Mids Hero Designer

[Doc Artz]

Hi to everyone
Using  "Mids Hero Designer",  I've been slowly restoring several of characters. When will I be able to use them in either Paragon Chat or Tequila COH?


Thanks for your help  ;D
Doc Artz

[Aggelakis]

There is no "Tequila COH", Tequila just helps you install/launch ICON or Paragon Chat, and beyond that, neither ICON nor Paragon Chat do anything with Mids' files. There are no powers, there are no enhancements, etc.

[Doc Artz]

There is no "Tequila COH", Tequila just helps you install/launch ICON or Paragon Chat, and beyond that, neither ICON nor Paragon Chat do anything with Mids' files. There are no powers, there are no enhancements, etc.

Oops on me, ok there is NO "Tequila COH."  8)  I still would like an answer to my question. Am I going to be able to use the characters I'm currently restoring or should I wait however long it takes for Titan COH <-- is that ok? Should I wait for  the launch  before I restore the 5 characters I saved. I used  Titan Extractor  for costumes from Sentinel+ files. Somebody please  help me out there.

Thanks a bunch
Doc ;)

[Aggelakis]

... neither ICON nor Paragon Chat do anything with Mids' files. There are no powers, there are no enhancements, etc.

ICON and Paragon Chat will take costume files and apply them to your new or existing Paragon Chat characters.

ICON is a couple years old now, and Paragon Chat launched last month.

[FloatingFatMan]

Oops on me, ok there is NO "Tequila COH."  8)  I still would like an answer to my question. Am I going to be able to use the characters I'm currently restoring or should I wait however long it takes for Titan COH <-- is that ok? Should I wait for  the launch  before I restore the 5 characters I saved. I used  Titan Extractor  for costumes from Sentinel+ files. Somebody please  help me out there.

Thanks a bunch
Doc ;)

He did answer your question. There is no "Titan CoH", there's Icon, and Paragon Chat; neither let you play the game as it used to be, and neither ever will.  We are still many years away from a functional game play server.

[Doc Artz]

Thank you for clarifying the answer to my question.
What are a few of the roadblocks remaining before  an operational form of "COH" may be available? I, I'm sure as  many others, have signed up to continue to donate to the cause.
I'm hanging in there as long as needed just to once again enjoy one of the most popular game of all time. ;D

Doc Artz 8)

[FloatingFatMan]

Thank you for clarifying the answer to my question.
What are a few of the roadblocks remaining before  an operational form of "COH" may be available? I, I'm sure as  many others, have signed up to continue to donate to the cause.
I'm hanging in there as long as needed just to once again enjoy one of the most popular game of all time. ;D

Doc Artz 8)

There are no "few" roadblocks, there's 100's of gigantic mountain ranges.

Paragon Chat is the best we have for the moment.  As time progresses, it will improve, but we are a VERY long way from functional powers and map servers.  All combat and missions were handled server side, along with a LOT of other things, and all of that has to be recreated from scratch; it's a massive job that's unlikely to be completed this side of CoT launching, especially when you consider that not all of the communication between the client and server was deciphered and now that there are no servers, that's an almost impossible task.

Think of it like this.  Someone tells you that you have to learn Russian, however the only guide you have is a Russian dictionary, written in cryllic, with no English translations.  From that, you have to learn how to read, write AND speak in Russian so that you are indistinguishable from a native.  How much Russian do you think you're going to learn? :P

[Arcana]

What are a few of the roadblocks remaining before  an operational form of "COH" may be available?

I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm, but Paragon Chat is not an incomplete version of a fully playable game.  As a learning platform Codewalker can use to figure things out its potentially useful to building a fully playable game, but Paragon Chat's trajectory is likely to be an ever more fully fleshed out chat and animation sandbox.  There are no plans to add the actual game mechanics to Paragon Chat.

Fundamentally, there's really only one major roadblock to getting a playable game back, but its a doozy.  Right now, Paragon Chat is acting as "glue" to connect different City of Heroes game clients together.  The clients can do a lot in terms of showing and animating characters and NPCs, but it has absolutely no awareness of powers, effects, scripts, missions, NPC AI, or anything else really except showing map geometry and letting things move around in it under player control.  What we're missing is what is called a mapserver.  Oversimplifying greatly here, the mapserver is what made City of Heroes a game: it understood what attributes were (things like player hit points), what powers were, what attribmods were (what you would call power "effects"), what NPCs were and how they were supposed to act, what missions were and how to execute a script of events to run one - basically everything that wasn't you the player moving around.  It was even the mapserver that understood what "flying" meant and that's why Paragon Chat doesn't support flying yet: Codewalker has to simulate that within Paragon Chat.

A mapserver would bring the world to life, and allow players and NPCs to do things other than move around.  Its a very complex bit of code, and the roadblocks to making one are two-fold: understanding *what* precisely it needed to do to do all the things it appeared to do, and understanding *how* to do that in a way the game client would understand**.  There are many things mapservers did that Codewalker is learning how to make happen in Paragon Chat.  There are many things its likely Paragon Chat will never be able to do in the way players want, due to limitations in Paragon Chat's design - limitations that will likely never be removed from Paragon Chat because they run counter to its intended purpose as a community interactivity platform (chat).

If City of Heroes did a thousand things, then the bad news is Paragon Chat currently does about twelve.  The good news is that there's hundreds of things Codewalker can probably add, eventually, given enough time.  The other bad news is that there's still hundreds of them that will likely never be fully doable.


** There's technically a third: mapservers can't work without data to drive them, and while much of that data is embedded in the game client, there's lots of data that a mapserver would need that only existed on the game servers, which aren't around for Codewalker to yank the data out of.  And even if that data existed somewhere, there's the separate issue of the legal grey area of whether its legal to create new software that uses it.  Paragon Chat skirts that by being dependent on and using what's inside the game client itself directly, without distributing that information within its own software.  But a mapserver would need data not in the game client, and that data would have to be hosted by anyone running a mapserver and distributed by anyone writing one.  That's a sticky situation in and of itself.

[Felderburg]

Aaaaand a few days late, here's a link to a potentially helpful album about the programs involved: http://imgur.com/a/TDCyB

I suppose the album doesn't actually explicitly say: "these programs are in no way shape or form anything close to actually having the game," which is perhaps a significant omission.