New efforts!

[Codewalker]

You always ruin ignorant people's fun

Knowing is half the battle!

[Relitner]

The new tutorial in CO is almost identical to the original tutorial in CO... The only difference being they took away the ceremony where the mayor presents you the key to millenium city and you no longer get to choose whether to goto canada or the desert... Which now the desert and canada lowbie areas are such a freaking joke. Back then you arrived with fewer powers and now you arrive with more than you really should have and the content is pointless for anything but storyline and easy leveling.

They also closed off some parts of the old map and opened new ones. I guess to make it more "fluid"?

[Relitner]

Knowing is half the battle!

:o

my OCD is OCDing on your uneven dots...

[Codewalker]

...and those textures were way better than CoH's ultra mode--and the "recommended" video card requirements were 256MB video RAM.

The main reason being that Ultra mode, while it added lots of rendering features, still used mostly assets from 2004. Low poly count models for performance, relatively low resolution textures, and most of the time no normal maps. Most of the "looking old" that people talk about with COH is from the assets, so moving them to a different engine wouldn't really help with that.

Contrast with some of the newer Issue20+ models that used normal mapping, reflectivity masks, glow maps, ambient occlusion maps, etc. Even those are subject to the talents of the artist that makes them, and texture sizes were still fairly small. Not due to tech limitations, but likely due to policy in order to not push the minimum requirements too high.

UT's requirements aren't really a good basis for comparison. There's a big difference in what you can do in an MMO open world environment versus an FPS where you can tightly control what angles the player can view the scene from. Something like Arkham (with full texture resolution, not 'performance' mode) would be a slightly better comparison point.

[Codewalker]

:o

my OCD is OCDing on your uneven dots...

It makes my personal text "Moar Dots!" even more appropriate.  :D

Also...... It's not OCD......

https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4141/4776603729_e4734ba3f4.jpg

[sindyr]

A resounding NO!!!!! to this. I don't have the reflexes needed to move constantly during combat and hate that dynamic.

I second that resounding No.

[DarkCurrent]

...And I would like a built-in way to track damage / healing totals and averages even if its only my personal stats because I find it useful for "being all I can be".

That was the major function of Herostats.  It tracked your character's performance and rewards.  I used it all the time to compare different builds and ATs to measure their effectiveness.  It provided quantitative data to draw conclusions about what's the "best" AT or if certain builds were "gimped".  I got into this type of argument all the time during the 'dominators suck' discussions.  IIRC doms were about 10-15% below brutes in regard to xpm and ipm, but equal or better than corruptors (depending on powersets).

Ah, the good ole days.

[hejtmane]

I totally agree with this.  The one thing I loved about CoH was that your contribution to a team consisted of more than just raw dps - you had buffs/debuffs,
control, aggro management, knockdowns, etc.   If you give players a tool that will allow discrimination based on dps, believe me they will take full advantage.  I saw plenty of that in WoW.
The moment they introduce a dps meter in CoH, is the moment I'd be heading out the door.

To be honest, I felt the CoH devs made a mistake when they listed out the stat bonuses for players.   I never saw it happen, but I saw potential for discrimination based on what IO sets you had - or didn't. I saw plenty of build discrimination in GW - use one of the cookie cutter builds or else.

What makes COH unique is you can stack the buffs and debuffs Rift has buffs and debuff but they cancel each other out which means if you like one build and someone is playing it guess what you switch to a dps build or this build has a higher debuff so you need to switch builds or we are missing this and his dps is 300 in front of you switch to the boring build oh you do not have that kick. I mean when I raided I was on my game and so where my builds but man COH makes it easy not to have to plan you life around a raid to get top end gear or have fun. I can take random group and pull them through an ITF TF raid like content. Every build can contribute you do not have to have x,y and z to complete the raid and this much dps etc because you can stack debuffs and win it is not all about raw dps. Other games restrict the debuffs and buffs and make it all about dps at the end of the game

[azazel005]

That was the major function of Herostats.  It tracked your character's performance and rewards.  I used it all the time to compare different builds and ATs to measure their effectiveness.  It provided quantitative data to draw conclusions about what's the "best" AT or if certain builds were "gimped".  I got into this type of argument all the time during the 'dominators suck' discussions.  IIRC doms were about 10-15% below brutes in regard to xpm and ipm, but equal or better than corruptors (depending on powersets).

Ah, the good ole days.

I think people 'feeling' that Dominator's sucked stemmed more the trouble they had in certain circumstances then there average performance. I don't think a good player running at a plausible difficulty level would really have problems with either but a Dom that got held up up by a powerful boss without domination up could be splatted fairly unceremoniously. When my wife started playing she rolled a dominator and got in trouble with such situations around the early mid levels, once she crossed into the 30s though it was seldom an issue with pets buying you safety and time.

Still there will never be perfect parity unless they are all identical and who wants that?

[MM3squints]

Knowing is half the battle!

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.slaw.ca%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2011%2F11%2Fthe_battle-400x376.png

[AlienOne]

UT's requirements aren't really a good basis for comparison. There's a big difference in what you can do in an MMO open world environment versus an FPS where you can tightly control what angles the player can view the scene from. Something like Arkham (with full texture resolution, not 'performance' mode) would be a slightly better comparison point.

Since we don't really have any system requirements to go off of yet for games being built on the Unreal 4 engine, I was going off of what the recommended system requirements are currently for rendering anything out within the Unreal 4 engine, which is currently 1GB video RAM.

The standard nowadays for any modern game is right around there, and the standard amount of video ram in any computer sold in the last few years has been at least 2GB (now it's up to 8GB last I saw for notebooks-- up to 12GB for desktops)... I don't believe having a lot of video RAM will be much of a problem, assuming they get this Unreal 4 engine-based game done 2-3 years from now...

[sindyr]

I think people 'feeling' that Dominator's sucked stemmed more the trouble they had in certain circumstances then there average performance. I don't think a good player running at a plausible difficulty level would really have problems with either but a Dom that got held up up by a powerful boss without domination up could be splatted fairly unceremoniously. When my wife started playing she rolled a dominator and got in trouble with such situations around the early mid levels, once she crossed into the 30s though it was seldom an issue with pets buying you safety and time.

Still there will never be perfect parity unless they are all identical and who wants that?

I don't know what y'all are talking about, I **LOVED** my Dominators! Once I got rolling with perma-dom I could lock down a couple of bosses and many liets and make each battle a cakewalk for my team!

Perma-Domination ROCKS!!

[MM3squints]

That was the major function of Herostats.  It tracked your character's performance and rewards.  I used it all the time to compare different builds and ATs to measure their effectiveness.  It provided quantitative data to draw conclusions about what's the "best" AT or if certain builds were "gimped".  I got into this type of argument all the time during the 'dominators suck' discussions.  IIRC doms were about 10-15% below brutes in regard to xpm and ipm, but equal or better than corruptors (depending on powersets).

Ah, the good ole days.

I remember that beginning of CoV, dominators were "that a cool concept, but dominators are too squishy." Then with the introduction of Patrons, dominators became very popular because of Sirocco pet gave you a pocket healer. With the introduction of IO, dominators jump from "hey I have a pocket healer" to "ok this is kind of feeling OP" when you got enough rech for perma dom. This paired with the Mu pet and Drain Psyche, you could kill just about everything and even farm faster than a SS/Fire brute. When Shades of Gray came out and a full villain dominator got access to Rage, it made dominators a "I win" AT with the instant domination (both in pve (plant/psi, fire/psi) and pvp (mind/fire, mind/ele, mind,dark)) Damn I miss playing dominators now :(

[BadWolf]

I also believe that Nc Soft needs this to be demonstrated to assist the potential sale. They have to be sure that this is not just an attempt to acquire the game and the licensing and then flip it for a greater monetary value to someone else. Not only does that create more legal issues but it also would definitely anger Nc Soft shareholders. Also if they sold it and the new owners didnt have the capability to run it in a manner that benefits the gamer it would definitely hurt Nc Soft's reputation even further.

It's also important to NCSoft because if they sell rights to the game to a company that can't run it, that company may go bankrupt. At that point, the rights might be sold to another party in a bankruptcy sale, which (depending on how the initial sale was structured) may complicate any future efforts to resurrect the game. The last thing NCSoft wants--the last thing any of us wants--is for a bad team to get in charge of the game and FUBAR it to the point where it's too tangled up in red tape to ever be relaunched. That's why this due diligence phase is important, and why I'm not at all upset that all parties involved are taking the time to make sure it's done right.

[MWRuger]

Since we don't really have any system requirements to go off of yet for games being built on the Unreal 4 engine, I was going off of what the recommended system requirements are currently for rendering anything out within the Unreal 4 engine, which is currently 1GB video RAM.

The standard nowadays for any modern game is right around there, and the standard amount of video ram in any computer sold in the last few years has been at least 2GB (now it's up to 8GB last I saw for notebooks-- up to 12GB for desktops)... I don't believe having a lot of video RAM will be much of a problem, assuming they get this Unreal 4 engine-based game done 2-3 years from now...

Pretty sure those RAM numbers are for system RAM not discrete video card RAM, In fact most laptops (unless designed for gaming) don't have any discrete video RAM and just share system RAM.

Modern OS's have gotten much greedier for RAM and that's why those number have been getting larger. Having a multi-threaded processor doesn't boost speed if you are crippled by virtual memory.

[lamer]

Pretty sure those RAM numbers are for system RAM not discrete video card RAM, In fact most laptops (unless designed for gaming) don't have any discrete video RAM and just share system RAM.

Modern OS's have gotten much greedier for RAM and that's why those number have been getting larger. Having a multi-threaded processor doesn't boost speed if you are crippled by virtual memory.

If you can run an Unreal 4 game on 1gb of system RAM, you have a magic computer.

[Rayderoth]

If you can run an Unreal 4 game on 1gb of system RAM, you have a magic computer.

Depends.

Assuming you mean: "If your computer can magically run an Unreal 4 game on System RAM alone..."

...Well an AMD APU can usually allocate about 1-2GB of System RAM for VRAM purposes.

Granted even the latest Kevari model is only about the equivalent of a Radeon R7 250 (basing this on the fact that you can hybrid-graphics an a10-7850k with an R7 250), it would at least (I imagine) be able to handle the Unreal 4 engine somewhat gracefully (IE: you could pull 30FPS on low-mid settings).

If they implement Mantle then you'd see pretty good performance boosts to boot.

The other way to interpret that statement is: "If your system has only 1GB of System RAM and you can run an Unreal 4 game then you have a magic computer."

Which I wholeheartedly agree with.

[Ohioknight]

It's also important to NCSoft because if they sell rights to the game to a company that can't run it, that company may go bankrupt. At that point, the rights might be sold to another party in a bankruptcy sale, which (depending on how the initial sale was structured) may complicate any future efforts to resurrect the game. The last thing NCSoft wants--the last thing any of us wants--is for a bad team to get in charge of the game and FUBAR it to the point where it's too tangled up in red tape to ever be relaunched. That's why this due diligence phase is important, and why I'm not at all upset that all parties involved are taking the time to make sure it's done right.

Hear him! Hear him!

[Des_Tructive]

I couldn't disagree more.

I feel like mods can actually destroy a game.  There were all types of timers and damage calculators, and other plug-ins in TSW that became expected pieces of kit for serious folks.  I forget what the end-of-arc missions were called.  But they were similar in mechanics to CoH Trials in which the principal action takes place on a single map, and ends with a boss confrontation that often has do-the-wrong-thing-and-insta-die mechanics.  These could be accessed by certain mods, and it allowed folks to get ready for them and have certain powers queued up ahead of time allowing people an insurmountable advantage over folks who didn't have them.  As such, the forum community began to talk as though everyone used these.  Personally, I felt they were cheating and refused.

They weren't cheating... because you weren't circumventing the game, but they seemed to defeat the spirit of those combat events.  They were MEANT to be difficult and force you to pay attention to the visual cues and move and attack accordingly.  I never actually played the game long enough to get beyond beating the second or third one of these "Trials" but some of the endgame ones were pretty punishing.

TL, DR:  Mods that alter the visual aesthetics of a game are cool, ones that give users a drastic advantage in game-play over others is not, IMO.  So, in CoH terms, the VidiotMap mod was awesome and I approved of it because all it did was cut out the middle man of using the Wiki to find all of the completely out-of-the way badges that you needed for the various accolades.  However, if there were a mod that would tell you where a green patch would appear in the Keyes iTrial before it appeared, well... I'd call foul (and I hated getting that badge... a lot).

I see where you're coming from, and i agree with a lot of points. It depends a lot on what can and can't be modding. Most of the mods I run are QoL/layout related. Stuff that changes the ui to a layout I can work better with, etc. Oh, and crafting automation.
I'm not object to others parsing my numbers either, if they would boot me for "underperforming", they're not the kind of people I want to play with, anyway.
As for Mods that actually impact gameplay by telling you when to do X, or what will spawn where: I haven't seen them in the game or in the mod DBs, and I wouldn't use them, even if they existed. That's cheating.

[AlienOne]

Pretty sure those RAM numbers are for system RAM not discrete video card RAM, In fact most laptops (unless designed for gaming) don't have any discrete video RAM and just share system RAM.

Modern OS's have gotten much greedier for RAM and that's why those number have been getting larger. Having a multi-threaded processor doesn't boost speed if you are crippled by virtual memory.

I went off of the recommended video card, looked up the video card, and then took note on how much video ram that video card had to get my vRAM numbers.