And the mask comes off.

[lapucelle]

I'm afraid I'm a little behind on my Kickstarter emails.  But I am getting them.

It was one of the early ones, back during the KS itself.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

Some guys _are_ just that damn good. Doctor Tyche is one of them.

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure Nate is a mutant that actually gets 48 hours a day.

[Shard]

On the subject of voice work... I'm not currently planning on adding Voice work to Revival. That's not to say it's never going to happen, ever. But if it did...It would be around like...the 4th or 5th issue at the earliest.

...I'd have to spend at least that long finding the right voices for the characters.

FWIW, the CoT policy on Voice work is "If you can't do it right, you shouldn't try"  and we're choosing not to risk it. Superhero dialog teeters VERY corny making it difficult to pull off straight even by frontline talent.  If we had a more universal theme, like, say Freedom Force, it's a lot easier.

[downix]

(tangent)

I'm a big BSD fan (and sometimes developer), so I can't fault you for showing him ports.

It's just the mess of mutually incompatible bleeding-edge dependency hell that Gentoo ended up turning the ports tree INTO that made me swear to never install it again. Maybe it's changed since then, but these days if I have no other choice but Linux I'll usually go with Debian. Closest to the BSD minimalist and conservative design philosophy I've been able to find in the Linux world.

I am the same way. Portage is one of the reasons I left Gentoo. I have a soft spot for OpenBSD (yes, even with Theo attached) and Debian myself, although I run a mainly customized Linux setup myself.

[fearalice]

"If you can't do it right, you shouldn't try"

We need to shut down ALL these beacons

[Cailyn Alaynn]

And grammar.

(I wish I'd kept logs of all the editing problems I sent off to the Paragon team to correct typos and grammar issues in the various missions over the years.)

Its understandable to see that in an memo, especially coh. Think about just how many lines of written text there are... that's ALOT to spell check.

[Arcana]

FWIW, the CoT policy on Voice work is "If you can't do it right, you shouldn't try"  and we're choosing not to risk it. Superhero dialog teeters VERY corny making it difficult to pull off straight even by frontline talent.  If we had a more universal theme, like, say Freedom Force, it's a lot easier.

Your policy on voice work should be "if you think you can do it right, hit yourself in the forehead with a hammer until you change your mind."

[Kistulot]

Speaking as someone who has had to help a lot of people with tech they weren't very good with, the only thing that only bothered me was when someone was asking for my help and upset they had to learn something. I literally had people who called me scream "I bought this computer so I wouldn't have to think!"

People who are just bad at computers, inexperienced, etc, were pleasant as long as they were patient with themselves and willing to keep an open mind. It only got bad when someone was stubbornly convinced the technology was the enemy.

Unless ya know, it's WIndows 8.

(Not kidding, but at the same time, I respect those who can stand it, or OS X. I actually have a laptop atm that came with win 8, and I upgraded it to 7. Can't get the trackpad to use trackpad drivers, or the ethernet port to work... but it's still otherwise a huuuge improvement!)

[Phaetan]

Arcana being the voice of reason yet again.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

Your policy on voice work should be "if you think you can do it right, hit yourself in the forehead with a hammer until you change your mind."

Gonna have to give Arcana thumbs up here, and agree.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

Unless ya know, it's WIndows 8.

(Not kidding, but at the same time, I respect those who can stand it, or OS X. I actually have a laptop atm that came with win 8, and I upgraded it to 7. Can't get the trackpad to use trackpad drivers, or the ethernet port to work... but it's still otherwise a huuuge improvement!)

I'll say one thing on win 8. I have it on my Surface RT, and it's actually quite fantastic on my tablet. It works smashingly well on tablet, not... so much on PC.

Ive got both a Surface RT, and a Galaxy Tab 7in. I use the surface far more.

[Kistulot]

I'll say one thing on win 8. I have it on my Surface RT, and it's actually quite fantastic on my tablet. It works smashingly well on tablet, not... so much on PC.

Ive got both a Surface RT, and a Galaxy Tab 7in. I use the surface far more.

The idea of a tablet with a desktop OS (but a UI designed for tablets) has appealed to me since before tablets became a huge thing. The idea of carrying around the sheer library of applications and games that run on a windows PC...

It wasn't a bad idea to try to make a touchscreen UI on Microsoft's part - it was just bad to not see that it would be taken with the same level of love as Vista was.

[Pherdnut]

In my youth I used to think all users were idiots.  I've come to realize that while some are idiots, equal percentages of the technical people are also idiots.  The difference is that the technical people are paid to know this stuff, and are failing their responsibilities.  The users aren't explicitly paid to know this stuff, and most look like idiots because the people whose job is to educate them are idiots.

Its rare for me to find genuinely idiotic users that can't learn.  I have far more patience with users who want to learn, but simply do not have the context to pick things up quickly and need time to absorb it all, than I have for know-it-all techs that think they know everything, then blame the laws of physics for not generating the result they know is supposed to happen when they type the wrong command for the fifth time.

In fact, I would much rather work with users that know nothing, than technical types that know a lot, but more than half of which is wrong.  Many supposed tech people slinging stupid user jokes are actually themselves net negative in useful knowledge.

Not that I don't think its funny when users do weird or unexpected things: I'm only human (as far as anyone knows).  But while I will laugh at someone that slips on a banana peel and falls, I will also extend a hand and help them up and help them pick up their stuff.  I may laugh at "stupid users" but I will also spend hours teaching them, no matter how long it takes, as long as they are willing to learn.

If you can't teach it, you don't really know it.  The same was true for City of Heroes.  Easy to laugh at the newbees, but for every newbee that didn't know what we knew, there were other players laughing at all the things we didn't know or knew incorrectly.

By "we" not me specifically of course, but you know: other we.  And even I spent much of my first day playing trying to figure out why the train refused to take me anywhere when I walked through the door and onto the train.

You're starting to sound suspiciously like a UI dev.

I've known and liked geniuses who couldn't code for a team or maintainability for a damn. The problem is that when you can hold a spectacular quantity of information in your head, taking a simple get-the-data web service problem that already has the DB layer and HTTP handler stuff all but written for it, and breaking it into a spectacularly atomically granularized 25 class solution that uses all of the Design Patterns (with some edits) doesn't really seem like that big of a deal to you to understand. Sure it takes 7 seconds to do a simple 1 row/column lookup and spit it back out in an HTTP response but think of the componentization man! We might maybe need any one of these 25 tiny little pieces to get reused one day!

Myself, I'm partially a UI dev because I'm a GUI  moron. Every problem a person could have understanding this stuff, I run into and I hate them all. I actually like Win 8. Why? WindowsBtn + Q to search for an app. I have a desktop with explorer for doing explorer stuff and I have WindowsBtn + Q. And a taskbar to pin stuff, which has always worked well for me. It's all I freaking need. And it doesn't take 25 minutes to load the silly thing for a change. The tiles are ridiculous. Removal of the start menu completely unnecessary. But it's just another crap OS that at least performs well to my eyes.

[Arcana]

I'll say one thing on win 8. I have it on my Surface RT, and it's actually quite fantastic on my tablet. It works smashingly well on tablet, not... so much on PC.

Ive got both a Surface RT, and a Galaxy Tab 7in. I use the surface far more.

Everything that makes Win8 detestable on a desktop makes it functional on a tablet.  Everyone else understands that, from Apple to the Linux community and Android.  Microsoft was still and apparently still is locked into a "Windows everywhere" mindset that says all anyone should need is Windows, and Windows should be good enough for everyone everywhere.  I see some signs of cracks there, but I still think its a point of religion at Microsoft that Windows is the greatest OS ever, and everyone should have the privilege of running The One True OS on everything.  See: WinCE, Windows Mobile 1-5, Windows 8.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

<all the really informative and useful stuff snipped for brevity>
13.  Nyx:  http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/duckvsduct.html
<see previous snippage>

Heh. Thank you. Some other site had referenced the fabric layer in duck tape as being part of the source of the name, but the water resistance makes even more sense. It's still a terrible long term solution for ducts or anything else that regularly gets hot, cold or even exposed to weather, but it is really useful as a quick temporary repair or rigging.

[lapucelle]

Everything that makes Win8 detestable on a desktop makes it functional on a tablet.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/dell-venue-8-pro/pd
I really, really enjoy this little beast. Great battery life, and so portable. And you can use a USB2Go adapter and a USB to serial and plug it right into a firewall's serial port.
Or run Maya on it.
Or, er, read comics.
I do wish it had more RAM.

[Neutrio]

I will warn you, however. Something nobody thought to tell me when I got into learning Game creation. Get into it far enough, and you'll never look at games the same way. You start to look at how you think things were built, and how you might build them better/differently. Seriously, I look at games and I like...see Wireframes and scripts, lol.

or is Irish_Girl trying to say:

Seriously, I look at games and I like ... see ... there's way too much information to decode the game. You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the wireframes & scripts. All I see is building, bench, redcap

/e ducks   

[Pherdnut]

FWIW, the CoT policy on Voice work is "If you can't do it right, you shouldn't try"  and we're choosing not to risk it. Superhero dialog teeters VERY corny making it difficult to pull off straight even by frontline talent.  If we had a more universal theme, like, say Freedom Force, it's a lot easier.

It's a good policy if it doesn't prevent you from asking how you could do it right. I think the important thing to start with is the writing. Modern superhero movies don't generally indulge in such dialog. A lot of the COH stuff walked a very blurry line and did it well but maybe that's the thing that's better left unattempted when you don't have funds for voice talent that's better able to compensate for wooden dialog. But I'm trying and failing to think of anything Robert Downey Jr said in in the entire Iron Man trilogy that could have been Freedom Force-esque in the wrong hands.

But more practically speaking, it's expensive, and voice actors getting hit by buses are even harder to compensate for than programmers getting hit by buses when they play an ongoing role in the game. There's a lot of good reasons to not mess with it right out of the gate. But maybe it wouldn't hurt to think about it when there's more to convince the right fans of the COH phenom that there's more than a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality going on here.

[hejtmane]

Honestly, it would take too much work to teach most normal users to switch to a different desktop.  Not even that Linux is necessarily harder, Mac OSX is not harder to use than Windows but try switching OSX users to Windows, or Windows users to OSX: same problem.  Users get locked in to a certain look and feel, and its difficult to unlearn.

For most office automation use cases, I find properly managed VDI to be just as bulletproof running Windows as any other solution, and even easier to maintain.  It is hard to break a Linux desktop, but its *impossible* to break a VDI desktop that can be reset to the same state it had at the beginning of the day at the push of a button with no possibility of the user being able to damage or corrupt the hardware in any way.

Mandatory on-topic mental muse: I wonder if VMware's GPU hypervisor support would allow you to run CoH clients in the cloud and stream the game to well-connected (low lag) users?  You'd never have to worry about hardware or OS support issues ever again.  Game companies are building games that support streaming now, but I wonder if it could be retrofitted into "classic CoH."

We start our POC on that this year I say that the way the Hospital moves may be next year; I am just glad I no longer do Customer support side I been on the infrastructure side for the last 6+ years.

On your questions on the Hypervisor with the new enhanced graphic acceleration support it may be a possibility If i remember correctly that came in 5.0 and they upgrade it further with the last two releases. I have not used that function but hardware wise on the server side the speed is there and with some of the new hardware and ram scheduled to come out over the next two years Cisco released 40GbE last year and 100GbE from them or someone else should be here before we know it not sure of the cost but hey.

That may be the next future for gaming companies to make money hey do not worry about your PC being old for X$$ a month extra run are games from the cloud PC optimized for XXX game never worry about updating again. No patching your machine after an update it will be already patched when the server come back on line; maybe I should be pitching this to some big company.

[Felderburg]

Regarding future plans for CoH: check out the Lore AMA article at the wiki: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA It has the three Lore AMAs collected there. Good stuff!

Regarding Atlas Revived zone changes: I say start off with everything as is, barring minor improvements. If something happens storywise, or just doesn't make sense in the first place, go ahead and change it, but for the most part I think it should start from CoH and build from there. I do like how you've laid out the entire city in one thing; FYI, the first Top Cow comic's opening scene shows a shot of the city from outside the walls - there appears to be lots of forest (yeah they're sort of non-canonical, just saying - more of my thoughts on that here: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,9677.msg153257.html#msg153257).

As for Skyway being the only place with freeways... maybe they were built in a giant circle around the city - Paragon was built before cars were invented, and the trains are pretty good, so maybe the interstates just run in a circuit around the city? Or maybe the Rikti destroyed them in the first war - major lines of transportation ought to go, after all.

Regarding Valiance and Heroes & Villains "opting out" of the licensing deal: are they opting out entirely? Because even if they don't use any story or characters or lore, or even say "this is an alternate dimension", I would have thought they would want to slap a CoH sticker on the game and say "Official City of Heroes Successor!" Just to get that boost, even if they use nothing else.

So like a Moab (DoTA, LoL, Infinite Crisis, etc) type of deal but instead of picking your heroes, you pick make them? :O I don't know if that is what your are getting at, but that would be fun

A CoH MOBA would be SWEET! With the licensing deal, it could actually happen. I would LOVE to see some sort of porting between a MOBA and CoH of characters - even if it was just costumes onto the MOBA's generic versions of your toon (e.g. all fire / eng blasters, when ported, would become the moba version of a fire / eng blaster) or just a costume onto an existing character.

Regardless, it would still be great to have a MOBA team of Cole and the Praetorians versus States, Recluse, and other Primal Earth folks, or other crazy combinations. The minions could be Clockwork vs. Longbow, or something like that. The plethora of characters and power ideas would make creating new champion concepts pretty easy.

You can do better, loads better. :p  Personally.. I kinda like how they do it in DCUO.  Just a collection of big empty rooms you can decorate how you like. Just don't gate the furnishings behind drops and let the users buy additional rooms to add on to it (including multiple levels).

Huh - I played the intro mission to placing things in a base, but it seemed to me like I could only place items at certain points - I couldn't move them freely. Is that unlocked later, or did I miss something?

As for 'realism' - who wants that?  You can see the pitfalls of that thought process in any Marvel movie.

How so?