itself: make hitting Enter in the password field trigger Launch City of Heroes. Every time I've logged in so far, I've done this, and then remembered that I have to click or tab down to the button.

Done internally, will be on the next build. Don't want to release 0.97g just for that...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: GamingGlen on July 14, 2015, 09:48:35 PM
Done internally, will be on the next build. Don't want to release 0.97g just for that...

But Arcana will be disappointed...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: themamboman on July 14, 2015, 10:13:23 PM
Hmm... would having citizens wandering down the bot-paths on the sidewalks or cars driving around be too much for this project?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Shadowe on July 14, 2015, 10:14:44 PM
Done internally, will be on the next build. Don't want to release 0.97g just for that...

Big things are made of little things. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for everything.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Chernobyl Man on July 14, 2015, 11:02:56 PM
Hmm... would having citizens wandering down the bot-paths on the sidewalks or cars driving around be too much for this project?

I love this idea in theory... I am betting there would be lag issues if this were implemented, however...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: emperorsteele on July 15, 2015, 12:56:40 AM
I love this idea in theory... I am betting there would be lag issues if this were implemented, however...

Maybe there's a way to make those things client-side to avoid the lag?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eoraptor on July 15, 2015, 01:41:34 AM
Maybe there's a way to make those things client-side to avoid the lag?
not likely... the walking NPCs were timed to the server... because they had to be able to randomly say things about randomized user accounts "did you hear they're making an action figure of X?", or spout off the time or date or usage stats when clicked, or whine about their purse getting ganked, etc.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Charged Mastermind on July 15, 2015, 03:15:43 AM
I'm betting if they get a much better server (which I'm not sure of) they could run NPC's easily but not much else
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on July 15, 2015, 03:30:48 AM
I want to confuse NPC's and watch them battle it out, maybe version 1.4ish.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Shidan on July 15, 2015, 04:16:07 AM
Any chance we could get the Mission Architect interface added to Paragon Chat? I know you obviously wouldn't be able to do anything with it besides edit your locally stored characters, missions, groups, etc. But it's one of my go to things when I'm bored, and I'd much rather be doing it in PC instead of Icon.  :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 15, 2015, 04:37:25 AM
Any chance we could get the Mission Architect interface added to Paragon Chat? I know you obviously wouldn't be able to do anything with it besides edit your locally stored characters, missions, groups, etc. But it's one of my go to things when I'm bored, and I'd much rather be doing it in PC instead of Icon.  :)

Good idea! We'll go back in time and add it to version 0.97c, just to make sure it's done soon. :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on July 15, 2015, 04:54:08 AM
Hey, shouldn't you name these versions?
Either, like CoX with Issues.
Or Apple's and Android's code words.
0.97f = FrankenChat
0.97g = GotChat
0.97h = HeroChat
0.97i = internetChat
0.97j = JoltChat
0.97k = KitKatChat
0.97l = LolipopChat
0.97m = MilkdudChat

or something like that.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: The-Hunter-JLJ on July 15, 2015, 08:36:19 AM
Good idea! We'll go back in time and add it to version 0.97c, just to make sure it's done soon. :)

Well, that's one way to do it...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: The-Hunter-JLJ on July 15, 2015, 09:19:50 AM
not likely... the walking NPCs were timed to the server... because they had to be able to randomly say things about randomized user accounts "did you hear they're making an action figure of X?", or spout off the time or date or usage stats when clicked, or whine about their purse getting ganked, etc.

Ya know though... the walk-path information IS available on the client side. Anything non-critical tasks you can push out to the client means that much less load on the server, obviously.

From a design perspective, I wonder sometimes if the industry does not reserve too much for the servers. Some things obviously HAVE to involve the server as the authoritative source, to avoid cheating if nothing else. In this case, the one strong argument I can make for the wandering NPCs being tracked by the server is so all players would see them in the same spot. But there might be other ways to handle that.

Just off the top of my head, you could run the NPCs around their walk paths based on time. Sync  Paragon Chat with an NTP time server probably on login and every time you zone, and everyone's clients would probably stay "close enough". If you really wanted to go nuts you could keep them closer than that, but why bother? So long as you keep them synced within a few feet on different player's clients, the only people who would ever realize they are not standing in the exact same spot are dual-boxers - and THEY would be very likely to be time-synced within milliseconds of each other anyway since they're on the same lan segment and uplink.

You'd only need to "track" NPCs in the zone / room you're currently standing in, which probably helps. The original server had to keep them moving in ALL zones, your client really does not care about NPCs in a zone you are currently not in. The other functions of NPCs maybe could be faked, too. Time is easy, as is anything referring to YOUR character.

The NPCs who mention other people's character can probably even be handled, since Paragon Chat "knows" who else is currently logged in. That gives you a list to work from, add in your global friends, and now you've got a probably much smaller list of possible heroes for them to comment about. Might get a bit weird since villains and heroes are mixed willy-nilly, but  even that could be finessed if it's possible to query the info from the other Paragon Chat client when it is needed.

The network environment is VASTLY different than it was when CoH was first designed. And for that matter, I suspect based on what I see from the outside looking in that a lot of things are done a certain way in the industry cuz that's how they've always been done. A project like this gives you the chance to discard the old ways of doing things if it makes sense.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Leandro on July 15, 2015, 09:33:56 AM
It's just a low priority thing that is far more complicated than it looks. What the maps have, client-side, are specific points saying "an NPC can walk to here", not a "walk path" that includes information like "don't approach me from the north because there's a building in the way". Creating proper walk paths out of the navigation points is not trivial and there are more important things that have priority.

The actual generated walk paths (as well as all other information for NPC movement) were server side, and the client only has remnants on how they work for debug purposes.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Shidan on July 15, 2015, 09:47:56 AM
Good idea! We'll go back in time and add it to version 0.97c, just to make sure it's done soon. :)
Great job on that! Though if you guys have working time travel, why exactly didn't you go back in time and save our game already?  ;)

I apparently missed Leandro's post about it in the download thread, and it wasn't in the patch notes so I just assumed it still wasn't working. Well, I guess I know what I'm going to go do now.  ;D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Vr2Lrose on July 15, 2015, 10:17:21 AM
Sooo sorry the closing of City is a fixed point in time. 😒
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 15, 2015, 11:01:53 AM
How hard is ai pathing?

1. Escort out missions. They were grrrrrreat. Hey, why is this guy playing ring around the elevator?
2. Pushy NPcs. Who didn't love being shoved away from a vendor or wedged into physics hell tightroping on the geometry?
3. Floating Redside kitty pride family barrel rollers. Seriously. Those guys didn't respect gravity or physical laws of the universe.

And that was when the game was actively developed.

We've been given the maps and friends that we can slowly do more stuff with. Our chefs are taking us from starving to ramen noodles. I'm not going to ask for better place settings as they try to make us steaks.
Edit: reserves right to kill post at later date. Stupid insomnia upping my snark quota.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 15, 2015, 11:41:14 AM
We've been given the maps and friends that we can slowly do more stuff with. Our chefs are taking us from starving to ramen noodles. I'm not going to ask for better place settings as they try to make us steaks.

A big part of the problem isn't even going to be the walk path for peds, but server capacity. We just have to accept that the an XMPP chat server doesn't have as much capacity as the original game server did; period.  I'd rather the slots be taken up with real people instead of hundreds of bots walking around the place...

Perhaps a better option is just to have a program running on the client machine that just sends peds to your local game, and it never goes to the server. Of course, that means other people won't see the same peds (or any if not running the app), but at least it doesn't clog the server with essentially useless bots.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 15, 2015, 12:01:09 PM
A big part of the problem isn't even going to be the walk path for peds, but server capacity. We just have to accept that the an XMPP chat server doesn't have as much capacity as the original game server did; period.  I'd rather the slots be taken up with real people instead of hundreds of bots walking around the place...

Perhaps a better option is just to have a program running on the client machine that just sends peds to your local game, and it never goes to the server. Of course, that means other people won't see the same peds (or any if not running the app), but at least it doesn't clog the server with essentially useless bots.

Does that play out like Propel objects or alakazamreact? Everyone sees a different object because it was their client and not the server creating it?

I'd be down with that down the line after we have "franchises" for players to take home.

Wait, can I run the propel animation in game now or do I need a target?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 15, 2015, 12:22:08 PM
Does that play out like Propel objects or alakazamreact? Everyone sees a different object because it was their client and not the server creating it?

I'd be down with that down the line after we have "franchises" for players to take home.

Possibly, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting on CW to code it. He's got far too much to do to Paragon Chat to spend time doing something like this. Why not have a go yourself?

Wait, can I run the propel animation in game now or do I need a target?

You need a target. All powers need a target, even if it's yourself like with PBAoE's.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: The-Hunter-JLJ on July 15, 2015, 12:59:05 PM
It's just a low priority thing that is far more complicated than it looks. What the maps have, client-side, are specific points saying "an NPC can walk to here", not a "walk path" that includes information like "don't approach me from the north because there's a building in the way". Creating proper walk paths out of the navigation points is not trivial and there are more important things that have priority.

The actual generated walk paths (as well as all other information for NPC movement) were server side, and the client only has remnants on how they work for debug purposes.

No argument at all that it should be low priority, Leandro. It *IS* striking how often you hear people comment about the lack of pedestrians and cars. I've taken to joking that the NPCs and cars are too dumb to update their clients and are still afflicted with the invisibility bug, so we can hear them but not see them.

I'm a hardware guy, not a coder, so I take your assurance that it's a far more difficult problem than it at first appears to heart. My point is more that there may be a way of achieving something to show peds & traffic that is considerably lower impact than the way it was originally implemented. As an observation, not as a suggestion that it needs to even be considered.

FFM is not wrong that we need to save the bandwidth and server horsepower for actual players. But do keep in mind that CoH (mostly) worked at launch, with FAR less capable servers and networks than we have available now a decade later. My suspicion is that if you include what you can farm out to the clients, you may well have MORE raw processing power available than Cryptic did at launch. And your available usable bandwidth is probably not a lot worse, either, given how much networks have improved since 2004. (Building networks is what I did for a living, so this, I know.) Actually utilizing all those nice gaming rigs you're being given access to over reasonable sized pipes MIGHT of course be a nightmare of another order entirely.

What I am pointing out is that there may be ways to implement things like pedestrian traffic which requires minimal network traffic, and pushes the processing out to the clients.  Certainly not worth worrying about short or even medium term, but it appears that what you've created is flexible and extensible enough to allow the creativity of the community to be brought to bear in the long term. You guys have already pulled off something I thought sounded a bit nuts when I first heard it proposed. I figure it is entirely possible one of you or some other genius may have a brilliant idea at any moment. (grin)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Leandro on July 15, 2015, 02:15:53 PM
I'm a hardware guy, not a coder, so I take your assurance that it's a far more difficult problem than it at first appears to heart. My point is more that there may be a way of achieving something to show peds & traffic that is considerably lower impact than the way it was originally implemented.

My reply was mostly to correct the assumption that "Ya know though... the walk-path information IS available on the client side." It's not, not in an immediately usable way. I am sure that once we do have the ability to show pedestrians, a way to show them that is very optimized will be found; but right now, that's putting the cart way before the horse.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 15, 2015, 02:46:12 PM
My reply was mostly to correct the assumption that "Ya know though... the walk-path information IS available on the client side." It's not, not in an immediately usable way. I am sure that once we do have the ability to show pedestrians, a way to show them that is very optimized will be found; but right now, that's putting the cart way before the horse.

Besides which, the walk path in some areas was completely crap, so I for one would want to redo them in places! :p
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Noyjitat on July 15, 2015, 04:19:48 PM
Besides which, the walk path in some areas was completely crap, so I for one would want to redo them in places! :p

Especially "gaspee" or whatever it was called in Founders Falls. Looked like a mob marching around the fountain.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 15, 2015, 04:40:19 PM
I've seen players use dual pistols and martial arts animations with no target just goofing off under atlas. However, no bullet streams or weapons were seen. My character would likely run Propel but it would come off as a slow motion alakazam.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: BluArcher on July 15, 2015, 06:56:55 PM
I've seen players use dual pistols and martial arts animations with no target just goofing off under atlas. However, no bullet streams or weapons were seen. My character would likely run Propel but it would come off as a slow motion alakazam.

That's due to some players hacking the files and turning the attack animations into emotes so they no long need a target
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eoraptor on July 15, 2015, 07:16:47 PM
That's due to some players hacking the files and turning the attack animations into emotes so they no long need a target
this... what you're seeing is not the execution of an attack code, but the playing of an animation script which was originally bound to that attack when the game was still running. some players have rebound the animations as emotes rather than actions in order to add a bit more depth to roleplay. (basically it's the /em slap emote taken to the next level)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Garble on July 15, 2015, 07:35:18 PM
In Icon I was able to add the propel fx to a costume and found that without a target the animation goes to the center of the map. Specifically coordinates 0,0,0 in Atlas is around where you first enter the game.

It actually produced dibris you can knock around. Paragon Chat is less forgiving of hacked costumes though.

http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9216.0.html (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9216.0.html)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: TheCyberchill on July 15, 2015, 09:43:06 PM
I'd like to see those exclusive costume parts like the arachnos helmets capes logos, the two masks from that anniversary event, added to everyones costume directories
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nebularian on July 15, 2015, 10:28:58 PM
That's due to some players hacking the files and turning the attack animations into emotes so they no long need a target

hmmmm  wonder if that could be done with an emp/def's heal all :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Vr2Lrose on July 15, 2015, 11:58:22 PM
useing combat emotes (nonweapon ones) with auras could also give cool power looks ie magnitism which looks like metal bits swirling around could look much like propel.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyx Nought Nothing on July 16, 2015, 12:41:47 AM

*reads roadmap*
(https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3865/14684966334_c23eab80a1_q.jpg)



Hey, shouldn't you name these versions?
...
0.97m = MilkdudChat
(https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2581/3779834896_8d76d04d75_m.jpg)
It should be mudkipchat.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on July 16, 2015, 02:02:33 PM
hmmmm  wonder if that could be done with an emp/def's heal all :)
I would love to be able to do it with the Nature Affinity powerset.  Those were gorgeous animations.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 16, 2015, 06:44:04 PM
Good idea! We'll go back in time and add it to version 0.97c, just to make sure it's done soon. :)

How the hell am I supposed to go back in time and fetch it?  Devs hate players.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 16, 2015, 07:00:22 PM
FFM is not wrong that we need to save the bandwidth and server horsepower for actual players. But do keep in mind that CoH (mostly) worked at launch, with FAR less capable servers and networks than we have available now a decade later. My suspicion is that if you include what you can farm out to the clients, you may well have MORE raw processing power available than Cryptic did at launch.

Yes and no.  Yes, server hardware is far faster now, and for that matter implementation technique is better now.  But players need to understand that no, server horsepower is not higher now than it was before, its actually *lower* for the simple reason we don't have servers.  Not in the conventional gaming sense.  Everything you are seeing is happening because either a) your client did it or b) another client did it and sent a message to your client to also do it.  You jump, you see your character jump.  She jumps, she sees her character jump and her Paragon Chat sends a message to your Paragon Chat so you see her character jump also.

There is no server that can tell everyone "here's a pedestrian, move him here."  None whatsoever.  The only way with Paragon Chat's current architecture to make pedestrians move is for Codewalker to add that capability directly to Paragon Chat itself, and to do so in a manner that everyone would see the same thing - otherwise it would be problematic if everyone started to see a totally different environment (I mean, you could do it, but its something I suspect Codewalker would really not want to do).

Everyone, from people running this on the fastest gaming rigs to people running this on their old Pentium desktops, will have to be able to run the City of Heroes client itself *and* whatever Codewalker puts into Paragon Chat.  If he decides to add NPCs, everyone's individual clients will have to be able to support them and in a synchronized fashion.  And then this starts to snowball.  Do we broadcast NPC localchat?  Do we perform NPC collision detection?

All these issues have solutions.  I mention them not to suggest I lack the capability of conceiving ways to solve them.  Its more to illustrate the scope and the limitations surrounding the problem.  The fact that computers are faster today than they were in 2004 is largely irrelevant to the actual problem(s) Codewalker faces.  The problem is that Codewalker can't really do this in the same way the game's mapservers did, because he doesn't have central mapservers to work with.  However he solves the problem, it will have to be different, support things the game never had to, solve problems the game's mapservers didn't need to worry about, and do so in a way that doesn't make it harder for people to run Paragon Chat for its intended purpose of being a community communications platform.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 16, 2015, 07:12:41 PM
A big part of the problem isn't even going to be the walk path for peds, but server capacity. We just have to accept that the an XMPP chat server doesn't have as much capacity as the original game server did; period.  I'd rather the slots be taken up with real people instead of hundreds of bots walking around the place...

Perhaps a better option is just to have a program running on the client machine that just sends peds to your local game, and it never goes to the server. Of course, that means other people won't see the same peds (or any if not running the app), but at least it doesn't clog the server with essentially useless bots.

Bandwidth isn't really the issue, I don't think.  If you spawn NPCs reasonably, and you make sure their walk paths go only between widely spaced and reasonable beacons, all you need to do is send a message that says "spawn NPC Alpha at beacon Beta" and "Alpha set course for beacon Gamma."  And then every Paragon Chat client who gets those two messages will spawn and walk the appropriate NPC.

Question: who spawns the NPC?  There's no server.  You can't just allow Paragon Chat to arbitrarily spawn NPCs, because then you'll have the problem where every client is spawning NPCs, and everyone has to see everyone else's NPCs.  The more people in the zone, the more NPCs get spawned.  My guess is that you have two options.  Option one: use a bot to do the spawning for everyone.  Option two: use elections.  Option three: collision throttles.    We could say, whenever a Presence was detected, perform an election to find out who has been logged in the longest.  Whoever is, wins the election and spawns all the NPCs.  Or, Codewalker to program Paragon Chat to randomly spawn NPCs, but to automatically back off and reset timers if it detects someone else has done so within a certain interval.

But just the question of where the spawning comes from is probably a question I think most people haven't considered.  Its part of the complexity of handling this issue properly, and its a non-intuitive question for people without an intuitive grasp of how different Paragon Chat's distributed architecture is from a conventional MMO.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 16, 2015, 07:31:10 PM
Pedestrians make much more sense to implement entirely clientside. Using a deterministic algorithm with a seed value that can be reasonably synchronized (UTC perhaps?) is probably the simplest route. However, pedestrians need to have paths precalculated for them, because some zones could have hundreds of pedestrians in them and running realtime pathfinding algorithms for them all seems like a huge waste of CPU. There's also currently no pathfinding at all, so work needs to be done on algorithms to find walkable paths over arbitrary 3D geometry, which is hardly a trivial task.

Cars are somewhat more likely as they at least have beacons in the map files for 'stops' along their route, though they still need to have a network created between those beacons to create reasonably drivable paths.

Fixed paths like the Atlas blimp are much easier to implement and likely to be seen before any of the above. Those are already in the map.

There's also the issue of the generator names in map files not being defined anywhere (likely was in serverside data files). So someone will have to manually go through each of them and figure out what it's supposed to spawn, make a list of NPC models that make sense for it, determine reasonable spawn and despawn rates, and tie it to whatever deterministic algorithm is running the whole shebang.

Non-static NPCs placed by people with elevated access -- server admins / moderators in public zones and room owners in private instances -- are something I have planned, and those would need to go over XMPP. I'm currently strongly leaning towards using XMPP's publish-subscribe extension to maintain state for those, as it's designed to store either persistent or transient data that multiple clients can subscribe to and receive notifications when it changes, while new clients can quickly query the xmpp server to get the full state without having to bother their peers about it. When we get to that point I'll probably do a quick community brainstorming session on the forums to see if the design makes sense before implementing it.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 16, 2015, 07:45:29 PM
Pedestrians make much more sense to implement entirely clientside. Using a deterministic algorithm with a seed value that can be reasonably synchronized (UTC perhaps?) is probably the simplest route.

That's another possibility, although it requires Paragon Chat itself setting its own clock with NTP or something (most likely with a calculated offset from the hardware clock).  You can't rely on everyone having properly synchronized clocks.  And my spider-sense is tingling on doing it this way.  I don't know why, but something tells me there's a catch I'm not currently seeing.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Void Huntress on July 16, 2015, 09:23:39 PM
That's another possibility, although it requires Paragon Chat itself setting its own clock with NTP or something (most likely with a calculated offset from the hardware clock).  You can't rely on everyone having properly synchronized clocks.  And my spider-sense is tingling on doing it this way.  I don't know why, but something tells me there's a catch I'm not currently seeing.

I'm flashing back to some of the adventures we had in Planetside back when SpeedStep was a new thing, and some people would be experiencing a subjective reality in which everyone else was moving in slow motion, and everyone else would see that person moving at hyperspeed.

Not that I think this is necessarily a specific problem we'd need to concern ourselves with (timing mechanisms for games have evolved greatly since then, even in the madness pit that is windows timers), but it's the kind of problem this approach makes me think about.

Even with NTP as a reference point, keeping clocks in sync across an unbounded number of users can be exciting.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Noyjitat on July 16, 2015, 11:22:18 PM
I'm flashing back to some of the adventures we had in Planetside back when SpeedStep was a new thing, and some people would be experiencing a subjective reality in which everyone else was moving in slow motion, and everyone else would see that person moving at hyperspeed.

Not that I think this is necessarily a specific problem we'd need to concern ourselves with (timing mechanisms for games have evolved greatly since then, even in the madness pit that is windows timers), but it's the kind of problem this approach makes me think about.

Even with NTP as a reference point, keeping clocks in sync across an unbounded number of users can be exciting.

surgile instagib tripple jackhammer ftw!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Void Huntress on July 17, 2015, 12:34:41 AM
surgile instagib tripple jackhammer ftw!

VANU FOREVER
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 17, 2015, 04:41:26 AM
Pedestrians make much more sense to implement entirely clientside. Using a deterministic algorithm with a seed value that can be reasonably synchronized (UTC perhaps?) is probably the simplest route. However, pedestrians need to have paths precalculated for them, because some zones could have hundreds of pedestrians in them and running realtime pathfinding algorithms for them all seems like a huge waste of CPU. There's also currently no pathfinding at all, so work needs to be done on algorithms to find walkable paths over arbitrary 3D geometry, which is hardly a trivial task.
That's another possibility, although it requires Paragon Chat itself setting its own clock with NTP or something (most likely with a calculated offset from the hardware clock).  You can't rely on everyone having properly synchronized clocks.  And my spider-sense is tingling on doing it this way.  I don't know why, but something tells me there's a catch I'm not currently seeing.

I want a coffee talk face off of Arcana vs Codewalker. Just pick a programming or coding topic and let them go. I wouldn't understand 90 percent of it but I'd watch. With aspirin handy.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 17, 2015, 05:35:53 AM
Even with NTP as a reference point, keeping clocks in sync across an unbounded number of users can be exciting.

Main reason I brought it up in reference to civillians is that for the most part they are background filler. So long as they aren't wildly different, people are unlikely to notice them being a little out of sync. So a reasonable approximation can work for them.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 17, 2015, 08:37:52 AM
Question.

We know the NPC/A.I/combat and walk paths are the most difficult thing to do from the MMO interview...and shouldn't expect that for some considerable time.  That I understand.

But I have an intriguing thought... 

Would it be possible to spawn the NPCs Mobs at their actual CoH spawn points as a GM (or could it theoretically be a capability...) in Paragon Chat.  eg. Trolls in Hollows, Outcasts in Steel etc.  Sure.  They'd be non combat for some considerable time...but like the Easter Egg NPCs and other NPCs (eg. Ms. Liberty...) they'd add to the zone 'atmosphere.'  They could cycle through their actual or random emotes..?

The spawn points are in the actual developer view mode? 

I'd rather that than the walking civilian NPCs at the moment. 

Just wanted to know if this was a possibility and whether it was resource hungry re: Paragon Chat.  (Which seems to do deal ok with the persistent NPCs and the newly inserted Easter Eggs ok...)

Or whether an idea like this could be inserted into the Paragon Chat development Timeline..?

Azrael.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 17, 2015, 09:13:25 AM
Question.

We know the NPC/A.I/combat and walk paths are the most difficult thing to do from the MMO interview...and shouldn't expect that for some considerable time.  That I understand.

But I have an intriguing thought... 

Would it be possible to spawn the NPCs Mobs at their actual CoH spawn points as a GM (or could it theoretically be a capability...) in Paragon Chat.  eg. Trolls in Hollows, Outcasts in Steel etc.  Sure.  They'd be non combat for some considerable time...but like the Easter Egg NPCs and other NPCs (eg. Ms. Liberty...) they'd add to the zone 'atmosphere.'  They could cycle through their actual or random emotes..?

The spawn points are in the actual developer view mode? 

I'd rather that than the walking civilian NPCs at the moment. 

Just wanted to know if this was a possibility and whether it was resource hungry re: Paragon Chat.  (Which seems to do deal ok with the persistent NPCs and the newly inserted Easter Eggs ok...)

Or whether an idea like this could be inserted into the Paragon Chat development Timeline..?

Azrael.

There are a number of technical and operational (read: griefing) issues with spawning NPCs.  But Codewalker has already stated his intention to investigate allowing NPC spawning in private maps - i.e. allowing a player to create a map and become the administrator within that map, and within that map that admin would then be granted spawning rights.  That way people could "opt-in" to such maps voluntarily (also, he's expressed some thoughts behind allowing certain kinds of power function in such maps, if and when he actually gets to making powers function in some capacity).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 17, 2015, 09:25:32 AM
There are a number of technical and operational (read: griefing) issues with spawning NPCs.  But Codewalker has already stated his intention to investigate allowing NPC spawning in private maps - i.e. allowing a player to create a map and become the administrator within that map, and within that map that admin would then be granted spawning rights.  That way people could "opt-in" to such maps voluntarily (also, he's expressed some thoughts behind allowing certain kinds of power function in such maps, if and when he actually gets to making powers function in some capacity).

*nods.  I see, Arcana.  (But, GM spawning aside in private 'chat rooms'...which is on the timeline...)  I was also specifically wondering if the 'spawn points'/mob indicators from the developer view mode could be used to put the mobs where they used to be in each zone? 

...once the technical issues are resolved?  (...and whether this could be made persistent each time you log in?)

Though I'm quite enjoying Paragon Chat and 'wandering around' as it for the moment.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 17, 2015, 10:19:58 AM
*nods.  I see, Arcana.  (But, GM spawning aside in private 'chat rooms'...which is on the timeline...)  I was also specifically wondering if the 'spawn points'/mob indicators from the developer view mode could be used to put the mobs where they used to be in each zone? 

...once the technical issues are resolved?  (...and whether this could be made persistent each time you log in?)

Though I'm quite enjoying Paragon Chat and 'wandering around' as it for the moment.

Azrael.

It should be technically possible to do, but feasible only from the client side of things, just like peds and cars.  Sure, it would be great to see the city getting some semblance of life beyond us running around, but we have to be realistic.

We have a -chat- server, that just lets us talk to each other and also, thanks to some extensions, lets us see each other and move about.  We don't want NPC data going through the XMPP chat server as it would just take up valuable player slots in the zones.

We have Paragon Chat itself, which acts essentially as a sort of micro-server to the game. Taking the messages CW and team have managed to decode, sending it to the XMPP server, and reading messages it gets back and feeding them to the game client.  This is where NPC spawning would be best to happen, with maybe occasional timebase synching between clients, though that would likely cause NPC's to rubberband a lot.

The important part here is, have the SCoRE team decoded the messages needed to tell the CoH Client to spawn villain mobs in the zones, and have they decoded the messages needed to spawn peds and cars and setup their pathing to send to the CoH client?  Using in-memory hacks as per ICON is a lot different to reading and responding to client messages.  If you don't understand the language, you just hear gibberish.

The other important part is, does the client PC have the horsepower to run the client AND an emulated mapserver, because that's what we're actually talking about here.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 17, 2015, 12:21:36 PM
It should be technically possible to do, but feasible only from the client side of things, just like peds and cars.  Sure, it would be great to see the city getting some semblance of life beyond us running around, but we have to be realistic.

We have a -chat- server, that just lets us talk to each other and also, thanks to some extensions, lets us see each other and move about.  We don't want NPC data going through the XMPP chat server as it would just take up valuable player slots in the zones.

We have Paragon Chat itself, which acts essentially as a sort of micro-server to the game. Taking the messages CW and team have managed to decode, sending it to the XMPP server, and reading messages it gets back and feeding them to the game client.  This is where NPC spawning would be best to happen, with maybe occasional timebase synching between clients, though that would likely cause NPC's to rubberband a lot.

The important part here is, have the SCoRE team decoded the messages needed to tell the CoH Client to spawn villain mobs in the zones, and have they decoded the messages needed to spawn peds and cars and setup their pathing to send to the CoH client?  Using in-memory hacks as per ICON is a lot different to reading and responding to client messages.  If you don't understand the language, you just hear gibberish.

The other important part is, does the client PC have the horsepower to run the client AND an emulated mapserver, because that's what we're actually talking about here.

Thanks for the response.  I'm not technical.  But I am curious and like understanding the technical problems and potential solutions that are discussed.

Yes.  A kind of micro server with the stuff they've managed to decode so far.  At least we have something nice to enjoy.  Rather than waiting until the entire project was complete before being released.

It sums up the state of play.  With the road map we have.  Building bricks.  'Most' things in time.  Lots of quality of life things first.  Travel powers.  Team chat.  GM capabilities.  SG/bases etc.  The PVP and NPC come much later.

I'm looking forward to having the travel powers back.  It will make getting around in zone easier.

It's still a surreal moment logging in and having a chat server.  The famous 'yellow tell' text and the 'beep' upon backspace.  All other things will be a nice bonus.  The development timeline is a nice touch as it gives Paragon Chat users a 'rough idea' of when things will develop.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 17, 2015, 02:05:07 PM
I was also specifically wondering if the 'spawn points'/mob indicators from the developer view mode could be used to put the mobs where they used to be in each zone?

Those only indicate locations that mobs can spawn. They don't have any useful information about what can spawn there, which positions in the group different NPCs should spawn at for different team sizes, etc. There is also apparently some kind of grouping algorithm because there are many of those clusters of spawn points that overlap, but the game would never (or very rarely in specific missions) spawn two overlapping groups on top of each other.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 17, 2015, 02:10:01 PM
I always felt the spawning code in CoH had every other MMO ever, completely beat.  You never had mobs spawn on top of you, when you loaded into a zone, there were never mobs on top of you... Mobs sizes were always manageable...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Shadowe on July 17, 2015, 03:48:06 PM
For me it was the dynamic spawn sizes. Never having to worry about "a huge group of foes" unless I set my difficulty higher to get them. Not to mention the mix of enemies within a particular spawn: you would never know if that group would have a Sapper in it or not, or even if it would be Carnival of Shadows, Malta, Nemesis, or whatever. Brilliant. I'm totally sick to death of other games with fixed spawning.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 17, 2015, 04:14:13 PM
Those only indicate locations that mobs can spawn. They don't have any useful information about what can spawn there, which positions in the group different NPCs should spawn at for different team sizes, etc. There is also apparently some kind of grouping algorithm because there are many of those clusters of spawn points that overlap, but the game would never (or very rarely in specific missions) spawn two overlapping groups on top of each other.

Thanks for the reply.  ;)

So they only show that mobs *can* spawn there.  I see.  But no what mob type, positions of NPC in the group..?  Hmm.

The mobs used to vary in size of spawn on the same spawn area when Street Sweeping.  It would make sense that there was some kind of grouping algorithm for clusters of NPC spawns that overlapped.  i.e..  to cycle through mob size/mix over time...so it was was 'similar' but relatively different each time when a hero wiped out 'spawns' on a street sweep.  Enough to provide a bit of variety.

Quote
I always felt the spawning code in CoH had every other MMO ever, completely beat.  You never had mobs spawn on top of you, when you loaded into a zone, there were never mobs on top of you... Mobs sizes were always manageable...

That's a good point.  In this regard, Coh was fantastic.  The developers got that fine balance of Mob size down the to the granular level.  It was so finessed...and it took on another level with the difficult slider going wide or higher...with bosses or without..!  (You only have to play A.N Other hero game to see just how good CoH was in regard mob handling.)

Quote
For me it was the dynamic spawn sizes. Never having to worry about "a huge group of foes" unless I set my difficulty higher to get them. Not to mention the mix of enemies within a particular spawn: you would never know if that group would have a Sapper in it or not, or even if it would be Carnival of Shadows, Malta, Nemesis, or whatever. Brilliant. I'm totally sick to death of other games with fixed spawning.

Yes.  The mix was very dynamic.  Watching out for those Sappers.  Never fixed.  Always varied.  The mobs differently textured with unique style of difficulty.  A rocky outcast in Steel was different to a sapper in P.Island...  This was a large part of what I found so compelling.

I'd often street sweep in Steel and Bricks and level up several levels just finding 'juicy' mobs and pushing how many I could 'take' with a glass cannon, blApping blaster. 

Bags of fun.  Though you'd miss out on mission bonuses...

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 17, 2015, 08:20:22 PM
The problem is that Codewalker can't really do this in the same way the game's mapservers did, because he doesn't have central mapservers to work with.

Sounds like he just needs to make new mapservers. Problem solved.

 :P

I want a coffee talk face off of Arcana vs Codewalker. Just pick a programming or coding topic and let them go. I wouldn't understand 90 percent of it but I'd watch. With aspirin handy.

This is why I unsubscribed from the "technical side discussion" thread. It was interesting at first, then became way too much for me.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 17, 2015, 08:23:58 PM
Sounds like he just needs to make new mapservers. Problem solved.

Paragon Chat doesn't need central mapservers. It's a deliberate design choice.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 17, 2015, 09:38:20 PM
This is why I unsubscribed from the "technical side discussion" thread. It was interesting at first, then became way too much for me.

So you didn't get to see my bot fly backwards then.  Oh well.  I might have something more interesting working this weekend.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on July 18, 2015, 04:52:41 AM
Paragon Chat, the paragon of chat in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles and Praetoria near you.
Void where prohibted, use only as directed, and as always, keep out of reach of children.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eskreema on July 18, 2015, 09:38:47 AM
Will there be any artistic changes in the distant future like pedestrians with robotic arms or business cows?

Any comments on what will never be on the road map, like the old Energy Transfer animation  ;D or other insanity?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 18, 2015, 06:27:07 PM
Will there be any artistic changes in the distant future like pedestrians with robotic arms or business cows?

Actually, the addition of 4 legged creatures to the character creator, or a reliable method of editing costume text files to get them, would be pretty cool.

Paragon Chat doesn't need central mapservers. It's a deliberate design choice.

Well, yes, hence the :P
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Void Huntress on July 19, 2015, 04:27:39 AM
Main reason I brought it up in reference to civillians is that for the most part they are background filler. So long as they aren't wildly different, people are unlikely to notice them being a little out of sync. So a reasonable approximation can work for them.

Right, I didn't intend to suggest there could be a problem there, just noting stuff it reminded me of.

And on that topic, there used to be (still is? I haven't looked in some time) this hilarious failstate in Warframe where two teammates could have their clients be desynced, causing them to see different enemies in different positions.

So I have this hilarious mental image of a couple of people moving close together, then getting wedged between each other and the same NPC on both sides due to slightly out of sync positioning.

Again, not a problem in /this/ case, but stuff like that can cause hilarious headaches in 'real' games.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 19, 2015, 05:11:51 AM
I always felt the spawning code in CoH had every other MMO ever, completely beat.  You never had mobs spawn on top of you, when you loaded into a zone, there were never mobs on top of you... Mobs sizes were always manageable...

I always thought this, too. Most games feel like theme-park robots resetting for each new customer. CoH's mobs felt more fluid. I did notice that "I MUST GET BACK TO MY SPAWN POINT"/unaffected target running back to where you aggroed it look started popping up in Going Rogue. I wonder if some corners had to be cut to get it out on time and on budget.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: caine6900 on July 19, 2015, 05:41:14 AM
I had a thought, and it looks like some of that may be implemented in later releases. I was thinking that there could be some of us that download the tabletop rules for COH and the players makes their characters and they all meet up in a section of the map that is not being used and in say local they all play their RPG game with no powers but the map would be really way cool map just for role players with the Gm running the dice rolls if the dice roller was totally random the player could roll them in game.
It is an idea.
Layne B Landis
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 19, 2015, 08:28:50 AM
I had a thought, and it looks like some of that may be implemented in later releases. I was thinking that there could be some of us that download the tabletop rules for COH and the players makes their characters and they all meet up in a section of the map that is not being used and in say local they all play their RPG game with no powers but the map would be really way cool map just for role players with the Gm running the dice rolls if the dice roller was totally random the player could roll them in game.
It is an idea.
Layne B Landis

People are seriously thinking about variations of that very thing: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/board,192.0.html
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Voltixdark on July 19, 2015, 10:02:32 AM
Important: All of this is preliminary and is subject to change!
There are probably a number of things I'm forgetting about and will be added to this list as I remember them.

Target Milestone: 1.0
Estimated Completion: Soonish

  • Persistence of keybinds in the database

  • Persistence of window positions in the database

  • Persistence of power trays in database (needed for macros)

  • Auto-update

  • Account management
    See list of accounts and characters at a minimum

  • Dice rolling command

  • Whoall command

  • Sentinel+ importer (may be deferred to 1.1)

  • Prompt for closing main window while client is running


Target Milestone: 1.0.5
Estimated Completion: In a bit

  • Global MOTD

  • Cross-zone player search and notes

  • Hide options to opt out of player search

  • Door animations

  • Limited server-wide GM abilities for moderators
    (testbed for later use in private instances)


Target Milestone: 1.1
Estimated Completion: Sometime

  • Travel modes emulating Fly, Super Speed, Super Jump, Ninja Run, Beast Run, and Walk. Teleport is a possibility but may have technical issues blocking it.

  • Teams

  • Supergroups (may be pushed back to 1.2 depending on tech issues)


Target Milestone: 1.2
Estimated Completion: A while

  • Private instance support using arbitrary maps

  • GM abilities in private instances

  • NPC spawning in private instances


Target Milestone: 1.3
Estimated Completion: Longer than a while

  • Base editor

  • Integrate bases into private instance support


Target Milestone: Future, near to mid term
Estimated Completion: Sometime after 1.3

  • Better cross-server support for federated XMPP servers

  • Basic AI and means of coordinating non-combat NPC movements efficiently

  • Simulated self-affecting powers such as armor toggles

  • Lua scripting for client-side modifications


Target Milestone: Future, long term
Estimated Completion: Whenever

  • Simulated attack powers, possibly usable on target dummies

  • Handoff to realtime communication service for more demanding activities, such as PVP Arena matches


Wishlist
May be inserted into the roadmap as time allows or technical feasibility is determined

  • Costume change emotes

  • Exploration badges. Depends on if they can be done algorithmically, or if they depend on serverside data that would have to be reconstructed by hand.


Hey CW, do you think all these milestones can be completed by this year?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 19, 2015, 10:05:35 AM
Hey CW, do you think all these milestones can be completed by this year?

One really shouldn't ask for ETA's.  They'll be done when they're done.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Pengy on July 19, 2015, 11:40:45 AM
I always thought this, too. Most games feel like theme-park robots resetting for each new customer. CoH's mobs felt more fluid. I did notice that "I MUST GET BACK TO MY SPAWN POINT"/unaffected target running back to where you aggroed it look started popping up in Going Rogue. I wonder if some corners had to be cut to get it out on time and on budget.
My impression was that a directive came down from NCSoft: This doesn't feel like an MMO. Make it stupid and annoying! I hadn't noticed the obnoxious resetting mob mechanic until Freedom hit.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Ohioknight on July 19, 2015, 12:23:45 PM
I always thought this, too. Most games feel like theme-park robots resetting for each new customer. CoH's mobs felt more fluid. I did notice that "I MUST GET BACK TO MY SPAWN POINT"/unaffected target running back to where you aggroed it look started popping up in Going Rogue. I wonder if some corners had to be cut to get it out on time and on budget.

Until those last few releases with the Atlas Park Hellion-arson and Skulls arcs, the mob spawning and mob behavior in general was fantastic.  I never saw a mob spawn "in the wild" before those.  I found those features incredibly annoying because you could SEE the mobs spawning. 

That was also one of the things that really turned me off about Champions Online.  Sure I could save that grocer from a mob, but within seconds  that SAME grocer would appear threatened by that SAME set of mobsters in exactly the same spot -- what was the point?

I can fully understand the NPC behavior being the most complex thing in the game, the CoH NPC AI was INCREDIBLE.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 19, 2015, 06:37:19 PM
Hey CW, do you think all these milestones can be completed by this year?

That depends on what planet you live on.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 19, 2015, 06:38:53 PM
I can fully understand the NPC behavior being the most complex thing in the game, the CoH NPC AI was INCREDIBLE.

Probably one of the most ironic statements about CoH of all time.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 19, 2015, 06:42:28 PM
Probably one of the most ironic statements about CoH of all time.

Yeah... The actual NPC AI itself was dumber than a stunned herring.  It was the spawn code that was nifty.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 19, 2015, 07:42:52 PM
Yeah... The actual NPC AI itself was dumber than a stunned herring.  It was the spawn code that was nifty.

One of my less well-known contributions to City of Heroes has to do with the fact that the NPC code had some special algorithms designed to make them reasonably efficient at selecting and using attack powers.  Ironically, the logic to do this actually made the NPCs less dangerous than they would have been and also prone to being manipulated (you could manipulate them into not even shooting at you more than half the time they could have, which is like free 50% resistance).  I suggested a change to the AI attack code that simultaneously made them significantly more dumb, and yet counter-intuitively made them significantly more deadly.

What's doubly interesting to me is that the change actually made critters deal up to 25% more damage in some cases, and yet there were exactly zero reports of the game getting more difficult after the change took place (it helped that the more powerful the critter, like AVs, the less they were helped by the change for technical and tactical reasons).  I don't think anyone could even name the moment when the change happened.

The problem with NPC AI is that, as the great engineer Scotty once proclaimed: the more they overhaul the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.  Simple tends to beat complicated, if simple is designed properly.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Ohioknight on July 19, 2015, 08:32:55 PM
Yeah... The actual NPC AI itself was dumber than a stunned herring.  It was the spawn code that was nifty.

Is this simply my ignorance of the standard abilities of game AI?  I watched a rescued NPC run half a mile trying to find a place where it could disappear without my witnessing it until it finally gave up and faded out.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: General Idiot on July 20, 2015, 05:24:56 AM
One small (Or probably not so small) suggestion. Would it be possible to get some kind of meet up feature?

For reference, I play TSW and in that game you can simply click a name in chat and hit 'meet up' on the context menu. They get a popup asking if they want to let you meet up on them (with options in the settings menu for auto accept or deny) and if they let you you immediately teleport to their location - specifically, to the closest respawn point.

Here it'd probably have to be a slash command, you'd go /meetup <name> and if they let you, you'd just teleport straight to them or more ideally, to a location close by so you don't just pop in right on top of them. It's just the 'if they let you' part that I'm not sure about, doing that within limitations of both XMPP and the CoH client might be difficult. But it'd be a useful thing if it could be done, especially in the current system with no travel powers available.

Apologies if this isn't the right place for suggestions, I did look for a suggestions thread or forum but either my search-fu is weak or there isn't one.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on July 20, 2015, 05:42:11 AM
Don't we already have that? Isn't that basically /mapmove?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 20, 2015, 05:55:33 AM
Don't we already have that? Isn't that basically /mapmove?

He probably means teleporting to their exact location...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Void Huntress on July 20, 2015, 06:41:33 AM
Here it'd probably have to be a slash command, you'd go /meetup <name> and if they let you, you'd just teleport straight to them or more ideally, to a location close by so you don't just pop in right on top of them. It's just the 'if they let you' part that I'm not sure about, doing that within limitations of both XMPP and the CoH client might be difficult. But it'd be a useful thing if it could be done, especially in the current system with no travel powers available.

... Now I'm amusing myself with the notion of Paragon Chat pretending meetup is a rez, to convince the client it should give a popup.

Presuming that kind of hook can be borrowed, shouldn't be necessary to do THAT route given the team teleport prompt and whatnot. But it amuses me.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 20, 2015, 07:36:27 AM
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.

You're not reinventing the wheel. You're just reinventing the laws of physics we need to let the wheel move. No pressure.

If what I said here is any where close to the truth, take all the ####  time you need to do what you do. And that's coming form a person who medically may not be here in 5 years.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 20, 2015, 08:26:04 AM
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.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 20, 2015, 08:35:20 AM
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.

Which isn't quite as bad as it sounds.  After all... He COULD have gone to IKEA! :S
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 20, 2015, 10:02:25 AM
I'm staring into the lines of thought in my brain of possible legal issues and trying to see the right question line and avoid the web: That said, Arcana, can you be held liable if you can recreate the Gameplay code too well.

If I drink cherry coke, think it's awesome and recreate it's exact formula without ever asking that company for a hint or clue and then give it free to thousands of my friends am I in trouble? What if I charged for it and called it Rejolt cola? Is the formula illegal?

And thank you for that explanation. It gives a much better idea of the time table ahead.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Leandro on July 20, 2015, 03:00:25 PM
I'm staring into the lines of thought in my brain of possible legal issues and trying to see the right question line and avoid the web: That said, Arcana, can you be held liable if you can recreate the Gameplay code too well.

The EFF is working on an exception to the digital millenium copyright act for "restoring access to single-player or multiplayer video gaming on consoles, personal computers or personal handheld gaming devices when the developer and its agents have ceased to support such gaming". They will know if it passes in October. The initial version explicitly excludes MMOs in an effort to get it passed more easily, and they'll focus on MMOs if/when this passes.

https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/09/2014-07_eff_gaming_exemption_comment.pdf

Supporting the EFF is the best hope of ever getting centralized COH game servers running again.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 20, 2015, 03:06:19 PM
TBH, it really does boggle the mind that publishers actively try to stop fans resurrecting dead products.  Sure, they have the legal right to do so, but as they've killed the property, rendering it worthless, all they do by trying to squash fans is hurt their own PR.

It's very short sighted of them.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eoraptor on July 20, 2015, 03:46:24 PM
TBH, it really does boggle the mind that publishers actively try to stop fans resurrecting dead products.  Sure, they have the legal right to do so, but as they've killed the property, rendering it worthless, all they do by trying to squash fans is hurt their own PR.

It's very short sighted of them.
It's all about "don't play with my toys!" and yes, it is a profoundly childish mentality. But then many people higher up in corporations are clinical sociopaths who are prone to that mentality anyway.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 20, 2015, 05:38:15 PM
I'm staring into the lines of thought in my brain of possible legal issues and trying to see the right question line and avoid the web: That said, Arcana, can you be held liable if you can recreate the Gameplay code too well.

If I drink cherry coke, think it's awesome and recreate it's exact formula without ever asking that company for a hint or clue and then give it free to thousands of my friends am I in trouble? What if I charged for it and called it Rejolt cola? Is the formula illegal?

These are legal questions you shouldn't rely on my opinion for.  If we're speaking academically, then no, the direct answer to your question is almost certainly not, but your question lies on dangerous legal grounds.  For example, suppose you decide you like Cherry Coke so much you're going to experiment in your kitchen to make a drink you like just as much, with some kind of cherry flavor and some generic cola type flavor, and you find something that tastes an awful lot like Cherry Coke.  In the strict legal sense, you haven't broken any laws (that I'm aware of).  However if you like Cherry Coke so much you decide to analyze the formula for it and then try to come up with something that is not exactly the same but similar enough that it tastes the same, that's different.  Now you are using knowledge of their formula to recreate their formula, and you could be in trouble there.

Recreating something that behaves like a City of Heroes mapserver isn't strictly speaking illegal.  However, there are many ways to get there that *could* be illegal.  NCSoft would be within their legal rights to assert a belief that the effort required almost certainly involved illegal steps of some kind, and sue to try to prove it through legal discovery.

The question of legality comes down to three separate questions which can have different answers.  Does the act violate the law (is it in and of itself illegal).  Does at least one step involved in performing the act violate the law (is it technically legal, but involves a step that is illegal).  And would there be sufficient grounds for a property owner to sue for infringement, separate from whether they would succeed or not (does it look like infringement enough that a court would let someone sue you, regardless of whether or not you'd likely win).

There's also a question you're not asking.  Would recreating the gameplay code be enough to get the game back?  And the answer is no, the gameplay mechanics and technical infrastructure would not be enough.  We need three big components to recreate the game, and we only have one.  We need the game client, which we have.  We need the game servers, which we theoretically could recreate.  And we need the server-side content which is not in the game client, which someone would need to rewrite.  Things like a script for how Positron's task force worked.  Game content was mostly contained on the server side, and separate from creating software that replaced the server side functionality you'd need to rewrite the mission content (among other things).  *That* most definitely infringes on NCSoft's copyright to that content.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 20, 2015, 05:54:46 PM
The EFF is working on an exception to the digital millenium copyright act for "restoring access to single-player or multiplayer video gaming on consoles, personal computers or personal handheld gaming devices when the developer and its agents have ceased to support such gaming". They will know if it passes in October. The initial version explicitly excludes MMOs in an effort to get it passed more easily, and they'll focus on MMOs if/when this passes.

https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/09/2014-07_eff_gaming_exemption_comment.pdf

Supporting the EFF is the best hope of ever getting centralized COH game servers running again.

Even were they to prevail, and then shift focus to MMOs, and then prevail again, I don't believe that would  greatly improve the situation on its own to completely restore the game servers because the DMCA is not the only obstacle to getting CoH servers back.  There's hardly any protection to circumvent.  A DMCA exemption would not automatically grant people the right to recreate the server content, nor would it automatically grant blanket protection from reverse engineering complaints.  It would just eliminate the threat of being prosecuted for a crime (in the US) for breaking any copy protection City of Heroes might have.  NCSoft couldn't claim, for example, that cracking the authentication system for City of Heroes was violating an access control for copyright content under the DMCA (and therefore a crime).  But they could still claim people have no right to recreate game content server-side because the DMCA doesn't cover that, and an exemption to the DMCA would not affect that.  I suspect that is a major reason why the EFF chose explicitly to exclude MMOs from their exemption request.  There's a strange twisted legal judo they might want to play in the case of MMOs that is both absurd yet illustrates the absurdity of DMCA enforcement in the first place.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 20, 2015, 07:30:51 PM
These are legal questions you shouldn't rely on my opinion for.  If we're speaking academically, then no, the direct answer to your question is almost certainly not, but your question lies on dangerous legal grounds.  For example, suppose you decide you like Cherry Coke so much you're going to experiment in your kitchen to make a drink you like just as much, with some kind of cherry flavor and some generic cola type flavor, and you find something that tastes an awful lot like Cherry Coke.  In the strict legal sense, you haven't broken any laws (that I'm aware of).  However if you like Cherry Coke so much you decide to analyze the formula for it and then try to come up with something that is not exactly the same but similar enough that it tastes the same, that's different.  Now you are using knowledge of their formula to recreate their formula, and you could be in trouble there.

Recreating something that behaves like a City of Heroes mapserver isn't strictly speaking illegal.  However, there are many ways to get there that *could* be illegal.  NCSoft would be within their legal rights to assert a belief that the effort required almost certainly involved illegal steps of some kind, and sue to try to prove it through legal discovery.

The question of legality comes down to three separate questions which can have different answers.  Does the act violate the law (is it in and of itself illegal).  Does at least one step involved in performing the act violate the law (is it technically legal, but involves a step that is illegal).  And would there be sufficient grounds for a property owner to sue for infringement, separate from whether they would succeed or not (does it look like infringement enough that a court would let someone sue you, regardless of whether or not you'd likely win).

There's also a question you're not asking.  Would recreating the gameplay code be enough to get the game back?  And the answer is no, the gameplay mechanics and technical infrastructure would not be enough.  We need three big components to recreate the game, and we only have one.  We need the game client, which we have.  We need the game servers, which we theoretically could recreate.  And we need the server-side content which is not in the game client, which someone would need to rewrite.  Things like a script for how Positron's task force worked.  Game content was mostly contained on the server side, and separate from creating software that replaced the server side functionality you'd need to rewrite the mission content (among other things).  *That* most definitely infringes on NCSoft's copyright to that content.

I hate to say this, because the core of who is here did like the lore of Paragon City and it's universe, but I'm big on three things: Custom characters, superhero powered combat and socializing. The story meant little to me! If we just got "mobs" to fight while allowing those three things I'm aces.

CoH - AE Universe edition where we populate maps with custom NPCs is all I really want. Even if I had to live with existing, base power abilities and no slotted enhancements. The issue is all of the server side stuff you talked about that makes that a reality.

I don't want the entire Major League Baseball property and things. I want a batting cage where occasionally my friend the batting practice pitcher throws and brush back pitch and mocks me a little.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Zombie Hustler on July 20, 2015, 08:16:46 PM
Just an FYI, if it comes about that we end up having to rewrite the missions based off of what has been preserved in the Paragon Wiki, I am happy to volunteer my efforts in editing.

(Some of the spelling and grammatical errors that persisted in the game through its many years- not to mention same that came through in new content- really bugged the grammar Nazi in me.  ;))
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 20, 2015, 08:52:49 PM
Just an FYI, if it comes about that we end up having to rewrite the missions based off of what has been preserved in the Paragon Wiki, I am happy to volunteer my efforts in editing.

(Some of the spelling and grammatical errors that persisted in the game through its many years- not to mention same that came through in new content- really bugged the grammar Nazi in me.  ;))

Per the wiki guidelines, you can correct them: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Paragon_Wiki:Article_Guidelines#In-Game_Text
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Zombie Hustler on July 20, 2015, 11:48:28 PM
Per the wiki guidelines, you can correct them: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Paragon_Wiki:Article_Guidelines#In-Game_Text

Ah- did not even think about that! That would be a good way to get ahead of the game, possibly.

Thanks for pointing this out.  :D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 21, 2015, 01:18:35 PM
For reference, I play TSW and in that game you can simply click a name in chat and hit 'meet up' on the context menu. They get a popup asking if they want to let you meet up on them (with options in the settings menu for auto accept or deny) and if they let you you immediately teleport to their location - specifically, to the closest respawn point.

Something like this is tentatively planned for the cross-server support that's coming down the road. It's kind of necessary there, because if you have someone on another server (i.e. XMPP domain) on your global friends list, you can see that they're in Sharkhead, but if you go to Sharkhead you won't be able to find them since they're actually in a different zone on another server. A hypothetical 'meet up' function with your friends list would be able to have you automatically jump to Sharkhead@somewhere.else instead of Sharkhead@my.server so that you can see them.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 21, 2015, 08:23:17 PM
I hate to say this, because the core of who is here did like the lore of Paragon City and it's universe, but I'm big on three things: Custom characters, superhero powered combat and socializing. The story meant little to me! If we just got "mobs" to fight while allowing those three things I'm aces.

CoH - AE Universe edition where we populate maps with custom NPCs is all I really want. Even if I had to live with existing, base power abilities and no slotted enhancements. The issue is all of the server side stuff you talked about that makes that a reality.

I don't want the entire Major League Baseball property and things. I want a batting cage where occasionally my friend the batting practice pitcher throws and brush back pitch and mocks me a little.

I have to agree with this to a degree.  I wasn't overly impressed with the Coh lore.  I found the IP somewhat 'weak' and derivative.  But the game itself hung really well on it.  It was written decently enough.  I liked the different mob types hero side.  It was the game.  The teaming.  The great combat.  The A.I, the mob variety.  The interface.  The chat window.  Great animation.  Great mix of powersets.  Sound design.  Very elegant.  Slotting enhancements.  I even came around to the IO system.  (Though the incarnate system was badly implemented with a weak interface and poorer grindfest design.)  The archetypes...12 different types?  And the different mix of them in teams could create vastly different mission runs.  Team with tank...no tank, healer, no healer, non healing defenders...PBs...Warshades...Brutes...scrappers...blasters....  You could have blapper, range or mix blasters...  The variety seemed endless...  You could AE make your own maps....powerlevel in P.I or in AE, get a mate to help you out...pimp out a several billion build.  Play the stock market...hang around missions chattings...costume contests...actually run missions or TFs...

My favourite things were the custom characters, superhero powered combat and the socialising on small teams.  (I preferred duo-ing and a team limit of '5'...generally...)  I liked the street sweeping and finding 'juicy' mobs in Steel or Bricks...

The combat was pure ballet.  Kinet 'oomph' and you could win or lose on a sixpence.  Very compelling and immersive experience.  The ambient sounds of the city.  The game felt very alive.

I got a bit lost there.  But the point I made...or was trying to make.  We don't even really NEED the original missions back if it's going to bring a lawsuit. 

The clue is in AE.  We can now play with that.  Create missions ourselves.  But not test them yet.  Get a couple of thousand people doing that and you'll have all the content you need.  Get the community to create Level 1-50 paths through the game by visiting the NPCs. 

Some people, given it took thousands of volunteers to create the Paragon Wiki..., will be crazy enough to try and recreate swathes of early, mid and later mission content...and give or take a micron...will it matter if it is...not perfectly the same.  Isn't that the point?  That we can have a community led revival.  Which leads me to...

The cryptic (!) clue is LUA scripting.  That's an intriguing possibility...

...there are some talented people in the CoH community.  With scripting, it opens the possibility of extending the game beyond the game's original design..?

In some ways...the game will never be the same again.  And?  What of it?

Perhaps...by the time Codewalker has recreated all the peripheral bits like persistence of interface, travel powers and bases...and people running all their own servers...

...as soon as he releases the PVP and NPC 'H Bomb' on the community...who will pick up the batton and run with it...

...what are NC Soft going to do about it?  Sue their fan base who are all running 'micro servers' running off 'Xmap'?  (That will look good with them trying to play legal 'whack a mole' as they try to crack the American market. :P

The micro server is just talking to the client.  No IP is being distributed? 

Is NC Soft going to sue people for chatting? :P

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 21, 2015, 08:31:17 PM
Yes (well, HELL yes to all of that).

My worry after that is some tool takes this work, mucks with it with 1000 chimps in 1000 re-skinning set-ups and tries to crank out ios or PC games before they're caught and we're stuck in the aftermath.

I'm assuming there's a password/protocol to getting a client that's been thought of?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 21, 2015, 09:42:22 PM
My worry after that is some tool takes this work, mucks with it with 1000 chimps in 1000 re-skinning set-ups and tries to crank out ios or PC games before they're caught and we're stuck in the aftermath.

It'll be some time before we have to worry about that, I think.  But at some point, you have to deal with the fact that the very goal of making a distributed system everyone can use in any way they want, is that some people will use it in any way they want.  The very thing that makes it impossible for anyone to kill, makes it impossible for anyone to control.

Also, I should point out that City of Heroes had a LUA engine in it.  We never got to see it in action much, because it was added around the I23 time frame and was supposed to be really getting leveraged in the I24-I26 timeframe.  But the devs were thinking in that direction already.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on July 21, 2015, 10:13:18 PM
Can we suggest wishlist pieces? I was wondering if we could add some way to store the password and autoupdate/autolaunch Paragon Chat? I'd love to double-click PC and just launch into the game. I don't have to worry at all about security, since you have to figure out my computer password before you can get to anything on it, and I change that password regularly.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on July 21, 2015, 11:02:32 PM
would be nice to be able to collect Badges again, something to do while walking..lol 8)

This is the first time I've smiled in a long time about CoH.
Thank you code-duuudes for all the midnight oil' you've put into this Paragon Chat.
It is so much better than Icon, my character no longer floats, very stable here and meeting old friends again. ;D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 21, 2015, 11:27:10 PM
Something like this is tentatively planned for the cross-server support that's coming down the road. It's kind of necessary there, because if you have someone on another server (i.e. XMPP domain) on your global friends list, you can see that they're in Sharkhead, but if you go to Sharkhead you won't be able to find them since they're actually in a different zone on another server. A hypothetical 'meet up' function with your friends list would be able to have you automatically jump to Sharkhead@somewhere.else instead of Sharkhead@my.server so that you can see them.

I'm a liiittle bit confused by this. I thought that when I logged in to PC, my "identity" was "Felderburg@chat.cohtitan.com". So when I create global friends or what have you, they're tied to that identity. I also thought that in order to log in to a different XMPP server, I had to change my identity to "Felderburg@some.random.com". Which would be an entirely different identity, and therefore have an entirely different friends list.... or would it? Or is the global friends list tied in to the program itself on a computer, not the identity? Or would someone need to log in to a separate XMPP thing like pidgin to get this to work?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 21, 2015, 11:57:17 PM
I'm a liiittle bit confused by this. I thought that when I logged in to PC, my "identity" was "Felderburg@chat.cohtitan.com". So when I create global friends or what have you, they're tied to that identity. I also thought that in order to log in to a different XMPP server, I had to change my identity to "Felderburg@some.random.com". Which would be an entirely different identity, and therefore have an entirely different friends list.... or would it? Or is the global friends list tied in to the program itself on a computer, not the identity? Or would someone need to log in to a separate XMPP thing like pidgin to get this to work?

Codewalker could be thinking about implementing federation, where one XMPP server could be configured to "trust" another one, such that people who log into server A can send messages to people on server B without having to directly log into server B.  Instead, server A forwards those messages to server B for the user, and returns traffic similarly.  Server "jumping" is the easy way, but its a little clunky.  Federation might be cleaner in the long run, but does require some cooperation between the server ops (Federation also allows for things like a global Paragon Chat channel that actually works across servers, like the global chat system City of Heroes used).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 03:34:35 AM
I'm a liiittle bit confused by this. I thought that when I logged in to PC, my "identity" was "Felderburg@chat.cohtitan.com". So when I create global friends or what have you, they're tied to that identity. I also thought that in order to log in to a different XMPP server, I had to change my identity to "Felderburg@some.random.com". Which would be an entirely different identity, and therefore have an entirely different friends list.... or would it? Or is the global friends list tied in to the program itself on a computer, not the identity? Or would someone need to log in to a separate XMPP thing like pidgin to get this to work?

The thing is that XMPP servers can talk to each other. That's how the protocol is designed and intended to be used. Your login of Felderburg@chat.cohtitan.com uniquely identifies you, much like an email address. If you send a message to Felderburg@some.random.com while logged in to your cohtitan account, the chat.cohtitan.com server will establish a connection (called an s2s connection, for server-to-server) with some.random.com and deliver your message.

The intended use for XMPP is what's called "open federation", where anyone can talk to anyone with only their JID, regardless of which home server they logged into. We have s2s turned off on the Titan server for now, both to control potential spam until we're sure we have means in place to deal with it, as well as waiting until Paragon Chat's support for multiple domains is more complete.

Paragon Chat can already sort of deal with it, as many parts of it were designed with cross-server communication in mind. If you use one of the extended /xmpp_* commands you can add a global friend by their full JID. Paragon Chat uses a slightly different syntax for global names that reside on a domain other than the one you've logged in to. They leave off the @ at the start and use a shortened domain abbreviation that is determined by an algorithm, most likely it would be "Felderburg@cohtitan" and "Felderburg@random", dropping letters as necessary to fit inside the 21 character global name limit that we can't exceed without crashing the client.

You can see online friend status, as well as send tells across domains just fine. You can even join a global channel by its full JID, even if it's hosted on a different server (again, using an extended slash command). But there's very limited support so far for actually seeing the avatar of someone who's on another domain, and it involves typing some arcane commands to manually set the multi-user-chat service to use and then zoning to get PC to establish a new connection to the remote server. That's where the jump to friend and/or team functions will come in, to automatically "hop" shards instead of having to deal with that.

You can also do what Arcana described. That is, allow federation only with a few specific domains that you trust. When the time comes, we'll likely start out by doing that so we can test it under more controlled circumstances before opening the floodgates.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 22, 2015, 03:35:44 AM
Codewalker could be thinking about implementing federation, where one XMPP server could be configured to "trust" another one, such that people who log into server A can send messages to people on server B without having to directly log into server B.  Instead, server A forwards those messages to server B for the user, and returns traffic similarly.  Server "jumping" is the easy way, but its a little clunky.  Federation might be cleaner in the long run, but does require some cooperation between the server ops (Federation also allows for things like a global Paragon Chat channel that actually works across servers, like the global chat system City of Heroes used).

Isn't Skyforge in trouble for this. Anti-Malware programs were blocking a "worm" that was allowing player to player sharing at start up without the player's request. Sounds like this will be optional here though.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: davpa on July 22, 2015, 03:56:42 AM
The one thing I want on the wishlist is to get the word bubble, or Typing Bubble, over the head when you are typing. When the game was live it was done by:

/bind enter "afk {insert witty message here}$$startchat"

example:
/bind enter "afk MM is preparing yet another insightful comment$$startchat"

This would put a bubble over your character's head that says "MM is preparing yet another insightful comment" whenever you hit the enter key to start typing.

If we could get that back it would be awesome.  It just clued in people around you that you didn't fall asleep or that you were typing a really really long message.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 04:01:09 AM
Isn't Skyforge in trouble for this. Anti-Malware programs were blocking a "worm" that was allowing player to player sharing at start up without the player's request. Sounds like this will be optional here though.

I think you're referring to Skyforge planting a peer to peer sharing system on people's computers that in effect allowed other players to download the game client's files from your computer in essentially a large p2p file sharing system.  I don't have first hand knowledge, but from what I've heard that was incredibly unethical of them to do.  However, what we're talking about is nothing remotely like that.  Paragon Chat is, fundamentally, a real time chat messaging system that happens to visualize your chat environment as the City of Heroes gamescape.  Its using a standard messaging system called XMPP.  XMPP is explicitly designed to be a global, routable messaging system.  The question is whether it would be possible for a Paragon Chat user logged into some private server over there to be able to communicate with, and even share visual space with, someone logged into another server other there, perhaps the Titan server.  XMPP itself already allows this.  What needs to happen is Paragon Chat has to be programmed to take advantage of that, so that the person you're chatting with and you could end up in the same visual zone, separate from chatting in the same room (channel).  None of that would be considered similar to the Skyforge situation.  Skyforge was actually taking bandwidth and sharing files without the player's knowledge.  Paragon Chat isn't really "sharing" anything in the same sense.  For Paragon Chat, "sharing" really means "sending and receiving messages." 

The proper analogy is that Skyforge, without the player's knowledge or consent, turned the player's computer into an FTP server that other people could transfer files to and from.  That's why antimalware software was blocking it.  Paragon Chat is an email client that at the moment can only send email to one place, but the intent is to one day allow it to send messages to many different destinations and receive them from many different destinations.  When you shut down Skyforge, and even before you ever start playing it, Skyforge's launcher was running in the background sharing (its own) files (the big problem: many people have bandwidth caps on their internet feeds or pay based on usage).  Paragon Chat does nothing until you start it, and stops working the moment you close it (as some players have discovered), and there's no intent to change that.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 04:08:15 AM
The one thing I want on the wishlist is to get the word bubble, or Typing Bubble, over the head when you are typing. When the game was live it was done by:

/bind enter "afk {insert witty message here}$$startchat"

example:
/bind enter "afk MM is preparing yet another insightful comment$$startchat"

This would put a bubble over your character's head that says "MM is preparing yet another insightful comment" whenever you hit the enter key to start typing.

If we could get that back it would be awesome.  It just clued in people around you that you didn't fall asleep or that you were typing a really really long message.

I didn't even know you couldn't do that; never occurred to me to test.  That sounds like a relatively simple thing that could be added to Presence.  <presence xmlns="pc:presence" afk="Away from keyboard eating sammich" />.  I'm just wondering if people do it a lot if it would be an abuse of presence to use it that way.  But its sort of logical in that afk was the City of Heroes version of signalling a form of unavailable status.

Sorry, getting technical here.  The technical thread is getting in my head.  I suspect its not a difficult feature to add assuming the actual CoH protocol message is something known to Codewalker; its just a matter of priority.  But it sounds like the sort of low hanging fruit QoL thing Codewalker might add in an alphabet release.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 04:10:01 AM
I haven't really been paying attention to the Skyforge thing, but it's a little surprising as Blizzard's updater has been using Bittorrent behind the scenes for years and there's hardly been a complaint. You can easily turn off "peer-to-peer" in its settings, though, so maybe the Skyforge issue is that they didn't tell people about it or provide an option to disable it.

Or they could be using something awful like Pando, which does peer-to-peer downloads but also does other spyware-like stuff that is a much bigger worry, plus it tries to hide and seed the P2P network even when you have the updater closed.

The latest version of Paragon Chat is more likely to trigger antivirus warnings because of the code to update itself. Some of the heuristics look for a program that downloads another program as a lot of malware does that. Most popular software gets to bypass that particular check simply because it's popular. "Modern" antivirus is more annoying than useful when it comes to small, independent developers.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 04:13:32 AM
I didn't even know you couldn't do that; never occurred to me to test.  That sounds like a relatively simple thing that could be added to Presence.  <presence xmlns="pc:presence" afk="Away from keyboard eating sammich" />.  I'm just wondering if people do it a lot if it would be an abuse of presence to use it that way.  But its sort of logical in that afk was the City of Heroes version of signalling a form of unavailable status.

That's kind of why I haven't done it yet. The logical way to implement it is exactly that; as presence, so that when you /afk ingame, you show up as away on the Pidgin buddy list for instance.

The problem is that of course is people abusing afk in keybinds to get a bubble over their heads.  That's a lot of presence to send quite often, and Paragon Chat's presence to roster members is heavier weight than normal due to the character info...

I could add a second command to do just the bubble but not the presence, which would only need to go to the zone meta channel be much lighter weight, but I'm not sure I can rely on everyone finding out about it and using it instead of /afk.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 22, 2015, 04:23:52 AM
The thing is that XMPP servers can talk to each other. That's how the protocol is designed and intended to be used.

I think that answers my question.

...the 21 character global name limit that we can't exceed without crashing the client.

Aw.  :-[

I could add a second command to do just the bubble but not the presence, which would only need to go to the zone meta channel be much lighter weight, but I'm not sure I can rely on everyone finding out about it and using it instead of /afk.

Make a /xmppafk command. There's already some xmpp specific slash commands, why not another?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 05:06:17 AM
Make a /xmppafk command. There's already some xmpp specific slash commands, why not another?

That's what Codewalker was saying, but the problem is that the idea is to have two commands: afk would be for genuine afk status and would not only show up over people's heads but also show up to generic chat clients: you'd see their status in your chat client as "AFK".  But the problem is that the XMPP message you'd normally use to do that is also used by Paragon Chat to signal a significant amount of other stuff.  If you are genuinely going AFK, it makes sense to send an updated Presence message that works for both CoH/PC and for normal chat clients (remember: Paragon Chat is fundamentally a chat client).  But if people are going to also use afk as a prefix to every tell they make, it will hammer the XMPP servers with these Presence updates.  I'm AFK now I'm not no I'm AFK again no I'm not wait I'm AFK again.  That's not good.

Since City of Heroes players use the /afk command to actually do two different logical things (that happen to appear the same), signalling genuine AFK and signalling "can't talk right this second because I'm typing", it makes sense to have two different commands that do two different things: one signals genuine status, and the other just pops the bubble over your head (but signals nothing to non-Paragon Chat users).  The problem with making an /xmppafk command is that honestly few players would use it.  Let's be honest: a large number of Paragon Chat users ran into exactly the same problems and asked exactly the same questions in the first week of launch.  If you make /afk work and make an /xmppafk command and people start using them, other players will see that working and assume Codewalker got /afk working and just start spamming that instead.

Having said all of that, one possible way around this might be to change the way Paragon Chat processes commands so that /afk *cannot* be used in macros.  That way if someone types /afk or actually goes afk literally (idles away from the keyboard and prompts the game client to try to auto-afk you) that triggers a Presence update.  But if someone tries to "afk TypingNow$$startchat" the afk will not execute.  That would enforce a "use xmppafk for afk-chat" rule, but still allow people to use /afk for legitimate away from keyboard time.  You could even have /afk throw a system channel error that says "cannot use afk in macros, use xmppafk instead".

(Except I wouldn't call it xmppafk, because that's Bizarro nomenclature - the real afk is the XMPP afk, and /xmppafk is explicitly *not* an XMPP afk.  I would call it "/chatafk" because that's basically what it is.)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 22, 2015, 05:18:21 AM
I didn't even know you couldn't do that; never occurred to me to test.  That sounds like a relatively simple thing that could be added to Presence.  <presence xmlns="pc:presence" afk="Away from keyboard eating sammich" />.  I'm just wondering if people do it a lot if it would be an abuse of presence to use it that way.  But its sort of logical in that afk was the City of Heroes version of signalling a form of unavailable status.

Sorry, getting technical here.  The technical thread is getting in my head.  I suspect its not a difficult feature to add assuming the actual CoH protocol message is something known to Codewalker; its just a matter of priority.  But it sounds like the sort of low hanging fruit QoL thing Codewalker might add in an alphabet release.

It was something used extensively by RPers.  It was incredibly useful, especially for slower typists, as it let other RPers know you were typing a response and not just ignoring them.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: General Idiot on July 22, 2015, 07:41:34 AM
Personally, I think the simplest solution there might be to just make the /afk we're all used to be the one used for the text bubble and have a new command like /xmppafk be the one that actually sets the proper afk status visible to chat clients. Sure, you'd still get people using the /afk command thinking it signals really being afk but at least that way you're not hammering the server every time someone uses the wrong command.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 08:15:10 AM
It was something used extensively by RPers.  It was incredibly useful, especially for slower typists, as it let other RPers know you were typing a response and not just ignoring them.

I didn't know you couldn't do that in Paragon Chat: I used to see it all the time in-game.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 08:25:06 AM
Personally, I think the simplest solution there might be to just make the /afk we're all used to be the one used for the text bubble and have a new command like /xmppafk be the one that actually sets the proper afk status visible to chat clients. Sure, you'd still get people using the /afk command thinking it signals really being afk but at least that way you're not hammering the server every time someone uses the wrong command.

For me, the problem is that its conceptually ugly to preserve the roundabout usage of a command and invisibly break the actual intended use of the command.  And there's a separate problem that I can't estimate the effort to resolve: the game client itself (at least appears to) throw /afk commands when you idle out.  Paragon Chat would have to figure out the difference between a  player typing /afk and the game client generating an /afk.  I don't know if that is easy, difficult, or impossible (given Paragon Chat's architecture).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 22, 2015, 09:25:34 AM
I didn't know you couldn't do that in Paragon Chat: I used to see it all the time in-game.

It was like, the second thing I tried on logging in. :p
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 22, 2015, 09:31:28 AM
the game client itself (at least appears to) throw /afk commands when you idle out.  Paragon Chat would have to figure out the difference between a  player typing /afk and the game client generating an /afk.  I don't know if that is easy, difficult, or impossible (given Paragon Chat's architecture).

Oh, it does, and in fact, as I found out the other day, the client will disconnect you if you idle too long, too.  I guess that was a client thing and not a server thing!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 12:55:57 PM
Having said all of that, one possible way around this might be to change the way Paragon Chat processes commands so that /afk *cannot* be used in macros.  [...] But if someone tries to "afk TypingNow$$startchat" the afk will not execute.

That's actually not cleanly possible. The "$$" is parsed clientside, so Paragon Chat gets sent two separate commands; afk, then beginchat. The only reason it (usually) wasn't working in PC is because the client has a tendency to (usually) pack those two commands into a single packet, and PC had an issue where it wasn't continuing to read more data after processing the first command.

(Except I wouldn't call it xmppafk, because that's Bizarro nomenclature - the real afk is the XMPP afk, and /xmppafk is explicitly *not* an XMPP afk.  I would call it "/chatafk" because that's basically what it is.)

I'd probably call it /typing, since that's what people use it for. Bonus points for implementing it using XMPP chat state messages (which XMPP clients use to indicate someone is typing). Not that it will really matter since PC has no way of knowing who you're typing to so it will just go to the meta channel for the bubble, but anyway.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 01:03:36 PM
Personally, I think the simplest solution there might be to just make the /afk we're all used to be the one used for the text bubble and have a new command like /xmppafk be the one that actually sets the proper afk status visible to chat clients. Sure, you'd still get people using the /afk command thinking it signals really being afk but at least that way you're not hammering the server every time someone uses the wrong command.

As was mentioned, the client sends an /afk command when you're idle, and there's no way to distinguish it from one that the user typed. Changing the behavior of /afk would mean that auto-idle away status wouldn't be seen by standard XMPP clients.

I think adding a separate /typing command for chat binds is probably the cleanest way to do it, and use either (or both) of these methods to encourage people to use it:

1. If multiple /afk commands are received in a relatively short time period, say more than once a minute for a couple minutes in a row, start processing them as "/typing" instead and send the player a message on the system channel advising them to update their binds.

2. When loading keybinds from the database to send to the client, look for any that contain "afk", "$$", and "beginchat" or "startchat". If one contains all three, change the "afk" to "typing". This wouldn't take effect when the bind was created, only on next login, because keybinds are mostly clientside and the server has no opportunity to change one except when sending the character after login / zone change.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: ukaserex on July 22, 2015, 02:36:44 PM
This is truly dizzying.

Why not just forbid people from ever going afk under penalty of lag and map server disconnects?

Seriously, I had no idea all this discussion would develop over something like AFK.

If I had, I would never use it. I don't often afk anyway - at least, not when the game was active. I found that to be kind of rude. Sure - things happen - but somehow, I just managed to play through those things. Different lifestyle, I suppose, not having kids or pets needing attention.

Utimately, given the resources the /afk utilizes, I say I'll trust you folks to figure something out. In the meantime, I just won't use the letters.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 02:56:53 PM
This is the same kind of thought process that goes into every feature added to Paragon Chat. It's just usually not posted on the forums. :D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 22, 2015, 03:03:01 PM
Personally, I think the simplest solution there might be to just make the /afk we're all used to be the one used for the text bubble and have a new command like /xmppafk be the one that actually sets the proper afk status visible to chat clients. Sure, you'd still get people using the /afk command thinking it signals really being afk but at least that way you're not hammering the server every time someone uses the wrong command.

This is what I was getting at. It seems to me that the reason many people used (in CoH) and want to use /afk is for the bubble over the head while typing (and I'm with FFM in it's extreme usefulness in RP letting others nearby know you're typing). The question for me is: how important is it that you send out to PC and anyone who might possibly contact you that you're literally afk, as opposed to just putting a bubble over your head?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 22, 2015, 03:14:17 PM
If I had, I would never use it. I don't often afk anyway - at least, not when the game was active. I found that to be kind of rude. Sure - things happen - but somehow, I just managed to play through those things. Different lifestyle, I suppose, not having kids or pets needing attention.

You need to pee. Do you go to relieve yourself, or sit in a puddle?
The doorbell rings. Do you get up and answer it, or ignore it.
The phone rings. Do you get up and answer it, or ignore it.
Your partner falls down the stairs. Do you get up to help them or ignore their screams?
An armed robber bursts into your home. Do you get up and do what he says, or ignore him and get murdered?
Your house catches fire. Do you evacuate or cook?

There are billions of reasons for going AFK, all completely legit, and some a bit silly ;).  AFK mode is a necessary thing in a multi-user environment.  It's the closest thing we have to a pause button.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: ukaserex on July 22, 2015, 03:59:27 PM
There's a quick afk - like the doorbell, or the call of nature - and there's a run to the store or having to watch a recital your daughter is in.

I never saw a need to declare the status for a quick run to the kitchen or restroom. And for the other situations, I'd log off.

Like you say - some a bit silly, and some legit.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on July 22, 2015, 04:15:15 PM
But what if the store is only 1 minute's walk away? ;)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: spindisc on July 22, 2015, 04:32:00 PM
I have no clue what Codewalker does for a living that distracts him from this, but I would gladly support a Kickstarter Project to support him enough to only focus on Paragon Chat.

Or even a Patreon subscription.

Please consider this, Codewalker! :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 22, 2015, 04:46:48 PM
I have no clue what Codewalker does for a living that distracts him from this, but I would gladly support a Kickstarter Project to support him enough to only focus on Paragon Chat.

Or even a Patreon subscription.

Please consider this, Codewalker! :)

Funding through Titan's website is the best way.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 22, 2015, 05:24:06 PM
If I had, I would never use it. I don't often afk anyway - at least, not when the game was active. I found that to be kind of rude. Sure - things happen - but somehow, I just managed to play through those things. Different lifestyle, I suppose, not having kids or pets needing attention.

On the flip side, I use Pidgin to connect to the Titan XMPP server and am pretty much always logged in, whether I'm there or not. I set my status to Away when I'm at work and may not be able to check in very often (or may have to leave the conversation at a moment's notice), and to Extended Away when I'm definitely not there. I'm AFK or semi-AFK more often than I'm not.

I may not be in-game during those times, but I do have a presence in Paragon Chat through global channels and tells.

So while giving the community the ability to roam around the game world again for social purposes is definitely part of it, so is allowing the community to transcend that world by offering more than one way to access it. I'd go so far as to expect and encourage people who are interested in hanging out with fellow COHers on XMPP only to do so, even if they have no intention of ever using the graphical client.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 05:25:00 PM
Seriously, I had no idea all this discussion would develop over something like AFK.

As Codewalker said, this is how the sausage is made.  Some (non-developer) players might think its argumentative or time-wastingly trivial, but when you're designing and building systems meant to be used by people, this is what you do all of the time.  Some would even argue the most interesting part of writing software is the part where you're not writing software.  Its the part where you carefully consider and make design decisions, and then get to see how those decisions play out when real people interact with what you've built.  True for most forms of engineering, but the feedback loop is particularly strong with software.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: ukaserex on July 22, 2015, 06:06:21 PM
As Codewalker said, this is how the sausage is made.  Some (non-developer) players might think its argumentative or time-wastingly trivial, but when you're designing and building systems meant to be used by people, this is what you do all of the time.  Some would even argue the most interesting part of writing software is the part where you're not writing software.  Its the part where you carefully consider and make design decisions, and then get to see how those decisions play out when real people interact with what you've built.  True for most forms of engineering, but the feedback loop is particularly strong with software.

"This is how the sausage is made."  -- look, that's golden. That's priceless. Awesome. I love the way that's expressed. I mean, who doesn't like sausage? Even vegans like sausage. They may not eat it, but I'm pretty sure they like it.

I hope I didn't come off like I thought it was trivial. The discussions I see over these matters bring back my somewhat faded memories of CIS 250 Data Structures with C++ and my initial visit to CIS 120, 121 with Java - with a very brief extra credit journey into Windows MFC for an extra credit project - (and I need the extra, I assure you!)

It just brings to light all the detail that I, for one, take for granted when I do something that to my untrained eye seems so simple, like send an e-mail or a simple line of text on FB through the IM.

Don't misunderstand my pointless interruptions, please. I love reading all about it. It's just a bit mind-boggling to me to realize all that goes on into....sausage creation.

That being said - if certain behaviors should be avoided to keep from overloading the chat system, just let me know. I'll avoid 'em.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 22, 2015, 06:19:13 PM
That being said - if certain behaviors should be avoided to keep from overloading the chat system, just let me know. I'll avoid 'em.

Its really the developer's responsibility - Codewalker in this case - to make sure that he or she doesn't create a system that contains the seeds to its own destruction, and to the extent that is unavoidable to carefully warn the users of that possibility.  That's why these discussions happen with regard to any feature that contains that possibility, even when it doesn't seem obvious.  In this case there are a lot of contradictory considerations involved, including the predisposition and assumptions of the users who will use the system.

Since the whole point of using the City of Heroes game client as the basis for the system was to give people a familiar setting, its probably a very high priority for the system implementation to be able to properly handle all of the most popular use cases when that's possible.  That includes afk chatting which was a common macro.  The only issue is how to implement support in the way that makes the most sense thinking of Paragon Chat as a chat client, and still support the behaviors people have come to expect in City of Heroes the game client, both in a way that is technologically most efficient.  You know, just do everything perfectly in all respects under all conditions.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on July 22, 2015, 08:13:05 PM
I think another way to look at this is free QA. In other words, if you have devised a way to break it, please do so and report how and why (if you know why) this occurred.
This will positively affect code quality in most applications.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 23, 2015, 04:38:36 AM
Hi.  As long as we're discussing possibility further, I had some things I'd like to request/suggest/consider.

I apologize if this is in any way redundant... it's just things I didn't see on Codewalker's initial post.

LOVING Paragon chat!!  Thank you a thousand times for making this!

Best,
-Tipsy
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 23, 2015, 04:43:08 AM
I see that you're working on making Macros stay through different logins... this will be great.  Can you also ensure that the /chatsave happens, too?  Currently when I login I need to type /chatload to get my established tabs how I want them.

Chat tabs should already be saved in the db; that was working even before binds were. Make sure you don't have a default chat settings file sitting around that's resetting everything (UAC can cause /chatsave to end up somewhere different if you're not careful).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 23, 2015, 04:49:08 AM
Maybe those who drive player events get certain badges as a reward.
[...]
There could be harmless "points" systems in place that a db-write could tally

Exclusive badges are pretty much impossible to do with Paragon Chat's architecture. It's decentralized -- there's no single authority who can verify which badges are 'legit', so anybody would be able to claim they have whatever badge they want simply by editing the database or something similar. Any badges would have to exist within the confines of them being a self-challenge minigame rather than something to show off.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 23, 2015, 05:09:45 AM
Can anyone out there think of clever ways to get badges given the chat-focused constraints.

Yes.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 23, 2015, 05:18:06 AM
Exclusive badges are pretty much impossible to do with Paragon Chat's architecture. It's decentralized -- there's no single authority who can verify which badges are 'legit', so anybody would be able to claim they have whatever badge they want simply by editing the database or something similar. Any badges would have to exist within the confines of them being a self-challenge minigame rather than something to show off.

Not to play devil's advocate, but I think there'd still be a lot of people into the idea even if it's not for showing off.  I mean, at least 70% (spitting that # out of my butt, of course) of the badges in the game were already remarkably easy to obtain.  Plus, not everyone wants to bother with db edits... and doing tasks in game, if they're cleverly designed, might be interesting to some.   I'm not sure if such an idea is worth the effort, but it does vaguely introduce a little bit of a 'game' element, even if it's not especially competitive.

I mean, I'm equally in favor of the idea of just blanketly unlocking every title from the previous game for us select from, for overtop our character names.

-Tipsy
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 23, 2015, 05:36:23 AM
Another funny idea occurred to me.  This one is about travel powers.

If you're planning on essentially 'simulating' travel through clever modifications of movement, you may want to consider, after getting the basics, some New! Different! types of movement for funsies.  Such as:
There's probably other movement-types like this I'm not thinking of.

-Tipsy

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 23, 2015, 05:53:34 AM
Chat tabs should already be saved in the db; that was working even before binds were. Make sure you don't have a default chat settings file sitting around that's resetting everything (UAC can cause /chatsave to end up somewhere different if you're not careful).

This fixed it, thank you!  Well, mostly.

I am still seeing two issues, which you may be aware of.

- I can't ever "Leave" a channel and have it stick.  Some channels I joined when I first started eternally come up on my channel list, even after I click LEAVE upon the next login.

- This tab called "DefaultHelpChat" keeps reappearing, even if I remove it and /chatsave. 

(https://i.imgur.com/XaVlzGr.png)

Any way to get rid of that bugger?

-Tipsy
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 23, 2015, 07:52:46 AM
If you're planning on essentially 'simulating' travel through clever modifications of movement

"Simulating" is not the right word.  Replicating is probably more accurate: the mapservers worked with the client to produce the kinds of movement we're used to: running, walking, leaping, flying.  Codewalker has to program Paragon Chat to generate the same messages to the game client that the mapserver used to, in order to produce the same results.  But inventing all new ways of moving is a different kettle of fish.  Sometimes it might be easy, and sometimes very difficult, depending on the specific details.  And inventing new powers and abilities is probably, except for strict usability issues, very far down Codewalker's priority list (when there are so many things that previously existed that don't work yet).

As far as I'm aware, there's no way to /benpc a car, because the cars weren't NPCs.  /benpc allowed you to convert your visual model to an npc, but not all things were npcs.  You couldn't /benpc a Steel Canyon building, for example, or /benpc the Atlas tram station.  I think the cars were also not npcs.  For that matter, I don't think the pedestrians were npcs either.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: ziguzanuzoon on July 23, 2015, 08:00:06 AM
all i got to say recreating them server files may take you years also when you say reverse engineering lol but best of luck i just hope people realize how much worck the dev team really have ahead of them
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Valtyr on July 23, 2015, 10:31:04 AM
Any way to get rid of that bugger?

-Tipsy

This probably isn't the cleanest solution, but it seems to have worked for me.

When I first started Paragon Chat at release, I had a legacy chat.txt file. It was filled with whatever leftover channels I had back when Beta was a thing. So, I had old supergroup channels, a Beta Testers channel and weirdly enough a Winter 2009 channel.

Like in your case, it was supremely annoying because no matter what I tried these things would just be laying there, reapplying themselves and just RUINING EVERYTHING. I tried editing the chat.txt file manually but that would invalidate the file - it would no longer load. I tried deleting it but it would just remake itself.

What I ended up doing was unjoining the channels (again!) but joining the ones I wanted too, saving the file (/chatsave) - then double checking to make sure that the changes saved right. The chat.txt file is right there next to your cityofheroes.exe. If everything is kosher then you make it read only. Right click > properties > check the read only box.

Now comes the tedious part. You need to log in to every character and load this file. It may take several /chatload iterations to get on and off every channel. I think this mostly depends on how many new channels you've joined.

This is what worked for me.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on July 23, 2015, 03:31:05 PM
Chat tabs should already be saved in the db; that was working even before binds were. Make sure you don't have a default chat settings file sitting around that's resetting everything (UAC can cause /chatsave to end up somewhere different if you're not careful).

You need to log in to every character and load this file. It may take several /chatload iterations to get on and off every channel. I think this mostly depends on how many new channels you've joined.

This is what worked for me.

Hm. This may be what is causing my issue. I've mostly just logged in onto new characters, and have had to reload all 4 default files - the options, the chat settings, the window settings, and the keybinds. I'll have to log in to an "old" character and see what happens.

I mean, I'm equally in favor of the idea of just blanketly unlocking every title from the previous game for us select from, for overtop our character names.

This is a good idea. Although some titles were tied to origin, so I wonder if that would be able to be changed / unlocked.

/benpc allowed you to convert your visual model to an npc, but not all things were npcs.

For a list, go here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FRh-RUWpn-9GO3h4rvopYTlex6ZoIpeBCOuMlQOty7k/edit#gid=0

or here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Demo_Editing/Demo_Model_Names

While you can't be a car, you can be a pile of sandbags!

Turns out, there are actually cars on both of those lists. I will have to do some testing...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 23, 2015, 03:52:47 PM
Not to play devil's advocate

You just know I look for any excuse to pull this out...

(https://i1359.photobucket.com/albums/q795/campweezer/forum/devils_advocate_zpscjr6nbpo.jpg~original)

But seriously it sounds like we're both on the same page: that if badging is done it'll mostly be as a 'I want to challenge myself to see how many I can get honestly' system rather than a means to unlock things or show off.

- I can't ever "Leave" a channel and have it stick.  Some channels I joined when I first started eternally come up on my channel list, even after I click LEAVE upon the next login.

Known issue. I was silly and assumed that the client would be sensible, so Paragon Chat automatically rejoins any channels that the client has saved in the chat settings it sends. But it turns out the client doesn't actually clean those up when you leave a channel. It probably depended on the global chat server to tell it what channels it's a member of and to actually use.

I'll need to devise a new way of saving that information. Probably using the XMPP bookmark mechanism similar to other XMPP clients. That will make channel membership account-wide instead of per-character, but that's similar to how it worked in the live game anyway, so it shouldn't come as too much of a shock.

As far as I'm aware, there's no way to /benpc a car, because the cars weren't NPCs.  /benpc allowed you to convert your visual model to an npc, but not all things were npcs.  You couldn't /benpc a Steel Canyon building, for example, or /benpc the Atlas tram station.  I think the cars were also not npcs.  For that matter, I don't think the pedestrians were npcs either.

Hey, cars are people, too! Errr, NPCs.

Car_Compact[1-5]
Car_Lux[1-5]
Car_Lux2[1-5]
Car_Sport[1-5]
Car_Sport2[1-5]
Car_Truck[1-5]
Cars_PPD
Car_Monorail
Car_Blimp

Anything that can move independently (i.e. follow a non-static path like pedestrians), or react to the world (like doors) is an NPC.

Even the gravity geysers in the Shadow Shard and Pocket D are NPCs, and non-static ones at that. Without the server-side spawndefs referenced by the map files, it's hard to say exactly what NPC should spawn at each location and what properties to assign it.

Now those aren't combat NPCs. They lack the attributes structure giving them things like hit points. They're more like contacts and trainers in that regard.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on July 23, 2015, 07:38:05 PM
This all caused me to start thinking about what everyone is working on.
The main issue with badging and other persistent data is that anybody can edit anything on their local db to generate what they want.
The solution which seems appropriate to me is per XMPP Zone, Server, or Whatever, have a list available of trusted Bots which are able to retrieve and provide persistent data on who has what.

Example workflow:
1. Log into XMPP Server Foo.
2. Message Bot with same name as Server ("Foo-BotList") asking for list of bots hosting functions for this domain.
3. Per bot on the list provided, query the state of the character in question ("/t Foo-BadgeBot@FooBots, Query DynamicMan").
4. Update character data in local db from result of callback.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eoraptor on July 23, 2015, 08:14:46 PM
Hey, cars are people, too! Errr, NPCs.

Car_Compact[1-5]
Car_Lux[1-5]
Car_Lux2[1-5]
Car_Sport[1-5]
Car_Sport2[1-5]
Car_Truck[1-5]
Cars_PPD
Car_Monorail
Car_Blimp

Anything that can move independently (i.e. follow a non-static path like pedestrians), or react to the world (like doors) is an NPC.

Even the gravity geysers in the Shadow Shard and Pocket D are NPCs, and non-static ones at that. Without the server-side spawndefs referenced by the map files, it's hard to say exactly what NPC should spawn at each location and what properties to assign it.

Now those aren't combat NPCs. They lack the attributes structure giving them things like hit points. They're more like contacts and trainers in that regard.
That's actually a really interesting and critical point. And yes, that is how Vehicles work in CO... you literally transform into a new skin which is just non-humanoid and has different move points and hit points. I didn't realize that CoX was that sophisticated back in the day; I figured that it treated most, if not all NPCs as animated map objects rather than NPC spawns.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on July 23, 2015, 10:21:31 PM
Hey, cars are people, too! Errr, NPCs.

I seem to recall having issues trying to /benpc cars and the Atlas blimp on the beta server, but I don't recall what the problem actually was.  I've never tried to do anything that weird in Icon, so I just assumed (incorrectly) that wouldn't work.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 24, 2015, 04:24:34 AM
I seem to recall having issues trying to /benpc cars and the Atlas blimp on the beta server, but I don't recall what the problem actually was.  I've never tried to do anything that weird in Icon, so I just assumed (incorrectly) that wouldn't work.

(https://i.imgur.com/9WqrSuU.png)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 24, 2015, 09:55:11 AM
Tipsy Tipsy Bang Bang?

(Aka, I'm old)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Valtyr on July 24, 2015, 01:28:38 PM
Tipsy Tipsy Bang Bang?

(Aka, I'm old)

If Fly could hit 88 miles per hour, you'd see some serious stuff.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MomentaryGrace on July 24, 2015, 03:40:48 PM
Tipsy Tipsy Bang Bang?

(Aka, I'm old)

My Mother, the Car!

(not old, venerable... ;D)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eoraptor on July 24, 2015, 05:10:58 PM
"Bus stops? Where we're going we don't need bus stops."
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Pengy on July 24, 2015, 06:14:41 PM
If Fly could hit 88 miles per hour, you'd see some serious stuff.
It struck me not long after CoH began that, given the approximate speed you could reach with Super Speed, the visual effect must have been an homage to Back to the Future.

Also, "Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed."
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on July 24, 2015, 07:19:51 PM
Quote
Completed Items
Estimated Completion: Yesterday

Persistence of keybinds in the database

Persistence of window positions in the database

Auto-update

Dice rolling command

Prompt for closing main window while client is running

Some decent work completed there already.  Already release 1.0 is looming.  ...with 1.1 and travel powers not that far away.  That will be a pretty big release for me.

Swift progress so far.

One request I wish added to the 'wish list' is 'be npc' to be timed with the 'pvp' handover.  That way.  The players themselves could be 'npc' spawns and 'pvp' in the red zones of any given map?  (Obviously 'big' grief' monsters like hamidon would be excluded...but mobs like Outcasts, Trolls and Tsoo...could be 'be_npc' and allow for pvp to bring the map zones back to life...?)

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: AmberOfDzu on July 25, 2015, 05:59:01 PM
Something I'd like to be able to do is be able to save a few locations and jump to them. Maybe after we have travel-ish powers it would be redundant.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tipsy on July 25, 2015, 07:32:34 PM
Something I'd like to be able to do is be able to save a few locations and jump to them. Maybe after we have travel-ish powers it would be redundant.

Do you mean 'bookmark' a specific /loc position in a particular zone? (doesn't Second Life do that? I didn't spend much time there but I recall such a feature.)

The whole notion of spawn points versus 'appearing at any place on a map' is very nebulous to me, not being a programmer or particularly familiar with the under-the-hood technical side of CoH.  Would be an awesome feature, though, if it were possible.  I love anything that enables more cinematic options for RP, which is why having all the maps available for setting is such a treat.

To be honest, as things are right now, the biggest anti-RP bottleneck is the lack of Teaming.  People can't use a reticle to find each other on maps, so we're relegated to out-of-Pocket-D RP to be relatively easy to find locations.  It reminds me of a young kid who hasn't yet learned to swim, huddling around the edges of the pool for fear of drowning :D

-Tipsy
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: AmberOfDzu on July 25, 2015, 09:24:23 PM
  People can't use a reticle to find each other on maps, so we're relegated to out-of-Pocket-D RP to be relatively easy to find locations.

This is bothersome, and probably could be solved with a /jumpto <player> style command, but I can imagine lots of ways that would get old fast. Perhaps only if it was a friend. Or maybe a person could use a command to allow people to jump to them for the next few minutes, or something. Like, putting a "[Here]" marker in chat that someone could use to jump to. That's probably not readily doable (I'm imaging that the linkable items in chat have to be known to the client) and having travel powers will make lots of things easier later on.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on July 26, 2015, 06:42:32 AM
After the memorial to ascendent added, thought I'd add this.
Seemed funny and a bit appropriate to me.
(He's the short guy in the back!)
Taken ‎Saturday, ‎September ‎01, ‎2012, ‏‎12:11:08 AM

(https://i.imgur.com/EWEvXx7.jpg)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: TheFlea on July 26, 2015, 10:39:24 AM
If only I had the transcripts, if only I had them.

Long story short - Ascendant once promised a date to Rose Maiden. (Also known as the sane one who tagged along with Nurse White and was friends with Flea).

He stood her up. Got cornered. Was getting chewed out. He literally had a lynch mob of Quinton Vance, Nursie and Flea all standing there giving him the evils. And his final defence when Rosie mercilessly destroyed his reasons?

'I must go...uh...to the Moon!'

And he went to the moon.

It was hilarious. The panic ditch made it all worth it in the end.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: AmberOfDzu on July 26, 2015, 01:03:26 PM
(https://i.imgur.com/XP3gPf2.jpg)

It was 2010-2011-ish, I don't have the original dates anymore. My character, Talitha Laurent, had been at a social event with her VG in the D, and after a few too many drinks, they spoke a bit loudly about some plans to discredit a blue-side group. Ascendant overheard, and took my character aside to read her the riot act. We had a good, hours long, discussion that spanned right and wrong, good and evil, our personal histories, 'powered' culture, possible cosmic futures for humanity, and so forth. Through it all, he had that aura of innocence about him, and despite being flustered a time or two, he was a perfect gentleman, even to an arachnos widow.

I met him a few times on other characters, including a time when my reporter-character Kherianda interviewed him in (Incarnate) Astoria after one of the Virtue RP events there. Unfortunately, I lost most all my screenshots and chat logs later in 2012. But I still have my memories of the many good and great roleplayers I've interacted with, and these few with Ascendant are ones I cherish.



To stay sort-of on topic, I think it would be great if the Paragon Chat team managed to put in more little easter eggs for memorable elements of player-made history.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: TheFlea on July 26, 2015, 09:59:20 PM
To stay sort-of on topic, I think it would be great if the Paragon Chat team managed to put in more little easter eggs for memorable elements of player-made history.

I've always found the problem with that being the fact that who exactly decides this history?

Sure, Ascendant was big on Virtue. On Freedom? Unknown. On Victory? Unknown. On the EU servers? Unknown. All due respect to him, Virtue was very fortunate to get dev-attention on a fairly regular basis due to its unique nature...but it was one server of many. And I really don't think it's respectful to the other servers to demand personal bits of history to be stuck here and there.

Hell, pretty sure those who resided on Victory at one point or another could easily ask for Satanic Hamster to be stuck next to Positron and Freedom could ask for a pile of dead bodies under Atlas following all those confuse bug instances.

I have all respect for people, but I do feel that to some extent we need to avoid filling it up with tributes to X, Y and Z from one server or another simply because it starts to lose meaning if that happens as the number of people who could potentially go 'who?' gets larger and the memory diminishes because of it.

Null's a fairly good example of an Easter Egg - he was there on all servers and to be fair his bit of text actually reflects the situation rather well.

Ascendant...as someone who's resided on both Virtue and Victory? Well, the Virtue part of me appreciates it but the Victory can understand full well why some people might just be going 'And who the hell is this?'. Heck, the RP and PvP communities were different animals altogether and to be fair, used the game a lot of the time as a similar thing - a method of social interaction.

I'd say not so many 'tribute' Easter Eggs, please - simply because not everyone will know who this or that person actually was.

Because, heck, when you get down to it the definition of what actually had meaning on each individual server varied. You kind of have to give props to everyone for their own parts - on Virtue you could easily credit any SG of your choice - whether everyone else felt they were relevant or not was an individual choice.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Ohioknight on July 27, 2015, 03:54:13 AM
I've always found the problem with that being the fact that who exactly decides this history?

Sure, Ascendant was big on Virtue. On Freedom? Unknown. On Victory? Unknown. On the EU servers? Unknown. All due respect to him, Virtue was very fortunate to get dev-attention on a fairly regular basis due to its unique nature...but it was one server of many. And I really don't think it's respectful to the other servers to demand personal bits of history to be stuck here and there.
...

I'd say not so many 'tribute' Easter Eggs, please - simply because not everyone will know who this or that person actually was.

I'd personally suggest that tributes include, and be limited to, whatever the heck CW, Leandro and the rest of the crew feel like doing.  Since  they're the ones doing the work and we're contributing nothing but (hopefully) appreciation.

And, for that matter anybody with the chops is perfectly welcome to do whatever they like on their own versions. 

And I have to note I'm a bit surprised... aren't there billboards  or signs advertising "Ascendant-Os" on the city maps?  I would think those were in Victory as well as Virtue
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: WildFire15 on July 27, 2015, 06:48:48 PM
I've always found the problem with that being the fact that who exactly decides this history?

Sure, Ascendant was big on Virtue. On Freedom? Unknown. On Victory? Unknown. On the EU servers? Unknown. All due respect to him, Virtue was very fortunate to get dev-attention on a fairly regular basis due to its unique nature...but it was one server of many. And I really don't think it's respectful to the other servers to demand personal bits of history to be stuck here and there.

Hell, pretty sure those who resided on Victory at one point or another could easily ask for Satanic Hamster to be stuck next to Positron and Freedom could ask for a pile of dead bodies under Atlas following all those confuse bug instances.

I have all respect for people, but I do feel that to some extent we need to avoid filling it up with tributes to X, Y and Z from one server or another simply because it starts to lose meaning if that happens as the number of people who could potentially go 'who?' gets larger and the memory diminishes because of it.

Null's a fairly good example of an Easter Egg - he was there on all servers and to be fair his bit of text actually reflects the situation rather well.

Ascendant...as someone who's resided on both Virtue and Victory? Well, the Virtue part of me appreciates it but the Victory can understand full well why some people might just be going 'And who the hell is this?'. Heck, the RP and PvP communities were different animals altogether and to be fair, used the game a lot of the time as a similar thing - a method of social interaction.

I'd say not so many 'tribute' Easter Eggs, please - simply because not everyone will know who this or that person actually was.

Because, heck, when you get down to it the definition of what actually had meaning on each individual server varied. You kind of have to give props to everyone for their own parts - on Virtue you could easily credit any SG of your choice - whether everyone else felt they were relevant or not was an individual choice.

I do agree, even if an invasion of Elflings (themed Defiant group that was fairly well known for a while) would be entertaining.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on July 27, 2015, 07:27:23 PM
The way I personally view it was that if a player were significant enough to attract personal dev attention, and they died in a way tragic enough for the playerbase to desire devoting the resources, they deserve their spot beside Atlas.

The server he was from really means very little to me in this context.

The most any human can ever aspire to is to change the world around them and be remembered fondly, after all.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on July 27, 2015, 10:23:18 PM
The way I personally view it was that if a player were significant enough to attract personal dev attention, and they died in a way tragic enough for the playerbase to desire devoting the resources, they deserve their spot beside Atlas.

The server he was from really means very little to me in this context.

The most any human can ever aspire to is to change the world around them and be remembered fondly, after all.

Well, I can't decide if this is truly a good idea. On one hand, I don't want to think we're comparing our lost friends as you would those lost in an actual war.

On the other hand, I love the sentiment and a "wall" with names split up by server would allow for all players to receive their due. See above - it may not be taken with same intent to all.

Perhaps adding player NPCs to an echo zone? Have avatars of fallen players in Galaxy. You could rename districts by server name. Perhaps an Atlas Park 33 zone created with renamed server zones
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: APUK2015 on July 28, 2015, 11:10:22 PM
So them MA terminals allow you to create stuff to be saved to a local folder, eh?
Just sayin' :)

Well done, people. This is freaking awesome!
Running around in the maps (including original flavour Galaxy City), costume creating, freaking boombox (which I never thought I'd be glad to see *ever again* - but I totes am!)

Keep up the good work.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: AvatarDavis on July 29, 2015, 01:27:22 AM
I just wanted to say: Thank you for all the work you've put into this so far. You've done great. Watching people come together in various spots, even just to gab and talk has been enjoyable. The 'run-throughs' have been great as well.
Thanks AvatarDavis
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aceaer on July 30, 2015, 07:47:04 AM
Is there any way we can get an unlock on Rularu weapons in the game? I so miss being able to look at my beautiful eyeball encrusted shield.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Void Huntress on July 30, 2015, 10:26:51 PM
Known issue. I was silly and assumed that the client would be sensible, so Paragon Chat automatically rejoins any channels that the client has saved in the chat settings it sends. But it turns out the client doesn't actually clean those up when you leave a channel. It probably depended on the global chat server to tell it what channels it's a member of and to actually use.

I'll need to devise a new way of saving that information. Probably using the XMPP bookmark mechanism similar to other XMPP clients. That will make channel membership account-wide instead of per-character, but that's similar to how it worked in the live game anyway, so it shouldn't come as too much of a shock.

Similarly, ignore lists are not saved from session to session. Hopefully this is known too and can be fixed a similar way?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on July 31, 2015, 01:27:23 AM
Ignore lists should be saved, with one exception. There is a known issue that if you are logged in more than once when the server-side privacy list is first created (i.e. when you ignore the first person starting with a blank list), Paragon Chat won't be able to mark that list as the default for your account, so it won't be activated when you log in again.

This typically only happens if you are also logged in with a mobile or desktop XMPP client when you put the first person on ignore.

There is a fix pending, but a workaround is to make sure you are logged out of all clients using your account, log in to Paragon Chat, and place someone on ignore. Once you do that, the new list will be set as the default serverside and will persist across sessions, even if you log in multiple times afterward.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aceaer on July 31, 2015, 05:49:56 AM
Just wanted to mention, since I didn't previously. You're doing an amazing job on this, thank you so much for your efforts, and I'll probably be logged on 24/7 once travel powers are introduced.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 01, 2015, 11:26:32 AM
Top work indeed.  It's the emphasis on quality and doing a good job that I like.

My feature request is 'be npc.'

This could be useful with the GM powers planned in medium term future releases.  Be great for role play.  It's possible in icon.  I wonder how hard it would be to do it in Paragon Chat minus giant npcs re: grieving issues..?  (I suppose there could be an ignore list for any giant npcs...?)

 It could also be interesting in terms of the far flung future update of pvp capability is add a real human being factor to street sweeping..?  A hero versus a couple of mates as villain npcs in general or private gm zones..?

or even architect missions beyond that..?

Wish list :D

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on August 02, 2015, 09:39:15 AM
My feature request is 'be npc.'

This could be useful with the GM powers planned in medium term future releases.  Be great for role play.  It's possible in icon.  I wonder how hard it would be to do it in Paragon Chat minus giant npcs re: grieving issues..?  (I suppose there could be an ignore list for any giant npcs...?)

This is one that has been discussed previously, the problem is less technological and more operational, vis-a-vis griefing and other related issues.  Its conceptually partially linked to spawning NPCs and would likely be addressed in similar contexts and in similar timeframes.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 02, 2015, 04:43:04 PM
This is one that has been discussed previously, the problem is less technological and more operational, vis-a-vis griefing and other related issues.  Its conceptually partially linked to spawning NPCs and would likely be addressed in similar contexts and in similar timeframes.

Thanks, Arcana.  My suggestion was one of 'in principle' can it be done.  I'd expect it to be a 'far off' feature in regards PVP handover to a 'real time' server service?

I always felt the 'red tram lines' on the hero maps was a wasted opportunity for 'City of Villains'.  I felt a lot of work went into creating geometry heavy zones when really, all what was needed was villainous archetypes (which we got...) and the ability to 'take on' heroes.  I would have restricted the 'scheming' and PVP'ing to 'red tram lines' in each hero zone...and...used the AE functionality to create 'nemesis' missions for heroes in the game.  Felt a lot of 'sideways' work took City of Heroes 'sideways' to essentially duplicate the same game when City of Heroes could have been 'taken forward' in engine and filling up the many 'empty' zones City of Heroes already had.  Hindsight.

My idea is that as well as AI spawns...you'd have players who could be 'npcs' (of the none huuuuuuge griefing kind...) in red tram zones for that extra bit of 'real' bite to combat.  It's pretty cool to 'benpc' in Icon.  I know that for Paragon Chat it is a different ballgame due to server issues probably...and, as you say, linked to npc spawning..?

It's a 'wish list' idea for the future.  But it could be used in GM/SG private maps.  Used for street sweeping.  It would add an extra dimension to combat and interaction, in a way, taking the 'zones', GM'ing and private map functionality far beyond the original game in that regard.  I think Paragon Studios missed a trick or two in some ways.

With what's planned on Codewalker's timeline...there is a visionary expansion to functionality (I noted the Lua Scripting is one the timeline...) such as GM functionality and spawning private maps as chat rooms.  I can't wait to see how that works.

I know my 'Neverwinter' nights buddy enthused about that game's GM functionality to 'live' generate mobs to provide an element of unpredictability to a 'campaign.'

Adding such powers to a future Paragon Chat (or 'real time' server handover thingie...) entices the mind.

Here is now, though.  I'll be happy with animating doors.  Invite to and chat in teams.  Coh's unique travel powers and the 'not so far away' (?) GM capability (because I'm intrigued...)

Azrael.

PS.  From my 'playing' with SQL and creating 'NPC' costume sets...this can...'kind of' already be done in a manner of speaking.  Eg.  I create myself a Carnie NPC or 'Hollows Troll' NPC.   I get to 'look' like an NPC.  If we consider the 'pending' 1.2 version of Paragon Chat on the horizon...and GM private maps...you could...have that 'real time' role play element for...well...RPGing.  If you have a bunch of friends, one can be the GM, a few the heroes...a few the villains.  IF they've able and familiar with the NPCs they want to play and use SQL to achieve them.  Though you could, if inhibited by SQL, just use the standard Paragon Chat costume creator and 'create' a 'villain' anyhow, I guess. :)

I'm not particularly technical...however, I've managed to play with NPC carnie and 'lost hero' costumes and used the SQL to 'import' / save them into the CoH database.

I guess you could say I'm intrigued by the 'GM powers' in 1.2? :P
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on August 02, 2015, 11:42:28 PM
I always felt the 'red tram lines' on the hero maps was a wasted opportunity for 'City of Villains'.  I felt a lot of work went into creating geometry heavy zones when really, all what was needed was villainous archetypes (which we got...) and the ability to 'take on' heroes.  I would have restricted the 'scheming' and PVP'ing to 'red tram lines' in each hero zone...and...used the AE functionality to create 'nemesis' missions for heroes in the game.

Just gonna throw it out there that the "Red Line" was addressed by a Paragon Times article: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Red_Line  http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Paragon_Times/20050406

Basically it's either destroyed by the Rikti or incorporated into the Yellow Line, but all trains show Red Line for the service it did during the Rikti War.

I'm not saying that there wasn't some awesome lost potential in having villains attack actual tram lines, especially in an instance outside the war walls, but the Red Line itself isn't available for that.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eventine01 on August 06, 2015, 06:47:33 PM
vis-a-vis griefing and other related issues

This is something I've noticed. Already, there's griefers in the D harassing the RPers. It's easy enough to block them and move on - thank god for gignore that makes two people invisible to each other - but what is going to be done about these people when they're using the GM tools to harass? Is the gignore function enough to handle that? Or will a discipline system have to be put in place on the main PC XMPP server for people who misuse the GM tools?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on August 06, 2015, 07:10:45 PM
This is something I've noticed. Already, there's griefers in the D harassing the RPers. It's easy enough to block them and move on - thank god for gignore that makes two people invisible to each other - but what is going to be done about these people when they're using the GM tools to harass? Is the gignore function enough to handle that? Or will a discipline system have to be put in place on the main PC XMPP server for people who misuse the GM tools?

Those people won't have GM tools in the public Pocket D. Only server admins will have those tools in public zones.

Once the private instance support is finished, they'll have GM tools in their own private copy of Pocket D should they create one. But you won't have to deal with them unless they invite you to their instance and you accept. And even then you can leave at any time.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Stonehead on August 07, 2015, 05:29:58 PM
Target Milestone: 1.1
Estimated Completion: Sometime

  • Travel modes emulating Fly, Super Speed, Super Jump, Ninja Run, Beast Run, and Walk. Teleport is a possibility but may have technical issues blocking it.


I'm curious... once you've got the basic travel powers emulated, would there be any possibility down the road of also getting the purchasable travel powers to work (i.e. the the flying carpet, the rocket board, the void skiff, the coyote and panther transformations, and the steam jump power)?  I'm sure they're more difficult than the standard travel powers to emulate, but I don't have the knowledge of how much more so.


Thanks,
D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on August 07, 2015, 07:15:48 PM

I'm curious... once you've got the basic travel powers emulated, would there be any possibility down the road of also getting the purchasable travel powers to work (i.e. the the flying carpet, the rocket board, the void skiff, the coyote and panther transformations, and the steam jump power)?  I'm sure they're more difficult than the standard travel powers to emulate, but I don't have the knowledge of how much more so.


Thanks,
D

All travel powers that cause you to specifically move in a particular way (which means: all travel powers that aren't teleport) work by a similar set of mechanisms.  There are some odd hard coded exceptions for strange reasons, like the jump pack, but for the most part getting one travel power working is similar to any other, although each one can potentially take some extra work.  The fundamental mechanism making all of them work is I believe identical, with minor variations.

TL;DR:  Yes.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: umber on August 09, 2015, 07:53:24 PM
Wishlist Item:

At the character select screen would it be possible to get back the blue background for hero characters and the red background for villains?  Right now it always seems to be the red background, I'm looking to get updated screenshots such as this (http://www.coxhomestead.com/coh/poses/sand_wasp.jpg) instead of them all looking like that (http://www.coxhomestead.com/cov/poses/phantomime.jpg).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on August 09, 2015, 09:00:44 PM
All travel powers that cause you to specifically move in a particular way (which means: all travel powers that aren't teleport) work by a similar set of mechanisms.  There are some odd hard coded exceptions for strange reasons, like the jump pack, but for the most part getting one travel power working is similar to any other, although each one can potentially take some extra work.  The fundamental mechanism making all of them work is I believe identical, with minor variations.

TL;DR:  Yes.
So, things like the Holiday Rocket pack (Jingle Jet) would use the same mechanism as the basic flight travel power (with just customized visual/sound effects?  I would sooo love to see the Jingle Jet back some day.   :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on August 10, 2015, 04:08:37 AM
Wishlist Item:

At the character select screen would it be possible to get back the blue background for hero characters and the red background for villains?  Right now it always seems to be the red background, I'm looking to get updated screenshots such as this (http://www.coxhomestead.com/coh/poses/sand_wasp.jpg) instead of them all looking like that (http://www.coxhomestead.com/cov/poses/phantomime.jpg).

The colour of the background is dependant on whether you're creating a hero, villain or rogue. Mine is always blue.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Stonehead on August 10, 2015, 04:28:36 PM
All travel powers that cause you to specifically move in a particular way (which means: all travel powers that aren't teleport) work by a similar set of mechanisms.  There are some odd hard coded exceptions for strange reasons, like the jump pack, but for the most part getting one travel power working is similar to any other, although each one can potentially take some extra work.  The fundamental mechanism making all of them work is I believe identical, with minor variations.

TL;DR:  Yes.
Thanks, Arcana! 


D

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Prism Almidu on August 10, 2015, 04:33:08 PM
Wishlist Item:

At the character select screen would it be possible to get back the blue background for hero characters and the red background for villains?  Right now it always seems to be the red background, I'm looking to get updated screenshots such as this (http://www.coxhomestead.com/coh/poses/sand_wasp.jpg) instead of them all looking like that (http://www.coxhomestead.com/cov/poses/phantomime.jpg).

The colour of the background is dependant on whether you're creating a hero, villain or rogue. Mine is always blue.


Not only that, but there are RGB options to alter them further. Mine's a dark purple now.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on August 10, 2015, 06:25:01 PM
So, things like the Holiday Rocket pack (Jingle Jet) would use the same mechanism as the basic flight travel power (with just customized visual/sound effects?  I would sooo love to see the Jingle Jet back some day.   :)

More or less.  However, visual effects and powers that enable custom costume parts might themselves be a long time coming, whether they are for travel powers or otherwise.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: umber on August 10, 2015, 06:43:57 PM
The colour of the background is dependant on whether you're creating a hero, villain or rogue. Mine is always blue.

I thought that was the case as well, so far all my screens are red and I've made nothing but heroes.  Made a villain, still red (as expected).  Guess I'll revisit tonight after work to see if I'm wildly misremembering.

Are other folks seeing different behavior?  Can they trigger blue/red backgrounds as desired?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Dyne on August 10, 2015, 08:07:35 PM
I thought that was the case as well, so far all my screens are red and I've made nothing but heroes.  Made a villain, still red (as expected).  Guess I'll revisit tonight after work to see if I'm wildly misremembering.

Are other folks seeing different behavior?  Can they trigger blue/red backgrounds as desired?

I'm not sure what they are talking about.  Mine is always red as well, and I've never seen RGB options in the UI. I just looked through character creation to double-check. 

Things that do not change the background color:


As far as I'm aware, from memory and from looking at videos (https://youtu.be/4R4huHUzVP8?t=68) recorded when the game was live (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07CjTbIxavU), this is all standard behavior for the UI after it changed for Issue 21.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on August 10, 2015, 09:37:42 PM
The background is part of the new character creator that came with Freedom, when they revamped a lot of the full-screen UIs. It would be impossible to vary it based on alignment since you don't even select the alignment until the very last step, and then only if you skip the tutorial. Clicking on the 'Hero' button immediately creates the character and zones you into Atlas.

Attempting to change that doesn't belong on the Paragon Chat wish list, since client modding is not one of the goals of the project (and it bends over backwards to be able to use the stock client without modding).

I'm sure the texture can be overridden locally, you might want to start a separate thread about it so that the people who do that kind of thing are more likely to see it and offer assistance.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on August 12, 2015, 12:32:50 AM
I would like to have my clockwork pet back and be able to color it. ;D

....If not, then if possible, least restore the Badges we can search for and collect  :roll:
while we wait for the game to return.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on August 12, 2015, 06:38:12 AM
I would like to have my clockwork pet back and be able to color it. ;D

....If not, then if possible, least restore the Badges we can search for and collect  :roll:
while we wait for the game to return.

Pets would likely have to wait for NPC spawning, plus additional NPC AI.  That could take a while.  Things like exploration badges are probably simpler in some technical respects, but could still take significant amount of time to add as its not a high priority item compared to a lot of other things (like getting travel powers working so we don't have to jog everywhere, for example).

In the meantime, we have to create our own fun (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,11069.0.html).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 22, 2015, 06:50:18 PM
All quiet on the western front...

I wonder if the 'interim' 1 point planned updates will be rolled into the travel power update for a 'big' update to be released in time for the '3rd' anniversary of CoH's closure?

I'm sure looking forward to the travel powers...

Azrael.

PS.  I have one wish list idea for when powers come back in the years(?) ahead.  Can I have an 'over clocker' tool for recharge?  I'd love to be able to over clock Arcana's crazy fast 170% recharge on that En/En build.  Ok.  So the request is tongue in cheek.  But hey, they do it with cpus and gpus....
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Eventine01 on August 22, 2015, 10:48:18 PM
Those people won't have GM tools in the public Pocket D. Only server admins will have those tools in public zones.

Once the private instance support is finished, they'll have GM tools in their own private copy of Pocket D should they create one. But you won't have to deal with them unless they invite you to their instance and you accept. And even then you can leave at any time.

Concerns alleviated. Thanks!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Lord Nightmare on September 18, 2015, 05:20:28 PM
Yes I'm necroing, I'm evil who cares?

Now could these "dummies" potentially be made to look like any form of NPC like, say...Longbow? And maybe have a form of health? And maybe be subject to physics which would cause them to fly all over the place?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on September 18, 2015, 06:44:11 PM
Yes I'm necroing, I'm evil who cares?

Now could these "dummies" potentially be made to look like any form of NPC like, say...Longbow?

Yes.

Quote
And maybe have a form of health?

Unlikely for a very long while.

Quote
And maybe be subject to physics which would cause them to fly all over the place?

Probably.  But actually creating the part where you could hit them and subject them to a physic effect, that will likely take longer (implementing physics itself is probably easier than implementing enough of the powers system to actually invoke it, since physics support is something the client is capable of doing in theory on its own).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: syberghost on September 18, 2015, 07:16:28 PM
Yes I'm necroing, I'm evil who cares?

Now could these "dummies" potentially be made to look like any form of NPC like, say...Longbow? And maybe have a form of health? And maybe be subject to physics which would cause them to fly all over the place?

Obviously the priority should be on making them look like Skuls. Because then we can Go. Hunt.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Lord Nightmare on September 18, 2015, 07:26:44 PM
Obviously the priority should be on making them look like Skuls. Because then we can Go. Hunt.

Oh you heroes and your love of Skuls. To busy going and hunting to save the fools in Red and White.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: EsTrella on September 19, 2015, 02:48:39 AM
So, I'm not used to doing what my friends call "forum surfing", basically going through forums trying to find answers, so I'm just gonna ask my questions in here, since it seems the best place:

Do I need to do anything special to update my Paragon Chat launcher, or does it do that automatically?
Will characters I make on Paragon Chat transfer over to CoT when it comes out?
What Forum should I go on to see new updates that come out for Paragon Chat?
Lastly, can someone give me an estimation to tell my Dad as to when Paragon Chat will have NPCs to fight and a form of XP and leveling up?

Thank You for your help!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: EsTrella on September 19, 2015, 02:52:53 AM
Something I RALLY want CoT/ Paragon Chat/ WHATEVER! to have is pet cusimization, CoH didn't have this, I feel like in the power custim. when you make your character is a good place to put it, like, you should be able to choose how your zombies look and stuff like that
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on September 19, 2015, 03:21:36 AM
So, I'm not used to doing what my friends call "forum surfing", basically going through forums trying to find answers, so I'm just gonna ask my questions in here, since it seems the best place:

Do I need to do anything special to update my Paragon Chat launcher, or does it do that automatically?
Will characters I make on Paragon Chat transfer over to CoT when it comes out?
What Forum should I go on to see new updates that come out for Paragon Chat?
Lastly, can someone give me an estimation to tell my Dad as to when Paragon Chat will have NPCs to fight and a form of XP and leveling up?

Thank You for your help!

Something I RALLY want CoT/ Paragon Chat/ WHATEVER! to have is pet cusimization, CoH didn't have this, I feel like in the power custim. when you make your character is a good place to put it, like, you should be able to choose how your zombies look and stuff like that

If you have the latest version, the launcher should update automatically.

CoT, City of Titans, is an entirely separate project. Characters will NOT transfer over. Same thing goes for the other successor projects, Valiance Online and Heroes & Villains.

The forums you're on here. Specifically: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/board,190.0.html (http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,11060.0.html usually is updated with changes, although I don't know if a new one will be made for versions 1.0 and up)

For NPCs and XP... nobody knows. Paragon Chat is just a way to use the City of Heroes game client. It was connected to a server when the game was active, and that server contained lots of information that is needed to recreate the game, and reverse engineering it is likely to take a very long time.

Pet customization was never added to the actual game, so it is likely to not be added here, as such. However, I suspect that with the ability to modify costumes in the actual code and spawn NPCs while in developer mode, there's a good chance someone will make something that allows you to spawn a character with any saved costume to follow you around.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on October 05, 2015, 10:24:48 AM
I was wondering what is currently being worked on by Codewalker & Team for PC, as I was flying around the different zones last night deciding what I could do with my time, but just ended up touring the zones once again. Listening to the different music for various areas and remembering the good days when the game was fully live, teaming with friends and some good PUGs.

Thought it would be good to try and find the exploration badges again, which was fun for a time but not as satisfying when not receiving the pop up alert to advise new badge gained, looking forward to the day badge collecting will be implemented if it's going to be even possible again time permitting as well.

Just glad I'm able to have a fly around when feeling down due to the game not being around in all it's glory, just hearing the Atlas Park music makes me smile. Thanks for all your hard work Codewalker & Team.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on October 05, 2015, 03:50:56 PM
At the moment the only thing I'm working on is surviving a stressful relocation on top of an already-too-full schedule. I think the worst is over now, but I haven't even had enough free time to get my development environment set back up, much less do anything with it.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Arcana on October 05, 2015, 07:19:55 PM
At the moment the only thing I'm working on is surviving a stressful relocation on top of an already-too-full schedule.

I don't recall this being on the roadmap.  Probably a last minute addition by marketing.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: srmalloy on October 08, 2015, 01:40:29 AM
I don't know if the client makes any distinction between them and any other door on a map, but if it's possible to distinguish someone interacting with a transport object (i.e., portals, ferries, trams), would it be possible to make doing that bring up the mapmenu for zone selection? Because you'd be able to go anywhere from a portal, tram, or ferry, it wouldn't be an accurate recreation, but it would give a little more feel of things working again.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on November 12, 2015, 12:56:58 PM
Trains are working. :)

A great feeling to see them go live again.

Exciting to see the game come back brick by brick.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on November 19, 2015, 02:36:23 AM
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Draxion on November 19, 2015, 11:09:59 AM
This is brilliant so far!
Any plans to get us into the ski chalet?  Skiing each Christmas and hanging at the chalet became a bit of a tradition for me.  Being able to do it again would be amazing.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on November 19, 2015, 11:53:52 AM
It's already there.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Draxion on November 19, 2015, 03:42:42 PM
It's already there.

Oh my God you're right!

So this is so Awesome.  Thanks again  ;D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Ravynwynd on November 19, 2015, 06:07:06 PM
To Codewalker,

Four things I must say, before posting my wish list.

THANK YOU
THANK YOU
THANK YOU
and
THANK YOU

My Wishlist:

Character I.D. Profile:  Format features or code permissions, i.e. BOLD (code < b >< /b >)- Also a little more character space. Permission to insert jpg or png url image in profile.

Character Creation
(This might seem like an odd Wishlist item, but it's inspired by a few role-playing friends.)

1.  Thin male bodies, chests not buff.
2.  Dual Gender creation, or co-gender character creation, use of male or female faces and bodies.

More character creation Wishlist.

2 Upper Cranium Details (glasses + horns is one example)
2 Neck Detail (collar + scarf is one example)
2 More Chest Details for layering. (t-shirt, open vest, chain over chest as example)
More Skirts, and Kilts opened for female characters.

MEANWHILE. Until   1.2  - Since we can't form Super Groups, might a temporary feature be added by having a Super Group tag float under character name, for those that form Super Groups in forums.

The End.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on November 19, 2015, 06:29:07 PM
My Wishlist:

Character I.D. Profile:  Format features or code permissions, i.e. BOLD (code < b >< /b >)- Also a little more character space. Permission to insert jpg or png url image in profile.

Character Creation
(This might seem like an odd Wishlist item, but it's inspired by a few role-playing friends.)

1.  Thin male bodies, chests not buff.
2.  Dual Gender creation, or co-gender character creation, use of male or female faces and bodies.

More character creation Wishlist.

2 Upper Cranium Details (glasses + horns is one example)
2 Neck Detail (collar + scarf is one example)
2 More Chest Details for layering. (t-shirt, open vest, chain over chest as example)
More Skirts, and Kilts opened for female characters.

MEANWHILE. Until   1.2  - Since we can't form Super Groups, might a temporary feature be added by having a Super Group tag float under character name, for those that form Super Groups in forums.

The End.

Most of those are impossible. He can't add things which didn't exist in the game engine already. No extra costume part attachment points, no new body types, no new costume parts, nothing like that. Sorry.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on November 19, 2015, 06:29:34 PM
Oh my God you're right!

So this is so Awesome.  Thanks again  ;D

It's been there since day 1. :P
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on November 19, 2015, 07:10:16 PM
Codewalker and team, I want to add my heartfelt THANKS!!! for all the work you've done and continue to do with Paragon Chat.  Looking forward to what is to come, and loving what we have already.

As for wishlists -- will it at some point be possible to see Tim's last 2 holiday maps become available ?  The wintry Atlas Park one, and the one in Frozen Croatoa, with the little lodge, huge Christmas tree out on the lake, ice-slides and northern lights?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on November 21, 2015, 02:10:24 PM
Character Creation
(This might seem like an odd Wishlist item, but it's inspired by a few role-playing friends.)

1.  Thin male bodies, chests not buff.
2.  Dual Gender creation, or co-gender character creation, use of male or female faces and bodies.

Check out heroforge.com. It has very gender fluid bodies and facial features. I put a moustache on a lady, and the body sliders are the same for all characters.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Draxion on November 22, 2015, 11:01:00 AM
I just have a few general questions/suggestions that I'm sure the community can answer:

1) I and I'm sure others have been inspired by the work Codewalker has done so far and I would happily add funds to help expand the team to try and get him some extra help to add to this project.  Just wondering if there is any reason why Codewalker is tackling this alone and has crowd funding been considered to recruit some help on the server side for example?

2) Mission architect still lets you write missions.  Is there anyway to read mission arcs created by players even if we can't actually play them?

3) If the assumption is that everything in Paragon chat up to this point is legal and above board then any characters/stories created in Mission Architect that were original would also be legal.  I know that recreating server side code is a massive task and would take years but if this hasn't been started because bringing back the game would annoy NCSoft then why don't we concentrate only on creating our own unique content in MA?  Even being able to read a player created mission then going into a basic instance, punching a dummy in the face, (that doesn't even fight back) and then going back to the contact to read the next part of the story arc would be good enough for me at this point.

 4) In the meanwhile, how about a treasure hunt? Remember the Midnighter's base where you click on a skull at the front desk and it gave you a message and a clue as to where the next message is?  We know that Codewalker can put unique messages on doors and clickies so how about a similar thing with a story that takes you across the city trying to find the next clue?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on December 06, 2015, 09:05:06 AM
4) In the meanwhile, how about a treasure hunt? Remember the Midnighter's base where you click on a skull at the front desk and it gave you a message and a clue as to where the next message is?  We know that Codewalker can put unique messages on doors and clickies so how about a similar thing with a story that takes you across the city trying to find the next clue?

That sounds like fun, but CodeWalker is probably too busy for that, it would be a lot of work.  Hey, that was like the first cape mission.  You had to go to a bunch of zones, and click on a bunch of contacts.  And in the end, you weren't supposed to click on the glowie.  Then they changed it, and made it less annoying.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MomentaryGrace on December 12, 2015, 03:36:57 PM
I wish Mender Sally would return to Ouroboros!

*blows out the candles on the cake*


Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Valtyr on December 13, 2015, 12:15:04 AM
Mender Sally is on a very important mission. Not to worry, she is an intelligent and capable Mender and will soon return to Ouroboros after she successfully rights the wrongs in pre-history.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on December 13, 2015, 04:04:44 AM
I wish Mender Sally would return to Ouroboros!

Mender Sally never left Ouroboros...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Valtyr on December 13, 2015, 07:13:28 PM
Um. You may want to check your records.

Spoiler for Hidden:
(https://i.imgur.com/BxX7jt8.jpg)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Pengy on December 14, 2015, 01:37:08 AM
Well, it's Ouroboros. She's presumably doing some mending in a different time while staying in Ouroboros.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on December 14, 2015, 04:51:48 AM
I said she didn't leave Ouroboros. I didn't say she remained in the central pool where people were hurting her feelings by making fun of her... disability.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Valtyr on December 14, 2015, 05:30:16 PM
People are so mean. I loved seeing Mender Sally in the reflection pool. I have since refound her and given her the attention she deserves.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MomentaryGrace on December 18, 2015, 03:10:09 AM
Oooh, I found her too! Yay!!! She seems to be enjoying herself. :)

I am unaware of any disability. :P Being trans-dimensional ought not to be seen as a disability.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Acanous on December 27, 2015, 12:34:06 PM
this one's going to seem a bit odd but,
can we see our powers in the powers tab? I open it, it's blank, I'm sad.
Opening it to see the names of our primary/secondary powers would be really nice.
Oddly, the Incarnate tab works fine and I can see all the names of all incarnate abilities.

addendum; If we do get the powers tab showing powers, if it is at all possible to fill my tray with power buttons- even nonfunctional power buttons- I'd have a field day.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on December 28, 2015, 10:44:56 PM
Think the power menu etc thing is on the next major update ..?

Strangely enough...it is very cool to have some travel power buttons that can activate in the power trays...

Maybe it will extend to auras one day...and much later actual power activation against...

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Prism Almidu on December 29, 2015, 12:30:06 AM

Maybe it will extend to auras one day...and much later actual power activation against...

Azrael.

Do I hear you volunteering to be our target practice?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on December 29, 2015, 01:23:45 AM
Do I hear you volunteering to be our target practice?

...if it gets power activations here sooner I'll do the gallant thing and nominate myself as a target practice dummy.

As long as I get a tea break so I can practice energy torrent on Back Alley Brawler.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: EsTrella on January 04, 2016, 02:40:34 AM
I'm not familiar with how you have Paragon Chat set up, or what you have to use, so I'm not really complaining, but if you could, I know personally my whole family would appreciate it GREATLY if you could somehow make Paragon Chat like the older version, or atleast the initial theme it started out with, Hero Creation and everything else can be the same, but I know everytime I go to the login screen and see the "City Of Heroes: Freedom" logo, and the new song, it reminds me of all of the mistakes that lead CoH downhill, and less all the memories I have playing that wonderful game when I was younger.  ;D
Sincerely,
    Es~Trella
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on January 04, 2016, 07:02:28 AM
^ That would mean a downgrade to i23, so... No.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Shadeknight on January 04, 2016, 02:52:32 PM
Quote
it reminds me of all of the mistakes that lead CoH downhill

What mistakes...?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on January 05, 2016, 02:54:06 AM
What mistakes...?

Too many to list, but a whole lot less than in other, lesser, games.
(IMHO)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on January 05, 2016, 06:28:39 PM
Too many to list, but a whole lot less than in other, lesser, games.
(IMHO)

I'd agree with that.  Contemplating the naval while Rome burns comes to mind.  But Cryptic/Paragon did some very good work.  The basics of the game.  The Archetypes.  The 1-50 levelling.  Combat.  Interface.  ITF was a great piece of post - Cryptic work.

Less successful for me?

CoV.  Sideways move.  'Pressing' limited resources over twice the area.  Rather than filling the 'empty' zones with MORE content. :D
Rogue.  Compounding this error.  More great zones.  Beta tested mission content.  (So my Duo partner thought...)
Incarnates.  A fracture rather than a progression.  (Not like the game I'd come to recognise at all...like a pre-op for CoH 2.)
Lack of moving to a modern gaming engine.  Some say the graphics were starting to look dated.  (Me?  I just loved how it played.)
Mission types.  All seemed to familiar after doing 1-50 a few times.
NOT going back to original archeyptes sooner and making them 'more so.'
Perhaps not creating individual archetype mission arcs for 1-50 for each type.  (A lot of work?  Better than closing down.  The 1-50 journey was too samey for some.)
Game was too slow.  (Too fast for me.  But why not allow one server to switch on perma Hasten for all as inherent.  SB buff as inherent for all who want to play that fast.  Me?  I'd just slip around maps with that...)

Hmm.  Key expansions?  Sideways moves that didn't build on the core game in the right way.  Splintered the player base...while not really addressing.  Not adequately building on what made the core game so great.

...and for the money invested...did these 'key expansions' give a return of investment for NC Soft in terms of revenue and play base expansion?

Worse.  Did(?) some things alienate key parts of the player base that didn't come back. 

Subjective opinions.  But they can cause erosion of a player base.

Some may disagree.  But how come CoH is dead while some dreadful mediocre MMOs still survive.

Was it a lack of advertising by NC Soft only?  Cultural?  Politics.  Egos.  Fickle MMO fans?  Lessons learned too little too late?

*wrong thread.  I know.  But it just came out... ;)

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on January 16, 2016, 06:18:44 AM
I'm not familiar with how you have Paragon Chat set up, or what you have to use, so I'm not really complaining, but if you could, I know personally my whole family would appreciate it GREATLY if you could somehow make Paragon Chat like the older version, or atleast the initial theme it started out with, Hero Creation and everything else can be the same, but I know everytime I go to the login screen and see the "City Of Heroes: Freedom" logo, and the new song, it reminds me of all of the mistakes that lead CoH downhill, and less all the memories I have playing that wonderful game when I was younger.  ;D
Sincerely,
    Es~Trella

As far as the retro login screen, perhaps?  I remember a patching app (forgot the name) that allowed players to insert a custom graphic on the login screen instead of the default (Around the issue where Issue 12 landed I had the wallpaper of Statesman and Hero One as my login.)  If substituting the graphics is a trivial matter before the client launches it might be possible as a easter egg (perhaps as a checkbox in a future Paragon Chat options menu before logging in?) 

Otherwise, hunting that program down yourself and using it on your I24 client may bear quicker fruit than waiting for this.

As for the music and login experience after the password, no dice.  That is entirely on your own I24 client, Paragon Chat can't really do much about that.  (I don't think the Hero/Villain character select is there anymore, and if it was, what about Praetorians?  That would break the game I'd imagine.)  Same goes for Music.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on January 16, 2016, 06:54:39 AM
I remember a patching app (forgot the name) that allowed players to insert a custom graphic on the login screen instead of the default... Otherwise, hunting that program down yourself and using it on your I24 client may bear quicker fruit than waiting for this.

No need to hunt; it's right here: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,11201

Last two posts are of the most help.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on January 20, 2016, 08:19:24 PM
In terms of the wishlist, any chance of ever getting the NPC costume options opened up freely to everyone?  I know there's a backdoor way to access them, but I'm not that computer-confident.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Warchicken on January 21, 2016, 08:09:31 PM
In terms of the wishlist, any chance of ever getting the NPC costume options opened up freely to everyone?  I know there's a backdoor way to access them, but I'm not that computer-confident.

Seconded !  ;D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: saipaman on January 21, 2016, 10:17:22 PM
As an extension to that, hopefully the Sentinel+ importer will allow importing costumes whose parts were later removed or renamed.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Vr2Lrose on January 23, 2016, 09:47:25 PM
This is a minor thing but I think it would be nice if there was a way to see  What zones/channels/Rooms have non hidden people in them. As of now people  hang out in Atlas for non RP and Pocket D for  RP.

I logged in at one point and no-one was in the  D  I  saw people saying in paragon-chat  everyone  was in a GMed event but  had no idea where it was and no one answered when I asked.  so I just logged out.
people attract people. and being able to  easily see where people were  would have kept me playing.  adding a person count Zone list  would encourage themed RP in other areas which may encourage more activity in general.

 I think most people log in look around the D/atlas and if they don't see people they log out. if people see hey 10 people in  St. martial they might run over  to see if there is fairgrounds or casino RP. There are hundreds of  great RP areas in  this game/chat but very few of them get used cause  everyone huddles around the  D not  wanting  to miss any action.

And using paragon-chat or Atlas/Pocket-D Zone lists to see how many people are on  wont work because a lot of  people are logged into that via IM.

on the XMPP end I do know there is the  functionality possible cause pidgin does have  a room list and in other  Jabber chats I have there is a player count per room.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on January 24, 2016, 02:11:20 AM
on the XMPP end I do know there is the  functionality possible cause pidgin does have  a room list and in other  Jabber chats I have there is a player count per room.

That's actually not possible to do with standards conforming XMPP.  Getting a room list is easy enough (what Pidgin does), but isn't very useful for Paragon Chat since it already knows what the zones are. If some other client is showing a number count in the list, it either is depending on nonstandard extensions unique to a particular server, or it's sending a separate query to each room that it discovers. That query is actually listed as optional in the XMPP MUC spec, so a conforming server would be well within its rights to refuse such queries and not give you the list of occupants until you join.

Even if that query is supported, it still means sending individual requests to the metadata room of every single zone on the list, and receiving the JID for every occupant when all you were really after is a count. For the standard zone config that would be exceedingly inefficient and introduce long delays when bringing up the menu. For some of the custom ones that have hundreds of mission maps added to the list, it would murder your connection and probably be not too good for the server either.

There are plans to implement a custom protocol to make the player search feature work, using a method similar to how peer-to-peer network searches operate. It involves the player who wants to search broadcasting their criteria to a shared channel, and any other player who matches it and is not set to hidden sending a direct reply.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on January 24, 2016, 03:48:47 AM
Personally I think this is a terrible idea because the most legitimate purposes for this is trolling because there is no hide command.

If someone is on your friends list you automatically know where they are if you look.
If you go INTO the map and type in /whoall, it tells you who is in.
It's just if you want to search each and every zone for someone that this makes more sense.

In the actual city of heroes, it made sense because you could see who was up for teaming.
There's really no such thing as a team here.

Really, to find where the event is you could just ask on the paragon chat global channel most people are subbed to.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on January 24, 2016, 04:05:07 AM
Personally I think this is a terrible idea because the most legitimate purposes for this is trolling because there is no hide command.
yet.



It's like you're not even posting in the development roadmap thread, which includes /hide in the top two 'timeframes' in the first post.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on January 24, 2016, 04:12:21 AM
Yet indeed. If it were grouped into the second timeframe, I wouldn't mind.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on January 24, 2016, 07:40:38 AM
I logged in at one point and no-one was in the  D  I  saw people saying in paragon-chat  everyone  was in a GMed event but  had no idea where it was and no one answered when I asked.  so I just logged out.
people attract people. and being able to  easily see where people were  would have kept me playing.  adding a person count Zone list  would encourage themed RP in other areas which may encourage more activity in general.

It's quite possible that RP event wasn't open, but more a private RP mission. It could quite easily have just involved a set group of people who had specific IC reasons for being there, in which case maybe they didn't reply because they didn't want to be rude?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: crashpositron on January 30, 2016, 09:07:54 PM
Any chance of being able to use Icon commands in Paragon Chat?  It'd be nice to be able to spawn Statesman, Ghost Widow and other NPCs and use no_clip to explore
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on February 01, 2016, 09:21:34 PM
On a private server, I imagine you could. However, imagine how disruptive that would be on the public server where everyone goes.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Golden Aurora on February 01, 2016, 10:13:15 PM
That's a great idea for a feature.
As soon as it gets implemented I'm going to find you and /spawn Rularuu about fifty times or so.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: saipaman on February 02, 2016, 02:03:21 AM
On a private server, I imagine you could. However, imagine how disruptive that would be on the public server where everyone goes.

I'd love to see enough people on-line to cause that problem.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on February 02, 2016, 03:31:10 AM
I'd love to see enough people on-line to cause that problem.
All it takes is one person. So, no, it's unlikely that Random Joe will get any kind of powers like that on the Titan version.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Garble on February 02, 2016, 02:13:28 PM
Could there be a way to make spawning ungreifable by requiring agreements to see other people's spawns?

Kind of like trades.

"User Golden Aurora has spawned NPC Rularuu(50). Ignore? Make this visible? Ignore all spawns by this user? Alway view spawns by this user?"
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on February 02, 2016, 02:40:04 PM
That's all part of the planned private instance feature. Once you create a private instance on a specific map, you're the owner of that instance and can spawn things, disable clipping, etc. You have GM power on that map. It's opt-in, because for other people to get there they have to make a conscious decision to either go to the instance if it's flagged public, or to accept your invitation of it's private.

Spawning stuff locally that only you can see if fairly easy. Synchronizing the NPC information over XMPP so other people can see it is the hard part.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on February 03, 2016, 12:11:19 PM
The 'GM' powers and spawn NPCs on your 'own' map is one of the Paragon Chat features I'm looking forward to (that and the 'teaming'/ 'green' chat feature.)

Interesting that you say to spawn NPCs that only 'you' can see locally is quite 'easy' but the hard part is synching it over Paragon Chat so everybody can see the NPCs spawned.  Makes sense, I guess.

I wonder, will those GM powers allow 'random' seeding of NPCs?  Or to place a cluster of 'Outcast' on a street corner on a Steel Canyon map or even save the map so the NPCs will still be there next or will they auto wipe/disappear each time..?  Will it work like in Icon with single spawn commands?

Any clues as to what the LUA scripting (client side..?) will be for?  *Looks curiously...

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: NoreLineas on February 07, 2016, 01:40:49 AM
Having the 'Team' feature so you can track other players on a map, or at least see where they are would be most helpful.  Otherwise it's like 'I'm on the east side, but the light pole that faces south, with the crate that's near a trash bag.'
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aggelakis on February 07, 2016, 04:31:08 AM
Having the 'Team' feature so you can track other players on a map, or at least see where they are would be most helpful.  Otherwise it's like 'I'm on the east side, but the light pole that faces south, with the crate that's near a trash bag.'
MARCO!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on February 07, 2016, 07:48:55 AM
I think that it might be fun to have snowball fights, coolant fights, fire extinisgher fights and throw a disc from player to player.  Non-damage PvP system.
Any chance of something like that happening.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on February 07, 2016, 01:35:06 PM
I think that it might be fun to have snowball fights, coolant fights, fire extinisgher fights and throw a disc from player to player.  Non-damage PvP system.
Any chance of something like that happening.

Sure, they just need to write a functional powers system, targeting system, powers effects, particle effects, models, animations...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on February 07, 2016, 07:30:25 PM
MARCO!
POLO !!   :D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on February 14, 2016, 07:26:46 PM
Sure, they just need to write a functional powers system, targeting system, powers effects, particle effects, models, animations...

Sounds great, can't wait.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Rejolt on February 27, 2016, 06:24:38 PM
Sounds great, can't wait.

Not sure if serious...

A.k.a.: Sure! See you in 2 to 3 years
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on March 01, 2016, 03:45:04 PM
Can I ask what primary feature you're working on at present for the next patch?  ;)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on March 01, 2016, 06:24:27 PM
Mostly I've been working on the paragonchat_1_0 branch, which has 92 commits since it was branched and about 21,000 lines of code added or touched in some way.

Before you get all excited, almost all of that is stuff that while I might think it's really cool, most people probably won't care about. It's not terribly exciting from an end-user perspective, except that it lays the groundwork for adding more exciting features later.

Some highlights include:

Tighter integration with the COH client. At first this is just to fix some issues like the 127.0.0.2 problem on WinXP and macs, but it's done in a way that opens the door for more interesting things.
Multithreaded data loading for faster startup.
Improving the new user experience -- making it easier to install Paragon Chat and locate your COH files for it to use.
Complete separation from the Issue 24 beta install directory. Paragon Chat reads the files from there, but now lives completely in its own location and never needs to write anything to the COH folder. This helps avoid UAC issues for people who still have it under Program Files.
User interface improvements and polish.
Better debug logging and lots of other features to aid in development.
Fixing and cleaning up a lot of stuff that was rushed in order to get Paragon Chat usable enough to be beta-worthy, and doing it the right way.
Fixing most of the issues with long path names and non-ASCII characters in directory names.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on March 01, 2016, 07:05:17 PM
Mostly I've been working on the paragonchat_1_0 branch, which has 92 commits since it was branched and about 21,000 lines of code added or touched in some way.

Before you get all excited, almost all of that is stuff that while I might think it's really cool, most people probably won't care about. It's not terribly exciting from an end-user perspective, except that it lays the groundwork for adding more exciting features later.

Some highlights include:

Tighter integration with the COH client. At first this is just to fix some issues like the 127.0.0.2 problem on WinXP and macs, but it's done in a way that opens the door for more interesting things.
Multithreaded data loading for faster startup.
Improving the new user experience -- making it easier to install Paragon Chat and locate your COH files for it to use.
Complete separation from the Issue 24 beta install directory. Paragon Chat reads the files from there, but now lives completely in its own location and never needs to write anything to the COH folder. This helps avoid UAC issues for people who still have it under Program Files.
User interface improvements and polish.
Better debug logging and lots of other features to aid in development.
Fixing and cleaning up a lot of stuff that was rushed in order to get Paragon Chat usable enough to be beta-worthy, and doing it the right way.
Fixing most of the issues with long path names and non-ASCII characters in directory names.

Thank you for the reply, it sounds like you have your hands full for the time being  :) Keep up the good work!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on March 04, 2016, 09:48:44 AM
Mostly I've been working on the paragonchat_1_0 branch, which has 92 commits since it was branched and about 21,000 lines of code added or touched in some way.

Before you get all excited, almost all of that is stuff that while I might think it's really cool, most people probably won't care about. It's not terribly exciting from an end-user perspective, except that it lays the groundwork for adding more exciting features later.

Some highlights include:

Tighter integration with the COH client. At first this is just to fix some issues like the 127.0.0.2 problem on WinXP and macs, but it's done in a way that opens the door for more interesting things.
Multithreaded data loading for faster startup.
Improving the new user experience -- making it easier to install Paragon Chat and locate your COH files for it to use.
Complete separation from the Issue 24 beta install directory. Paragon Chat reads the files from there, but now lives completely in its own location and never needs to write anything to the COH folder. This helps avoid UAC issues for people who still have it under Program Files.
User interface improvements and polish.
Better debug logging and lots of other features to aid in development.
Fixing and cleaning up a lot of stuff that was rushed in order to get Paragon Chat usable enough to be beta-worthy, and doing it the right way.
Fixing most of the issues with long path names and non-ASCII characters in directory names.

92 Commits?  What are 'commits?'  *curiously.

(21,000 lines/edits of code is some going.) 

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on March 04, 2016, 01:59:55 PM
Commit is defined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control#Structure

Also, the 21,000 LOC estimate does exclude 3 files in particular that had a total of 335,953 lines added. However, those files are autogenerated by a script, so I don't count them (but I do count the contents of the script itself).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on March 05, 2016, 05:03:08 PM
Not sure if this has been submitted. Is it possible to install new Advertisement signs in Paragon Chat?
Like the Major Flanders, Up. Up and Away signs? ???
During the CoH game, I once saw a Tony Hawk ad....so I know it has been done before.

I'm not suggesting serious ads- like for Allergy medicines or Acne, just something Fun to liven things up in 
Paragon Chat.... :roll:
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Floride on March 05, 2016, 05:29:41 PM
Not sure if this has been submitted. Is it possible to install new Advertisement signs in Paragon Chat?
Like the Major Flanders, Up. Up and Away signs? ???
During the CoH game, I once saw a Tony Hawk ad....so I know it has been done before.

I'm not suggesting serious ads- like for Allergy medicines or Acne, just something Fun to liven things up in 
Paragon Chat.... :roll:
I know it would depend on how hard it is to implement, but I just wanted to chime in and 'second' this idea.

(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-aP-CnwIwRCQ%2FTWvgaggZNqI%2FAAAAAAAAMD4%2F-_RYaQbsxGY%2Fs400%2Ftumblr_lhc6bsex2u1qa6qs8o1_500.jpg)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyx Nought Nothing on March 05, 2016, 10:08:43 PM
Any ETA on adding Beast Run? While it's not a high priority for me i do know some people have been asking about it. And hey, at least it's not Teleport.  8)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on March 06, 2016, 06:19:12 PM
I know it would depend on how hard it is to implement, but I just wanted to chime in and 'second' this idea.


I remember that advert you drew...Yezz, that would be nice to post.  ;)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: chuckv3 on March 06, 2016, 07:14:05 PM
I'm sure these are just texture files in the PIGGs. Someone who has done a lot of poking around in there should be able to tell you where they are. The it's just a matter of putting files into the right directory to supercede those in the PIGGs. Maybe if I continue to be bored sh*tless at work this week (we're about 5 weeks ahead on our current project) than I'll poke around myself.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on March 07, 2016, 01:04:42 AM
yezz, anything to liven up Paragon Chat is useful. :P

If it's doable perhaps 'powers that be' can hold Ad contests and we submit designs for judging.
...then maybe winners get their work inserted  as update patches.?
maybe change out every quarter or something?

just my random thoughts.... ;D
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Linuial on March 23, 2016, 06:14:18 AM
I have a couple of suggestions....I don't know if anyone has already suggested these, so please don't throw anything harder than marshmallows...

What about resurrecting Teleport Other?  I suspect it would be a lot easier than Teleport, and we could use it to set up the Taxi Tours again, which could be a lot of fun. 

I'd like to place my vote for any of the Claws animations. 

I am *dying* to see the Cavern of Transcendence map!  Holy Hero One!  We finally got a way to "bust" the mission every time, but it was so boring, that as soon as we finished and stopped the timer, everyone left.  There was no way to "kill all" before the timer ran out, so it was stealth and tp all the way to the end.  I always wanted to get a team to finish, stop the timer, and THEN kill all, so we could finally see the entire map, but was never able to persuade an entire team to do so, and anything less than an entire team couldn't defeat the mobs.  I'm willing to bet there are very few people who *have* ever seen the entire map!  (I found Karsis in Paragon Chat, but couldn't locate the entrance to the cavern...) 

I went to Terra Volta and was disappointed that it was the outside map, not inside the reactor. 

Is there any chance to see the final inside map for the Hess TF?  The one with the giant robot? 

There are no words to express my thanks and admiration for what you have accomplished here.  Character Creation was always my favorite part of CoX, and I spent many a happy (if sleepless) night just making another toon. 
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Jeff Anderson on April 01, 2016, 02:03:18 AM
Any ETA on adding Beast Run? While it's not a high priority for me i do know some people have been asking about it. And hey, at least it's not Teleport.  8)

Assume you checked out the notes on release 1.0?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Jeff Anderson on April 01, 2016, 02:06:31 AM
Lua scripting environment, I would kill for that. I'd hire a couple of devs just to code a virtual tabletop on top of PCHat and share the results with the community if I could get that and the GM environments.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: GammaPaladin on April 06, 2016, 12:13:16 AM
I'd agree with that.  Contemplating the naval while Rome burns comes to mind.  But Cryptic/Paragon did some very good work.  The basics of the game.  The Archetypes.  The 1-50 levelling.  Combat.  Interface.  ITF was a great piece of post - Cryptic work.

Less successful for me?

CoV.  Sideways move.  'Pressing' limited resources over twice the area.  Rather than filling the 'empty' zones with MORE content. :D
Rogue.  Compounding this error.  More great zones.  Beta tested mission content.  (So my Duo partner thought...)
Incarnates.  A fracture rather than a progression.  (Not like the game I'd come to recognise at all...like a pre-op for CoH 2.)
Lack of moving to a modern gaming engine.  Some say the graphics were starting to look dated.  (Me?  I just loved how it played.)
Mission types.  All seemed to familiar after doing 1-50 a few times.
NOT going back to original archeyptes sooner and making them 'more so.'
Perhaps not creating individual archetype mission arcs for 1-50 for each type.  (A lot of work?  Better than closing down.  The 1-50 journey was too samey for some.)
Game was too slow.  (Too fast for me.  But why not allow one server to switch on perma Hasten for all as inherent.  SB buff as inherent for all who want to play that fast.  Me?  I'd just slip around maps with that...)

Hmm.  Key expansions?  Sideways moves that didn't build on the core game in the right way.  Splintered the player base...while not really addressing.  Not adequately building on what made the core game so great.

...and for the money invested...did these 'key expansions' give a return of investment for NC Soft in terms of revenue and play base expansion?

Worse.  Did(?) some things alienate key parts of the player base that didn't come back. 

Subjective opinions.  But they can cause erosion of a player base.

Some may disagree.  But how come CoH is dead while some dreadful mediocre MMOs still survive.

Was it a lack of advertising by NC Soft only?  Cultural?  Politics.  Egos.  Fickle MMO fans?  Lessons learned too little too late?

*wrong thread.  I know.  But it just came out... ;)

Azrael.
Sort of a massively lagged reply, considering how long ago this was posted, but I thought it was interesting that I disagree with you on most of this ;)

CoV was great, the game needed more ATs. I wasn't a fan of them strictly dividing the hero and villain games, but I think that was a Statesman/Cryptic decision, which would explain why I hated it ;)
Going Rogue was even better, and absolutely needed. Getting rid of the silly and arbitrary distinction between hero and villain ATs was something that had been needed for a long long time.  In fact, Paragon Studios kept continually knocking down the walls separating CoH and CoV, which was a very good decision to me.

Incarnates I can't comment on much, I had some level 50s but I had MASSIVE altitis... I only played on Virtue but I had purchased the maximum number of character slots, and had every last one of them filled, so I got a second account just so that I could keep creating new characters when the whim took me. So I spent a lot of time at low levels and not a lot at high levels. Plus I had gone one one of my many vacations from the game just before it went F2P, and when I got around to wanting to jump back in again, the game had just gone offline :/

Separate mission sets for ATs would have just made me angry. I was vehemently opposed to any content being restricted to a specific AT or origin. The type of character I want to play should NOT dictate what my story will be. Too samey? A huge part of the appeal to me was that it didn't matter what missions you did, the game was so different for every powerset, let alone each AT. The gameplay was so diverse.

In the end... I liked the game when it first released. I liked it less and less with every change Cryptic made to it. And then found myself liking it more and more after they thankfully left to build Crapions Online and Positron got put in charge of it. Pretty much everything they did after that was massive win to me. It just seemed like Jack/Cryptic wanted CoH to be like EQ or DAoC and were peeved that it got played totally differently when the players got a hold of it. Constant nerfs and changes that all seemed aimed at slowing you down and forcing you to fight fewer enemies at once when the joy of the game was that you were a SUPERHERO who could stand in the midst of 10 mobs and smash them all, not like EQ/DAoC where you were forced to cower and carefully pull one enemy at a time lest you die horribly.

Positron's team continually buffed the players, and offered conveniences and things that made the game faster, easier and less frustrating to level and gear up, and just generally brought back the feeling of being "super" for me.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: GammaPaladin on April 06, 2016, 07:49:08 PM
Oh uh... I had intended to post this with my last post, but forgot. A feature suggestion, which I think would be the biggest benefit for people who might want to code bots or server-side plugins for this with the smallest possible amount of code investment for you, Codewalker, would be to have a debug console mode that would display (And optionally log) every network message that PC intercepts from the CoH client, and every message it sends back to the client, and a config file allowing a simple CoH protocol to xml stanza mapping...

That way people interested in trying to implement advanced features could do things like create a bot and tell PC (Using the config file) to send X stanza with Y data when it receives Z message from the client, and vice-versa. So we could watch the debug console to figure out messages we want to handle, and have them sent to a bot, or a server plugin, and have the bot/plugin do processing and reply, and PC would again use the mappings in the config file to translate that back to send to the client.

The config file would be the most complicated part, and ultimately the Lua scripting system would be needed for really complex things (Pretty much anything beyond simple variable replacement you wouldn't want to be implementing yourself), but templates with variable replacement should be simple enough and the debug console should be trivial enough, and it would let people get started on relatively complex things at least.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on April 06, 2016, 09:06:11 PM
Oh uh... I had intended to post this with my last post, but forgot. A feature suggestion, which I think would be the biggest benefit for people who might want to code bots or server-side plugins for this with the smallest possible amount of code investment for you, Codewalker, would be to have a debug console mode that would display (And optionally log) every network message that PC intercepts from the CoH client, and every message it sends back to the client, and a config file allowing a simple CoH protocol to xml stanza mapping...

That woudn't be nearly as simple or as useful as it might sound. The CoH network protocol is not a network protocol as you'd think in terms of a list of commands and 'move here, do X'. It does have some commands, but those commands work on a level more like a state synchronization engine. All of the messages are custom, and tightly packed on a bitwise level, so in order to successfully read a command out of the stream you have to already know what it does and how to handle it, and must have the proper context to be able to decode it as well. There's no framing information (length indicator or similar), either, so if multiple messages are packed into a packet and you don't know how to decode the first one, you're not getting any of them.

Imagine if you had a single player game, took the code and duplicated it, then deleted 1/3 of of it from one copy and called it "client", 1/3 of it from the other and called it "server", and made them talk to each other by dumping the raw memory contents of internal data structures over the network. It's not quite that extreme, but it's not far off.

Because of that, it's not something that can be cleanly separated from the implementation. You can't pick and choose what you want to handle. Your bot would need many of the COH data files loaded in memory, as well as have a pretty complete picture of the state of all the entities on the map to even understand what the messages from the client were saying. In order to build that map it would have to process the majority of the client messages itself.

Adding the ability for Paragon Chat to translate that into something human-readable is about as much work as just implementing the functionality to respond to it.

There are plans to implement more programmer friendly hooks and expose them through a lua interface, but the local engine instance will do most of the heavy lifting to get the state of the world into something that can be manipulated by people who don't know every little detail, and who wish to keep their sanity.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: GammaPaladin on April 06, 2016, 10:56:12 PM
Hmm... Well, I guess I'm just the crazy type, I like trying to decode complicated puzzles like binary file formats and such, so it seemed like something that would be fun to have access to ;)

I suppose I could always poke at the code in the Woofers github if I wanted to learn a bit of the protocol though. Assuming they actually got anywhere with that project anyway.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on April 07, 2016, 02:33:23 AM
I guess I could put in a hex dump of the raw bytes without too much trouble. Actual detail on it wouldn't be very doable since the code isn't set up that way. Can't exactly use plain old structs for it when most of the protocol is conditional and branches all over the place. Things like if bit#7 is set, it's followed by a string, a 5-bit value, and a packed value, otherwise a 2-bit value.

I suppose I could always poke at the code in the Woofers github if I wanted to learn a bit of the protocol though. Assuming they actually got anywhere with that project anyway.

You'd be better off looking at the SEGS code if it's still up somewhere. Last I looked at it, it looked like somebody tossed a half-working authserver implementation on github, called it Woofers, then abandoned it. It hadn't been touched in over a year.

The auth protocol isn't very interesting because it's already well known and uses a completely different protocol over TCP that isn't used for anything else. It isn't even necessary to have. Paragon Chat doesn't use the auth protocol; the client can connect to a dbserver without authentication for testing.

SEGS at least implements most of the underlying UDP transport, which really hasn't changed that much since Issue 3 or whatever they're using. It's missing the key exchange, so it requires a hacked client to disable encryption, but I think most of the bit stream operations are the same.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on April 08, 2016, 01:58:07 PM
Codewalker do you think there is a chance that the explore badges will ever be active again for collecting? And if when exploring the zones you clear the black covering on the map it stays clear even when zoning back and forth? Great work with PC already love being able to explore the zones again  :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on April 08, 2016, 02:13:03 PM
Quote
and things that made the game faster, easier

That was part of their undoing.

Castrating the Hollows one of many examples.

Azrael.

Quote
you were a SUPERHERO who could stand in the midst of 10 mobs and smash them all

I liked pre-4 for that.  Even after issue 4 you could still aggro a decent amount.  Great feeling 'tanking' the 'eye of the storm.'
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on April 14, 2016, 07:43:13 AM
Codewalker do you think there is a chance that the explore badges will ever be active again for collecting? And if when exploring the zones you clear the black covering on the map it stays clear even when zoning back and forth? Great work with PC already love being able to explore the zones again  :)

Codewalker not sure if you've seen this post ^ Was wondering if either of these would be possible in the future?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: saipaman on April 14, 2016, 08:24:28 PM
I'm sure we would see a lot more people on-line if exploration badges could be re-implemented.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: nicoliy on April 15, 2016, 04:03:11 PM
If I had a realistic wish list (no combat) it would be:

Explorer badges, base building, and to tie some mission maps to doors (not sure where). I know I can get to the mission maps, but it'd be fun if clicking on a door brought you in a building for one.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on April 16, 2016, 03:54:41 PM
If I had a realistic wish list (no combat) it would be:

Explorer badges, base building, and to tie some mission maps to doors (not sure where). I know I can get to the mission maps, but it'd be fun if clicking on a door brought you in a building for one.

I think that's a good idea.  Being to click on a door to go to random mission maps.

I think that's one that could go on the wish list or timeline?  Only Codewalker would know if that was doable.

Re super bases.  They're on the timeline at some point.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on April 17, 2016, 11:09:20 PM
...couldn't resist.
(https://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i451/BlueDalek/Ad_zpsl3tbpezd.gif)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Floride on April 18, 2016, 07:41:51 AM
Codewalker do you think there is a chance that the explore badges will ever be active again for collecting? And if when exploring the zones you clear the black covering on the map it stays clear even when zoning back and forth? Great work with PC already love being able to explore the zones again  :)
I found this...

The badge markers are in their locations, they can be seen if you're close (they have a quite short draw distance). The invisible volumes used to trigger exploration badges are present as well. However, the name on the volume does not match the name of the badge and there's no known correlation between them.

Most likely said correlation was in the Requires field of the badge, however that field is flagged ServerOnly and is blank in badges.bin. Presumably so that players couldn't peek and find out how to get badges that don't have an explicit hint string.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on April 18, 2016, 12:39:51 PM
Thanks for the find, looks like not going to happen any time soon  :(
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on April 18, 2016, 04:42:09 PM
Thanks for the find, looks like not going to happen any time soon  :(

More to the point, even if he COULD, that would mean replicating copyrighted information, and that goes into a grim and dark place from which there is no escape...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on April 18, 2016, 05:50:24 PM
Well, with the Wiki, we do know which badges are where. So I'm confident that there is a way to make tags, and implement something that replicates the function of the server.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on May 14, 2016, 01:09:04 PM
Well, with the Wiki, we do know which badges are where. So I'm confident that there is a way to make tags, and implement something that replicates the function of the server.

'Simulated Badge Hunting?' ;)

Azrael.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: slickriptide on May 15, 2016, 05:03:23 AM
'Simulated Badge Hunting?' ;)

Azrael.

IMO, what you need to ask is "What does badge hunting mean to you?"

There's no central server so there's no inherent way to tell a client that you found a badge or take an appropriate action.

If you used existing technology to simulate badge hunting, you'd do something like Dyne was working on last fall for exploration badges - a bot whose purpose is to sit quietly, monitor the location of people, and send them a /tell when their computed location coincided with a badge location.

You have the problem of persistence at that point. How do you make a permanent record? It's not that it's difficult to do that, but more that you want to do it in a way that's simple and little or no work for the player to interact with. Ideally, you want it to be something the player can share with other players.

If a scripting engine is built into the client then you can get fancier; possibly activating whatever triggers already exist in the client to display badge award banners, and recording badges to a .ini file or a database file on the client.

If you're a "player" today, do you want any kind of badging experience you can get now, or do you want to wait for the tools to have it done "right", for values of "right" that most closely approximate the original CoH experience?

Do you want the identical badging experience you had with CoH or are you open to having new "badges" to explore for and collect?

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on May 15, 2016, 12:49:51 PM
Just for the record, badges are way down on my list of junk I would like to see/have in PC.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: General Idiot on May 16, 2016, 12:05:54 PM
Pretty far down mine as well, behind things like the base editor and simulated powers for things like toggle auras. Both of which are probably harder to do than badges though, so chances are we're more likely to get those first.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aoide on May 26, 2016, 02:49:43 PM
If this has been asked before, I'm sorry.  And I know it's basically normal Flight with some extra effects, but is it possible to get the Peacebringer version of flight added as a Travel Power?  I know it wouldn't be a priority, but since we already have travel powers that are the same, but just with different animations (i.e. Ninja and Beast Runs) I figure that it couldn't help to ask.

Thanks, and sorry if it's already been asked, or in the planning stages, or just isn't possible.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on May 26, 2016, 03:57:15 PM
I had previously been holding off on stuff like that because power trays couldn't be customized, and the one default tray had limited room in it.

Now that they are being saved correctly, it's doable for new ones to be added as time allows, similar to Beast Run where it's not on the bar by default but can be dragged there from the powers list.

Note that Cosmic Flight is somewhat of a special case since it comes from the Peacebringer inherent set. If and when we ever get a proper concept of character-owned powers (this will be necessary to get custom weapons to be available), it's possible that non-Peacebringers may lose access to it at some point. So if this does get added and you plan to use it, roll your character as a PB to be on the safe side!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on May 26, 2016, 06:35:10 PM
Personally, I'd rather have the PB/WS forms, if that becomes possible! :P
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aoide on May 26, 2016, 07:04:11 PM
I had previously been holding off on stuff like that because power trays couldn't be customized, and the one default tray had limited room in it.

Now that they are being saved correctly, it's doable for new ones to be added as time allows, similar to Beast Run where it's not on the bar by default but can be dragged there from the powers list.

Note that Cosmic Flight is somewhat of a special case since it comes from the Peacebringer inherent set. If and when we ever get a proper concept of character-owned powers (this will be necessary to get custom weapons to be available), it's possible that non-Peacebringers may lose access to it at some point. So if this does get added and you plan to use it, roll your character as a PB to be on the safe side!

Thank you for even considering this, and ahead of time for any and all effort that you put into this if/when you do it!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Aoide on May 26, 2016, 07:10:24 PM
Personally, I'd rather have the PB/WS forms, if that becomes possible! :P

And the forms would be nice, as a different 'possibly down the line' thing (as is I know there a lot of more important stuff than doing this, as well as those things being more important than adding Cosmic Flight to PC).  I'm just one of those people who tended to try and work the glowing eye effect from CF into my costumes so that I was happy with them regardless of the fact of if that effect is on or off (or to look at it a different way, I tended to view the effects more like an Aura, thus I'd treat a costume like two different ones depending on if the CF effects were active or not).  In turn though that's left me feeling like my costume is only half as good as it could be, since people are only getting the non-CF added effects version.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on July 09, 2016, 06:24:38 AM
Is there currently any way to trigger power animations?  I've a Nature Controller character and it would be great to be able to trigger some of the various 'bloom' animations.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on July 09, 2016, 06:44:54 PM
Power Animations were a two-way transaction: there'd have to be a target for most of them in order for the full animation to work.  If you use the Quickchat fix, there are a number of movement animations in melee, but all of them are "dry" where the player just moves without a target and no special effects are visible (Martial Arts for example: Crippling Axe Kick is there, but there is no glow on the legs and no movement swish that happened during the live game.  The character just does the kick regardless of what is around them.)

It might work, it might not.  (I'm no programmer, just sharing what I've seen.  I might be wrong.)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Streetwise Hercules on July 10, 2016, 07:19:41 PM
Thank-you. This is amazing.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on July 31, 2016, 07:12:53 PM
Maybe it's the project manager in me, I try to keep that beast surpressed, but is it possible to update the first post with a grid or table of features, planned version to implement (or) version implemented, planned date to implement, difficultiy to implement rating, etc. and other stuff like that.

I'll go back to "Forum Games" now and stop bothering people.
Thank you.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on August 01, 2016, 03:52:36 PM
but is it possible to update the first post with a grid or table of features

Not easily, the forum software doesn't do too well with tables. It would probably have to be either a static image or a link to some sort of project site. I'd rather work more on the program itself than metaproject stuff like that, though if somebody wants to volunteer to maintain it I wouldn't say no.

planned version to implement (or) version implemented

The priority order and projected version numbering hasn't really changed and should be fairly up to date in the OP.

planned date to implement

lol, no

difficultiy to implement rating

An interesting idea. Any thoughts as to a reasonable scale?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on August 01, 2016, 03:55:31 PM
Also, current status: Working on a metric crapton of backend framework necessary to make something work that will cause a lot of people to flip out. Before you get too excited, it's something that's already on the roadmap. But it's close to being functional enough for initial testing.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyx Nought Nothing on August 01, 2016, 04:06:34 PM
Also, current status: Working on a metric crapton of backend framework necessary to make something work that will cause a lot of people to flip out. Before you get too excited, it's something that's already on the roadmap. But it's close to being functional enough for initial testing.
/e tantrum
/e crosses fingers hoping for teleport.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: LordRayken on August 02, 2016, 03:41:48 AM
Also, current status: Working on a metric crapton of backend framework necessary to make something work that will cause a lot of people to flip out. Before you get too excited, it's something that's already on the roadmap. But it's close to being functional enough for initial testing.

I just want to play CoH again  :'(
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Acanous on August 02, 2016, 04:43:42 AM
Powers, Slotting, and enhancements just as a thing you could do. A levelup system so you can be "Lv 50" and people can see you as "Lv 50".
Targeting VIA friendlist would be amazing, but I understand that's handled by the combat engine that we don't have, so.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on August 02, 2016, 04:47:47 AM
Targeting via friends list should work, I thought, but just like on live only works if they happen to be close enough to you to be in draw distance.

Targeting via team window is supposed to work regardless (team member positions are sent no matter the distance). Team support is a high priority item on my agenda that will probably be in the next release or two.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on August 06, 2016, 06:49:38 PM
Just thought of something...
whenever we've right clicked a contact, NPC , or dayjob, whatever character,
we could choose" follow or Chat."

I guess I miss the little story arcs they would tell, about their plight or a favour asked,
usually a mission to do for them..
That would be neat to see again. :roll:
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MaidMercury on September 17, 2016, 05:45:58 PM
I have been playing with 'tumble weed' in First Ward.... Interesting you can kick them around.
 :D
I was thinking, if they could somehow be adjusted so the 'down counter' (they disappear) isn't so short,
players might be able to 'kick' them around and play soccer? It would be something to do in chat
.


Just an idea to give some life to paragon chat (https://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i451/BlueDalek/Tumbleweed_zpsf276aeph.gif)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyx Nought Nothing on September 19, 2016, 04:00:53 AM
I have been playing with 'tumble weed' in First Ward.... Interesting you can kick them around.
 :D
I was thinking, if they could somehow be adjusted so the 'down counter' (they disappear) isn't so short,
players might be able to 'kick' them around and play soccer? It would be something to do in chat
.


Just an idea to give some life to paragon chat
i was under the impression that debris and objects like the tumbleweeds were specific to each client in much the same way as the objects summoned by Propel. You can kick that tumbleweed all over the place, but no other players will see the same tumbleweed in the same place since that's handled entirely within each player's client and is not tracked server side.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Super Firebug on September 20, 2016, 07:53:43 PM
i was under the impression that debris and objects like the tumbleweeds were specific to each client in much the same way as the objects summoned by Propel. You can kick that tumbleweed all over the place, but no other players will see the same tumbleweed in the same place since that's handled entirely within each player's client and is not tracked server side.

That would explain why, when teamed with grav 'trollers, my exclamation of "Hey, that's MY car!" got so little response. :/ The prop department was at fault! (throws hands into the air in exasperation) I've had it! I simply CANNOT work under these conditions! I'll be in my dressing room!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on September 21, 2016, 12:16:49 AM
It's not a dressing room.  It's a crate.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: AmberOfDzu on September 21, 2016, 12:45:59 PM
I have been playing with 'tumble weed' in First Ward.... Interesting you can kick them around.
 :D
I was thinking, if they could somehow be adjusted so the (they disappear) isn't so short,
players might be able to 'kick' them around and play soccer? It would be something to do in chat.

I wonder if a bot-character could be created that would act like a tumbleweed/soccer ball/etc?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on September 22, 2016, 03:00:34 AM
As high as playing repel ball is on my personal list of demandswishes, sadly 1 second latency due to XMPP batching is just way too much to credibly do something like that.

Even if that weren't an issue, trying to do multi-master synchronization of physics is a very difficult problem that there isn't a true solution for.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Super Firebug on September 22, 2016, 04:41:03 AM
Also, current status: Working on a metric crapton of backend framework necessary to make something work that will cause a lot of people to flip out. Before you get too excited, it's something that's already on the roadmap. But it's close to being functional enough for initial testing.

(hoping against rational hope that it's base-editing WAY ahead of schedule)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Pengy on September 22, 2016, 11:13:59 AM
(hoping against rational hope that it's base-editing WAY ahead of schedule)
https://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=12299.msg212872
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyx Nought Nothing on September 22, 2016, 11:28:09 PM
As high as playing repel ball is on my personal list of demandswishes, sadly 1 second latency due to XMPP batching is just way too much to credibly do something like that.

Even if that weren't an issue, trying to do multi-master synchronization of physics is a very difficult problem that there isn't a true solution for.
During the first winter event there were a bunch of players holding games of Hydra hockey on the frozen lake in Perez Park. It was probably the most fun i ever had using Force Bolt. (Well, more like third most.) But yeah, i can understand why Repel Ball is not something that's currently practical.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MM3squints on September 24, 2016, 05:27:27 AM
I have been playing with 'tumble weed' in First Ward.... Interesting you can kick them around.
 :D
I was thinking, if they could somehow be adjusted so the 'down counter' (they disappear) isn't so short,
players might be able to 'kick' them around and play soccer? It would be something to do in chat
.


Just an idea to give some life to paragon chat (https://i1094.photobucket.com/albums/i451/BlueDalek/Tumbleweed_zpsf276aeph.gif)

Reminds me of Base Football. Awhile back when base PvP was enabled we used to play football in bases. The way it works was a team 8 people in the same SG all Grav/ trollers with repel and the enemy that enters the base would be a mastermind with a minion set to non hostile. The object of the game was 4v4 where you used repel to knock the minion into the other person's goal.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on November 18, 2016, 05:00:37 AM
Last year we had random snow in various zones for December, which was awesome!  Thanks, Codewalker and crew. 

Is there any possibility that at some point in December this year we might get lit Christmas Trees (like the ones around the ski chalet) in Atlas Park? 
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on November 18, 2016, 05:42:57 AM
Last year we had random snow in various zones for December, which was awesome!  Thanks, Codewalker and crew. 

Is there any possibility that at some point in December this year we might get lit Christmas Trees (like the ones around the ski chalet) in Atlas Park?

And how about giant christmas presents, either non-clickable or when you click them they reponse kind of like the doors do.

"This package isn't for you."
"Hey, not until Christmas."
"Snowman local 315 on strike"
"Did you see your name on this, go buzz off."
"You peek inside, it's socks and underwear.  You re-wrap the present."
"This package brought to you by NCSoft.  Have a whole lot of nothing."  (ok, maybe not this one.)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on December 05, 2016, 04:22:05 PM
Is the Jingle Jet data on our PC's, or was it a server-side bit of code? 

Just wondering if there's a way to either add it back for the holidays, or 'skin' a rocket-pack to look like a Jingle Jet and (heck, while we're at it, let's ask for the moon!) shoot snowflakes out the back, and have that little Jingle Jet music?  Aw, that sweet, sweet Jingle Jet.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Floride on December 06, 2016, 11:24:48 AM
Is the Jingle Jet data on our PC's, or was it a server-side bit of code? 

Just wondering if there's a way to either add it back for the holidays, or 'skin' a rocket-pack to look like a Jingle Jet and (heck, while we're at it, let's ask for the moon!) shoot snowflakes out the back, and have that little Jingle Jet music?  Aw, that sweet, sweet Jingle Jet.
The Jingle jet was an FX with the music and flakes built-in. You can edit the database to give yourself one but you'll be invisible.
In sqlite on my character 1 costume 9 it was:
Code: [Select]
"1" "9" "11" "NULL" "NULL" "V_COV/ITEMS/HOLIDAY_ROCKETPACK/TEMP_POWER_HOLIDAY_ROCKETPACK.FX" "NULL" "NULL" "None" "Capes" "Back Packs" "-21504" "-1" "0" "0"

The color "-21504" was the closest I could get to the actual original blue jet flame.
It's possible to give yourself a jingle jet back pack thats always there and doesn't make you invis, but it's just another backpack costume piece, which is to say it is without sound or flakes, just the backpack geometry. I found it a long time ago but I'd need to dig through a lot of files to find it again.


Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on January 01, 2017, 05:41:00 PM
And then CodeWalker went and just gave us all the Jingle Jets for CoHmas !!  Huzzah!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Ohioknight on January 01, 2017, 07:00:15 PM
And then CodeWalker went and just gave us all the Jingle Jets for CoHmas !!  Huzzah!

I'm loving all the new changes, and love the jingle jet, but I'm even more impressed/intrigued with the Frisbee/snowball...

Is this implying a route towards some kind of combat function might be available?  Even if it's in mock/dumbshow? 

How is the Frisbee coordinating between chatters?  Or is the deal that everybody's just not seeing the same Frisbee at the same time?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on January 03, 2017, 03:20:49 PM
The new powers system includes a high-level synchronization protocol. To boil it down, when you activate a power like Snowball or the Flying Disc, your Paragon Chat instance sends a message to the zone's meta channel declaring that you are activating that power. If it's a power that has a target, the message also includes the target -- either the XMPP JID if it's a player, or a name and coordinates if it's an NPC.

Other Paragon Chat instances receive that message and set things up in their own powers system to replicate the context. The proxy entity that represents your character is assumed to have that power, and the activation sequence fires off with the correct target (or nothing happens if for some reason the target can't be resolved). That of course only works if the receiving instance knows what the power is and how to activate it -- older versions that don't have that particular power show nothing happening at all. Targeting NPCs works because everybody's Paragon Chat has the same static NPCs and can find the correct one to use as a target.

You end up with multiple Paragon Chat instances, each with their own representation of the state of the world, all activating the same power at roughly the same time. Effects are handled locally, so the timing of the projectile and the hit always look correct based on your client's idea of everyone's positions. Since the effects are applied locally as a consequence of the power activation, even more complex ones work across the network - like the granting of the gift when you're 'hit' by Holiday Cheer.

The timing is consistent within the activation of the power, but as network latency implies that not everyone sees a completely consistent world state, the activation itself may not have exactly the same timing relative to other events from everyone's point of view*. For what Paragon Chat does, it's 'close enough' to be convincing.

For something like real combat, that would probably break down fairly quickly, and there would need to be a way to resolve out-of-order power executions, as well as ensure that everyone is playing fair and only sending power activations that are possible for them. AI-controlled NPCs are also a big wrinkle for distributed systems, as somebody has to be authoritatively running the NPC, and you have to handle cases where that particular instance suddenly disconnects. That's one of the reasons that long ago I said PVP is more likely to happen first - see also snowball/toy bat.

Mock effects are definitely in the realm of possibility with this system. Loading the real power data in a form that doesn't bloat Paragon Chat's already hefty memory footprint is one of the issues that needs to be solved. Persistent ownership of powers was another (which is now solved). Mock leveling or some other way to choose powers is another, as simply giving every power to every player would crash the client, and currently there is no record of which powersets you chose at character creation.


* Future plans for Paragon Chat involve moving away from the declarative system of periodically broadcasting coordinate updates. Instead, it'll send a timecoded event stream, kind of like an incremental demorecord that can be buffered by a small amount and played back for smoother movement without prediction artifacts. Presumably power activations would be timecoded as well in this system, which would solve the relative ordering problem quite handily.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: FloatingFatMan on January 03, 2017, 05:52:21 PM
A question if I may!

Is it possible to recreate peds and traffic in PC? It doesn't matter really if it's not consistent across the network, having it purely locally rendered would still bring the city back to life for us!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Garble on January 04, 2017, 01:31:32 PM
Speaking of making the zones less barren I've wondered if the zones could spawn area-appropriate foe-NPCs. Even if all they do is stand there folding and unfolding their arms like the trainer NPCs it would make the zones feel more like they used to be. I know from Icon that the spawn points are baked into the maps and from game experience I know the spawns were kind of randomized/timed. Even if the mobs were static, or spawned and despawned randomly it would be really cool to fly around Perez Park and see clumps of Hellions and Skuls again. (Especially if I can throw a frisbee at them or boink them on the head with a foam bat)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on January 05, 2017, 04:21:53 AM
Speaking of making the zones less barren I've wondered if the zones could spawn area-appropriate foe-NPCs. Even if all they do is stand there folding and unfolding their arms like the trainer NPCs it would make the zones feel more like they used to be. I know from Icon that the spawn points are baked into the maps and from game experience I know the spawns were kind of randomized/timed. Even if the mobs were static, or spawned and despawned randomly it would be really cool to fly around Perez Park and see clumps of Hellions and Skuls again. (Especially if I can throw a frisbee at them or boink them on the head with a foam bat)

Good idea, but there would need to be some sort of garbage collection.  Maybe that was built in, maybe that's what Rikti raids were for.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Leandro on January 08, 2017, 05:18:13 PM
Is it possible to recreate peds and traffic in PC? It doesn't matter really if it's not consistent across the network, having it purely locally rendered would still bring the city back to life for us!

Those require generating navigation meshes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigation_mesh) for the maps that the NPCs (including cars) can use for pathfinding. Not trivial, not likely to happen soon.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Garble on January 08, 2017, 07:28:35 PM
Did the ghost people in Dark Astoria also use those path meshes or were they an atmospheric effect?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on January 08, 2017, 08:18:41 PM
Those were just regular citizens with the LOD fade values flipped backwards. Probably had the flag to push players out of the way disabled as well, but I haven't checked.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on January 09, 2017, 12:10:27 AM
Probably had the flag to push players out of the way ...

I hated being pushed out-of-the-way by passers-by.  Made me fell like, "Sure, you risked your life and defeated The Malta Group, but what have you done for us lately?"
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: JordanYen on January 15, 2017, 01:52:24 PM
I hated being pushed out-of-the-way by passers-by.  Made me fell like, "Sure, you risked your life and defeated The Malta Group, but what have you done for us lately?"

Relevant to this discussion: http://www.jeremyduffy.com/jordans-town/?page_id=48
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Fighting Blaze on January 15, 2017, 03:54:57 PM
And here I am, a poor young temp player. I played the game on the 14 day trial way back in the day, I never even made it passed Kings, and you guys are missing so much cool sounding stuff that I sadly never got to see.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Jagblade on January 18, 2017, 01:41:32 AM
Couldn't find much mention of it anywhere else, but I'd love to see the old Giant Monster NPCs such as Lusca in Independence Port again. If I remember correctly most if not all of these guys stood in one spot until agro'd. They'd be great as decoration.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on January 18, 2017, 05:24:27 AM
Couldn't find much mention of it anywhere else, but I'd love to see the old Giant Monster NPCs such as Lusca in Independence Port again. If I remember correctly most if not all of these guys stood in one spot until agro'd. They'd be great as decoration.

Well, Sally is in Croatoa.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on January 19, 2017, 02:23:17 AM
Well, Sally is in Croatoa.

Is Sally really still there?  I thought she vanished after the Halloween Event with the Mysterious Floating Island.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on January 19, 2017, 03:25:19 AM
Well, Sally is in Croatoa.

Yes, 271 yards NE of the store, (Ronald Kincade).
I haven't tried throwing a snowball at her.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on March 29, 2017, 05:42:05 PM
Any more word lately on how testing is going for restoring Bases in Paragon Chat?  Especially the future possibility of restoring bases that multiple characters or players could enter at the same time?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: NJQuazar on April 04, 2017, 11:20:29 PM
I had a possibly crazy idea for the Anniversary party.  You have the temp  power of snowballs, so I was wondering if you could build on it and make water balloons. They could be either a temp power or a reward for those that show up and make the Anniversary awesome. Could have an epic water balloon fight!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on April 05, 2017, 12:56:03 AM
Tempering expectations... if it wasn't already in the client as a temp power or ability when the game was live, the possibility of it happening in Paragon Chat approaches 0.  (I'll never say it's impossible, but the likelihood of it coming to pass isn't great.)

It'd be easier to run around as a wolf than to throw water balloons.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on April 14, 2017, 07:34:14 PM
When we get bases (with access for all) back, I am totally going to try creating an Irish bar for hanging out.  Wish there was a way to pipe in our own music, but I'd settle for the bar, ha.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Solitaire on May 24, 2017, 12:33:20 PM
Is the road map going to be updated, with where things are up to, what's being worked on at present and what's in the future?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on May 29, 2017, 09:50:10 PM
I asked CodeWalker if he could make a table showing progress and versions and features
He said that tables were too difficult tomake and that do we want him making tables or updating Paragon Chat

FeatureVersionEst. Release
Supergroups
1.0.14SOONTM
Supergroup Base Editing
1.0.15 or 1.0.16SOONTM
NPC Vehicle Traffic
1.0.20SOONTM
NPC Foot Traffic
1.0.22SOONTM

But he is too busy and tables are so hard to do.

(the above junk is only an example and is probably not what they are even thinking about working on)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on May 30, 2017, 02:47:42 AM
He's not wrong.  Not much I can do to make this table more legible (https://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=12496.0).
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on May 31, 2017, 07:29:31 PM
So what have we learned,

OptionDisposition
TablesOut
Weekly UpdatesOut
Letting us know what you
 might be working on

Out
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Korbian on May 31, 2017, 10:24:43 PM
I should not be laughing at this but I am.   The more I thought about it the funnier it got.  :P

That being said, it's more fun if we don't know what's coming.  Then we can be awed by the progress.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: mobbyg on June 01, 2017, 08:29:35 PM
That being said, it's more fun if we don't know what's coming.  Then we can be awed by the progress.

It works for the big tech guys when they release stuff.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MainRage on July 29, 2017, 03:55:37 AM
The timeline looks amazing! I wish I had read this sooner- it excites me! If there's anything I can do to help please let me know!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Styrj on August 27, 2017, 11:26:34 AM
CW, are you still working on the Dev version of PC?  Just curious, because I have PC Dev. v.16.11.24.2. in addition to PC (standard 1.0.13) or do we just ignore the Dev version?

Thanks in advance.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on September 05, 2017, 02:35:09 PM
The dev version hasn't been updated in a while and is missing some fairly significant features (badges, for one). There is a lot of integration work that still needs to be done to unify that with the redesigned backend that can support bases and (eventually) private instances. Not sure when that will be complete.

However, despite the lack of updates on the dev branch at the moment, definitely keep it around. That's the update track I'll use for testing when all that stuff is done, so having it already installed will make it easier.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Styrj on September 06, 2017, 12:38:22 AM
That's good to know CW.  I can't wait to see what you & your (team?) come up with next!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Lycantropus on September 09, 2017, 08:57:07 AM
I'll take SOON (tm).

As far as I can tell, CW (and anyone else working on this) does this in their spare time, and out of a desire to see the City brought to life again without any financial recompense (which they legally can't take because then it would be profiting off an IP that doesn't belong to them). So... I'll take it. They have proven they have heads and shoulders above my levels of talent for making it happen (which has included attempting a 2D side scroller version from a freeware program off Steam that I don't even want to talk about because it got NOWHERE because... power selection, and a really poor attempt at a RPG-maker version that I actually paid for on Steam that didn't get past a substandard Atlas Park) much less the time to put into it (which is part of one of my problems) so you'll find little criticizing from me.

I can now log in, and grab badges, and actually *be* in the City when I can make the time (and especially when I *need* to just visit and roam). ANYTHING else that gets added is just more cherries on top (though I drool for bases next  :roll: ).

Yes, I'd love it all back, but that said, I can actually relieve stress from just wandering the zones and listening to the music start up for each area while I explore and hunt badges, so mileages may vary.

I guess what I'm trying to say is keep up the good work CW, it is appreciated and is enjoyed by many as it happens, but take care of yourself as well!! Thanks for all you do!

Lyc~
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: slickriptide on October 06, 2017, 03:28:03 PM
There isn't a suggestions thread that I could find, so I'm dropping this here as a "wishlist" item:

Map travel outside of hard coded map ID numbers - On metadata rooms, set the room subject of the metadata room to the map associated with that metadata. Let /mapmove accept an optional room name. If that room exists and the associated metadata room also exists, then leave the current map, join the chat and metadata rooms for the new map and load the map specified in the metadata room subject.

Zones could have arbitrary names and "mission" maps could be generated without the requirement that all participants have identical entries in their zones.cfg file. As long as one player had a local zones.cfg entry that allowed her to /mapmove to her custom map using her locally-assigned ID number (or she was sufficiently experienced with XMPP usage to create the rooms by hand), other people could then travel to the "custom" map by invitation or having been told the name of the "custom" map.

If you wanted to get fancy, and subject length allowed, you could do something like ":maps/Missions/V_Longbow_Seabase/V_Longbow_Seabase_45/V_Longbow_Seabase_45_Layout_06.txt:X:Y:Z:" where X, Y, and Z are the coordinates of a suggested "zone in" point.

Since this strikes me as a somewhat obvious route to .cfg independence, I'll be unastounded to learn that there's a good reason to NOT do things this way, but at first glance it looks like a simple way to implement such a feature.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on October 06, 2017, 06:34:51 PM
You've basically described the "Private instance support using arbitrary maps" bullet point. Main difference is instead of overloading the room description, a dedicated XML protocol is planned to transfer richer data rather than trying to hack it into a text string.

There are some changes necessary to make this work and decouple static zone IDs from map and room info (some places do lookups based on zone.cfg to generate things like zone names for display in the friends list). This is part of the pluggable backend system for the base editor project.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on January 20, 2018, 06:39:07 PM
Apologies if this has been asked before.  Is there any possibility of activating the "effects" of a power use without actually using the power?  Like spamming heals?  Or are the two intrinsically linked?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Doc Artz on January 21, 2018, 09:47:33 PM
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: aeb on May 01, 2018, 07:59:35 AM
Today, at DJ Havok's DJ show in King's Row, we hit the toons-per-zone limit, and several toons ended up in "King's Row 2." Could we raise the limit somehow? At least for King's Row and maybe Imperial City? And Pocket D if that isn't already higher, tho I suspect it might be? Pocket D gets most DJ shows, King's Row hosts DJ Havok's weekly show, and Imperial City has hosted at least two shows in front of Studio 55. {Smile}

Thank you very much for considering my request, whether you can grant it or not. {Smile}

aeb
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on May 05, 2018, 02:16:57 AM
The Zone Limit is actually the 'room size' for King's Row in our XMPP server. 

For Atlas Park and Pocket D, there is no maximum amount of players.  For other zones, the zone limit is able to be raised with early notice for an event or get-together past the cap of 30 users.  (This includes multiple instances, as each instance takes up a 'player'.) 

The 30 player limit is done on purpose: consider the number of maps in Paragon City, Rogue Isles and Praetoria altogether.  With 30 users per map, the server's workload is manageable.  And there's cheating: on all of the 100's of mission, encounter, and special maps, a set of 'shared' channels are used, so it's possible to hear someone in an Office building who is actually talking in the Summer Blockbuster Casino Heist set.

If the maximum is hit, players can move to Atlas Park or Pocket D if they want a place to see each other together "in person."  If you have a one-time event, let me know and I'll see what I can do.  For recurring events or weekly things, I can put it to Management for consideration, but no promises.

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on May 17, 2018, 01:47:54 AM

With 30 users per map, the server's workload is manageable, but add just one more and POOF!

Sorry, Tahquitz.  I couldn't resist.   :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on May 21, 2018, 10:53:02 PM
Sorry, Tahquitz.  I couldn't resist.   :)

Of course. :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on May 24, 2018, 04:48:39 PM
I should not be laughing at this but I am.   The more I thought about it the funnier it got.  :P

Don't laugh at him, you'll only encourage me.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: aeb on June 06, 2018, 09:58:40 PM
At the very least, please consider raising the cap for King's Row, especially on Mondays. DJ Havok has been running his shows there live right along, and they tend to attract a good crowd by Paragon Chat standards. Especially if each of a player's multiple instances count separately. A few of his regulars are dedicated multi-tooners. *Smile*

He told me once he really doesn't want to move out of King's Row because that's where he started. *Smile*

Thank you. *Smile*
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 03, 2018, 01:04:51 PM
Updated road map noted. ;)

Quote
Target Milestone: 1.2
Estimated Completion: A while

Private instance support using arbitrary maps

GM abilities in private instances

Costume change emotes

NPC spawning in private instances

Supergroups

More base love!

I have been base building, having fun with that...and encouraged others to do so...even given them help on how to do various aspects of it.  I've gone for the sewers look on private and oriental look on global...  Furnished with World Globe and Book Cases...and a Cosmic Cube.

While enjoying the 'now' I am, and have been, really looking forward to the 1.2 update.  It has intriguing features on it.  Such as...

Private instance support for arbitrary maps...  I can't escape the feeling that the work done on the 'back end' system for Bases/Building/Editing will be inextricably linked to this feature...  GM 'abilities' in said 'private instances' sounds intriguing.  What could that mean? :D

The NPC spawning in private instances also something I've been really looking forward to, along with the 1.2 update.  (Be nice to have some 'NPCs' in your private SG Base too...?  As a further feature request...)

'More base love!' is welcome.  It falls into that all important category, giving people something 'to do.'

It will be nice to have the supergroup 'Blue Text Club' feature but will be busy base building in the mean time...  (You can have your team mate look around your base any how...as 'good as...')


Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 03, 2018, 01:18:28 PM
Quote
Target Milestone: 1.3
Estimated Completion: Longer than a while

???
To be determined.

Such a tease. :D

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on August 03, 2018, 02:18:57 PM
Not really teasing on purpose, all the stuff I had on the roadmap for 1.3 ended up getting shuffled around and moved to other milestones. So that left me with an empty milestone that I now have to figure out what's going to go there.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 15, 2018, 06:23:02 PM
Re: Global message of the day...

Are they going to be plucked from a book of Confucius sayings...?

One idea I had for that was a bit line the community involved in rewriting the plaques.

Could tender the GMOTD from a bank of messages from the PC community randomly selected each day.

Just a thought.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Paragon Avenger on August 25, 2018, 04:10:45 AM
Not really teasing on purpose, all the stuff I had on the roadmap for 1.3 ended up getting shuffled around and moved to other milestones. So that left me with an empty milestone that I now have to figure out what's going to go there.

How about bringing back that blimp that flew over AP?

Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on August 29, 2018, 11:11:31 PM
Aye.  The Blimp.

One of the last sounds I remember hearing before the servers closed.

I was sitting on top of the Atlas globe, having a cup of tea...as it rumbled by...

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: slickriptide on August 30, 2018, 08:35:12 PM
One thing I'd like to see is a way for servers to customize their environment.

Specifically, I'd like for Paragon Chat to treat all of the .cfg files as being "per-server" instances, such that when it connects to a server it queries that server for any special .cfg files that go with that server and it automatically downloads them into an appropriate folder and prefers those .cfgs while connected to that server.

If I'm running my own server and someone joins up, they'd download my strings.cfg and when they joined Atlas Park, they'd be greeted by Liberty Belle instead of Ms. Liberty. The Top Dog badge on my server would be named 'On Top of the World!'.

I'm assuming this could be accomplished through a pub-sub node.

(https://s22.postimg.cc/n3lji8ial/liberty_belle.jpg) (https://postimg.cc/image/n3lji8ial/)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Streetwise Hercules on October 02, 2018, 04:40:30 PM
Gosh, I hope this is the right thread... It'd be awesome of Team Captains could set an in-zone Waypoint for the entire team! Love the continuing awesomeness! Thank-you all!
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on January 16, 2019, 05:11:43 PM
Not sure where to put this.  But I've just seen the Kalistri Wharf 'Twitch' stream (how did I miss it two months ago...) on Leandro's YouTube channel.

The work on Rikti Warzone was impressive.

But the work on...Kalistri Wharf?

Stunning.  An absolutely beautiful map.  Like a cross between Atlas, Founders and Independence port - the coming together of the map maker's potential.  It would have been the gleaming jewel in Issue 24.

To put that together from the 'force fielded' area I saw in Icon?  Impressive work.

I also noted that it was said that it took two years to put the Super Base work together to the exacting standards of Codewalker.  Impressive.  Very impressive.

If Paragon Chat can one day have a 'map builder' like the SG Base builder sitting on top of Paragon Chat?  That will be a dream come true.  Add that to private instancing and RPG controls such as NPC spawning and you're cooking.

I noted too, the subtleties.  The guy putting together the extended Portal and Rikti WZ Stuff.  The 3D modeller that did the Statesman statue for Kalistri Wharf as well as Leandro bolting together the Wharf.  Code walker the mystic code engineer who's making it all possible.  There's a team right there...and others, I'm sure, under the radar.

Quietly going about their business.  Putting the infrastructure in place in a low key way.  To the point where it will only need to 'switch' on the combat 'one day.'

Azrael.

PS.  As this is a development thread.

LUA scripting IS mentioned on the timeline.  1.2?

My mere suggestion.  As implemented in SEGs?  You need to learn coding.  But if the LUA could be put into a shell GUI for non-programmers as a kind of button generator.  Eg.

1. Contact.
2. Mission.
3.  Interior Mission Map.
4.  Zone.

They could be a series of variables for each one.  ie.  a bunch of contracts.  A bunch of 'go here/come back' missions.  All the interior maps.  All the zones.

Put a dice generator next to each one.  (You know, like next to the costume generator....)  And you could randomly generate the content (from a list of possibilities) for each one.  Allowing 'non-programmers' to create content quickly while the 'real' programmers use LUA to take it to the next level.

Azrael.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Codewalker on January 16, 2019, 09:54:00 PM
LUA scripting IS mentioned on the timeline.  1.2?

My mere suggestion.  As implemented in SEGs?  You need to learn coding.  But if the LUA could be put into a shell GUI for non-programmers as a kind of button generator.  Eg.

1. Contact.
2. Mission.
3.  Interior Mission Map.
4.  Zone.

They could be a series of variables for each one.  ie.  a bunch of contracts.  A bunch of 'go here/come back' missions.  All the interior maps.  All the zones.

Put a dice generator next to each one.  (You know, like next to the costume generator....)  And you could randomly generate the content (from a list of possibilities) for each one.  Allowing 'non-programmers' to create content quickly while the 'real' programmers use LUA to take it to the next level.

The plan in my head I've had for a long time with regard to LuaMission consists of two pieces:

1. A fairly low-level API for controlling encounter groups (spawn points), receiving events, setting mission objective text, sending chat window text and progress meters, etc.

2. A standard library written in Lua built around that API geared toward providing pieces that work like "standard" missions. Something along the lines of allowing a single ObjectiveDefeatAll("Vahzilok", "Defeat all the baddies!") call to set up the variables needed for a mission. A GUI editor that looks similar to the in-game AE interface - or maybe the AE interface itself - could be fairly easily built around these pieces.

Beginners could fairly easily create missions in notepad by copy/pasting examples that use the library (or a GUI editor if someone builds one). Advanced designers could bypass parts of the library, or not even use it at all, do to more interesting things and create nonstandard game mechanics.

I haven't looked at what SEGS is doing in a whole lot of detail, but from what I've seen of their Lua API so far -- it's a fairly unique take on Lua and not how I would have done it. So while #1 will likely be quite different from the SEGS implementation and not compatible, there's no reason that #2 couldn't be ported to work on top of whatever they decide on.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Azrael on January 17, 2019, 09:19:50 AM
The plan in my head I've had for a long time with regard to LuaMission consists of two pieces:

1. A fairly low-level API for controlling encounter groups (spawn points), receiving events, setting mission objective text, sending chat window text and progress meters, etc.

2. A standard library written in Lua built around that API geared toward providing pieces that work like "standard" missions. Something along the lines of allowing a single ObjectiveDefeatAll("Vahzilok", "Defeat all the baddies!") call to set up the variables needed for a mission. A GUI editor that looks similar to the in-game AE interface - or maybe the AE interface itself - could be fairly easily built around these pieces.

Beginners could fairly easily create missions in notepad by copy/pasting examples that use the library (or a GUI editor if someone builds one). Advanced designers could bypass parts of the library, or not even use it at all, do to more interesting things and create nonstandard game mechanics.

I haven't looked at what SEGS is doing in a whole lot of detail, but from what I've seen of their Lua API so far -- it's a fairly unique take on Lua and not how I would have done it. So while #1 will likely be quite different from the SEGS implementation and not compatible, there's no reason that #2 couldn't be ported to work on top of whatever they decide on.

1.  Sounds good to me, like it covers most bases.  API/Hooks for the elements of missions?

2.  A command that links all the 'variables' or 'Jigsaw' pieces to generate a mission?

That satisfies my curiosity because I wasn't sure what LUA on the Dev' timeline specifically meant.  But having a LUA library of elements that you can copy and paste from, like a very simple and basic 'text' command that can be copied into a notepad, that plugs in the variable elements to create a mission sounds cool to me.

What I like Paragon Chat so far, is that it honours the pick up and play aspect of the 'original' and that things are implemented with a perfectionist zeal.

If LUA can be implemented alongside a map editor (I'm presuming the kind of 'back end' work on the SG bases may be transferable to other stuff?  To help to plug in other stuff like a map editor, that the powers, as so far implemented are also part of some 'back end' work...like lego-brick modules that plug into Paragon Chat?) that is as well implemented and easy to use as the SG Bases then it will be a day long remembered. 

Imagine that.  ...the CoH community being able to create their own mission and map content from 'lego-bricks' - the possibilities would be endless.   8)

Paragon Chat, SG Bases & the Kalistri Wharf map (and the other 22 maps in progress!) offers a tantalising glimpse on the horizon where the community modify the original and take it forward...and where the outrageous 'sunset' of the original is consigned to history and CoH may live and breath again with it's legacy assured.

Thank you for the reply.  Much appreciated.

Azrael. 
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: aeb on February 28, 2019, 07:23:30 AM
People seem to be topping out at 479 badges these days. This is only 21 badges from getting the you-got-500 badge. I'd like to see enough more badges, you don't top out at frustratingly close. :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: MyriVerse on February 28, 2019, 01:19:11 PM
There was work being done on the History Badges. Not sure where that is. One day...
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: aeb on March 02, 2019, 01:51:36 AM
I think we're at the point of having the texts, but still needing the badges. So... those would work. :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on March 04, 2019, 02:33:20 AM
History plaques were part of a community project to make text for the plaques themselves so we're not reusing the COH IP.  Unfortunately, there is no ETA on when this will be ready.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Felderburg on April 19, 2019, 06:16:56 PM
What is the future of Paragon Chat, now that private servers are likely?
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Tahquitz on April 19, 2019, 06:44:39 PM
Unchanged AFAIK.  It still has utility as a private RP service if you install OpenFire on your own server.  Should NCSoft go for the nuclear option, it's still distributed.  Anyone with it installed today can still reach others via XMPP with a different server.

And it works as an offline base editor, so if other servers can import bases in the future it makes sense as a tool in that regard.
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Sheyon on May 06, 2019, 01:18:35 AM
I would love it if Paragon Chat could import bases that use the i25 items. :)
Title: Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
Post by: Nyghtshade on May 12, 2019, 07:31:41 PM
I would love it if Paragon Chat could import bases that use the i25 items. :)

Amen to that.  Some really AMAZING new I25 base items and tools !