And the mask comes off.

[Cailyn Alaynn]

No. No no no no no. All the live servers were *virtualized*....but they were *definitely* run on a whole *stack* of computers, if not multiple banks. Oh, man. There's no way in hell you'd be able to play the game on one computer.

I'll go ahead and blame the derp on being tired from moving. Yeah. That's it.
;P

[hopelives]

  Well friends, the night grows late and it's time to start my patrol of the skies over Atlas. I hope to see each and every one of you there with me again someday. Hopelives !  *Salutes all and fly's away*

[Ankhammon]

I have not said that, nor is that my intent. I simply stated that I had no intent one way or the other, and my reasoning behind that decision. I have every intent to take some time and dig through the links that were given me, and the i24 patch notes on Paragon Wiki.
It would be inappropriate for me to just dismiss something in that manner, and I have too much respect to dismiss Posi' and team's work without serious consideration.

Typically, if I'm talking about a decision that people might have strong feelings on like this. I lean, publicly, towards the least popular one so that players are prepared for the worst.

To back up your stance on this Irish_Girl.

A good for instance on why I24 should not be portioned in the Cannon is that there were still issues being worked out.

There were issues with it you can see just by logging into Icon Beta. Such as Dual Pistol damage for corrupters was higher than that of blasters. and much of the corrupter damage was... different than expected.

[Scendera]

The I-23 zombie CoH needs some kind of staff to maintain the game and answer player service tickets. This staffing will take time.

If someone was willing to train me I'd be willing to GM/Guide for a set number of hours a week gratis. Unemployed, no children, just a small indie game studio which doesn't have set hours so I could find the time anytime needed, long as it didn't conflict with my single commitment per week.

[Arcana]

If your database chokes at a few million small records, I'd suggest not using a terrible database. 

The way I would put this is if your mapserver dies after you try to grant a few powers to a couple hundred characters simultaneously, I'd suggest not using a terrible database.

Of course, only I would put it this way.

[Scendera]

(True story btw. Had to let my account slip because I had an extra few expenses that month. Only got a few of my 50s because of it.)

I've always thought that of every tragedy to come from this, that situation was the single cruelest.

You expect a one woman operation (no disrespect to Irish_Girl), to develop APR -and- run the legacy game, on her own? Riiiiiight...

Far as the development goes, she got the proof of concept out the door quite impressively. She would have her pick of volunteers now, due to that.

I strongly suspect she's going to do fine with her chosen corner of things, which is APR, not Legacy.

[Arcana]

No. No no no no no. All the live servers were *virtualized*....but they were *definitely* run on a whole *stack* of computers, if not multiple banks. Oh, man. There's no way in hell you'd be able to play the game on one computer.

I never found out definitively if the live servers were actually virtualized, but I have strong reasons to believe they were not.  That option was not practical when the game launched, and what I know of the server architecture is that it would not have benefited significantly from server consolidation.  It could have been virtualized by default eventually just as a server standardization practice, but its also possible they were kept in legacy configurations on bare metal.

Server instances definitely ran on multiple hosting servers, but that doesn't mean it would be impossible to run on a single server.  In fact, if you think the servers were virtualized then its definitely possible to migrate a set of virtual servers to a single computer and play it.  The single computer just has to be fast enough to handle the load you want to host, which for a small enough number of players would not be difficult.

To put it another way, my desktop at work probably has several times the speed that the entire server cluster hosting Triumph had when that server was activated, based on what you could have afforded to buy in 2003 when that server's hardware was purchased.

[Arcana]

A good for instance on why I24 should not be portioned in the Cannon is that there were still issues being worked out.

There were issues with it you can see just by logging into Icon Beta. Such as Dual Pistol damage for corrupters was higher than that of blasters. and much of the corrupter damage was... different than expected.

On the other hand, I really want my bugged Power Thrust back.

[Pherdnut]

To be fair, that rate is the maximum rate based on ad hoc recording needs.  Yeah, if you only need one minute of voice recording, that's what they'd charge.  It also notes "...or $1500 for a 45-minute recording," or $33 per minute.  Like most things, the more you need, the cheaper it is.

In the case of most video games, I strongly suspect that the work is contracted by the job, not by the minute, although based on some reasonable expectation of how long the actual dialogue is.  Think of it as the difference between taking a taxi if you just need to travel a few miles down the road in a pinch, versus renting a car for the day if you have extended travel plans over a longer period of time.

The $10 million figure is ludicrous, and without some kind of detailed accounting, you'll never convince me that it would cost that much for even the most expensive voice actors to do voice-over for a triple-A game title.  For that amount, to extend the analogy, you could just buy a car--or in this case, hire on a full-time cast of voice actors to do as much recording as you want, whenever you want.  Seriously, an average voice actor makes around $50k per year, and even if you double that to account for insurance, taxes, etc., you'd be able to maintain a staff of 100 full-time voice actors.

"Oh, but that's not including studio time!"  Okay, an average rate for professional studio time is around $200 or $300 per hour, call it an even $250, and that includes the sound engineer.  That would cost you around $500k per year, or the salaries of 5 of your full-time voice actors (remember, their total compensation plus taxes was doubled for this example), so you'd only be able to maintain a staff of 95 full-time voice actors, including studio time and a sound engineer, for $10 million.

In reality, it wouldn't cost nearly that much.  For one thing, if you contract voice actors from a company like Interactive Voices, they supply all of the equipment and expertise to do the recording.  You just need to supply the script and do any post-production necessary, which probably won't be much once they give you the finished product.  Second of all, like I said above, $100 is a maximum rate based on ad hoc recording needs; the cost of a full job such as what would be required for a game would be much, MUCH less, and likely could be negotiated as a whole project instead of a per-hour or certainly a per-minute deal.

Third of all, this is assuming that you want to go the route of using a company such as Interactive Voices.  One of the advantages of a project such as City of Titans is that we have a community to draw upon here that could do the work.  Not that they shouldn't be compensated, but I daresay that most people in this community would probably be willing to do the work for much, much less than even the cheapest rate quoted by a professional voice services company.

In short, if you don't like voice-over, there's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't like voice-over."  Some folks will disagree, but you know, thems the breaks, as a developer you have to get used to that.  But holy crap, man, don't try to justify such a position by quoting some outrageously exaggerated cost for having it.  Some of the times when I was most irritated at Paragon Studios was when I felt like they just didn't want to do something and tried to handwave it off and shut people down by saying it was "too expensive" or had vague "legal issues".  I'd like to break that culture.  And with a topic such a voice-over, which could easily be turned off by a click of an option by someone who doesn't like it, I don't see what the downside would be; it should at least be a fair topic of discussion without resorting to, "It would cost $10 million..."

Also, 100k hours?  Geez, man, even that's split across seven languages, that's 10 days straight of dialogue without stopping.  An average audio book is 15 hours long; a game with 10 days straight of dialogue would be around 16 read novels long.    I'm sorry, but I'm not buying that number either, even if that's supposed to account for retakes and whatnot.

It's always by the hour. I've never heard of a VO actor accepting pay "by the job" although spokesperson gigs could pay a salary. This is also not something where you can just throw together a bunch of decent amateur actors and expect it to pan out. Even strong actors aren't necessarily decent VO actors. 50K? Yeah, maybe if we're talking primarily cheesy local ad talent. Scroll a little bit further down in the article you probably pulled that from to get a better idea. My wife does VO for corporate training. The work isn't always there but when it is, it's 100s an hour. She's also worked for Nintendo. We recently met a guy who was the voice of Chevy for a few years. Millions. This is not a cost that is easy to estimate. There are unions. There are varying talent levels. And yeah, those takes can often go well past a dozen. You can't compare line reads to reading a book. The successors could never afford SWTOR-level VO. They might be able to afford some cinematic VO here and there. But IMO, it is a very smart policy to not make it a priority until they've figured out how they're going to do it without being awful. Because nothing stinks like crummy to mediocre VO.

[AlienOne]

It's always by the hour. I've never heard of a VO actor accepting pay "by the job" although spokesperson gigs could pay a salary. This is also not something where you can just throw together a bunch of decent amateur actors and expect it to pan out. Even strong actors aren't necessarily decent VO actors. 50K? Yeah, maybe if we're talking primarily cheesy local ad talent. Scroll a little bit further down in the article you probably pulled that from to get a better idea. My wife does VO for corporate training. The work isn't always there but when it is, it's 100s an hour. She's also worked for Nintendo. We recently met a guy who was the voice of Chevy for a few years. Millions. This is not a cost that is easy to estimate. There are unions. There are varying talent levels. And yeah, those takes can often go well past a dozen. You can't compare line reads to reading a book. The successors could never afford SWTOR-level VO. They might be able to afford some cinematic VO here and there. But IMO, it is a very smart policy to not make it a priority until they've figured out how they're going to do it without being awful. Because nothing stinks like crummy to mediocre VO.

Yeah, I've worked in post production for over 10 years now. Best I can say is...

However high your estimates are for good work...expect sticker shock.

[blacksly]

I haven't spoken to either teams, So this is pure speculation.
There's also the concern that agreeing to something like that forfeits a certain level of control. You can't simply have the Rikti come in and blow up the planet, it would conflict with what's going on in the I.P. in other places.
Basically, the only way to have no real concerns is to make your story take place in an Alternate time-line/universe/dimension that has very little story ties to CoH. At that point, why even bother calling it a CoH successor?

Considering how many different timelines already exist in CoH, it would not be unreasonable to say that there is a "main CoH" universe, a "Titan CoH" universe, etc. Then you agree with all the others that you can make events/missions set in their universes, but these events cannot actually change their universes. But you do get license to change your own base universe, plus any others that you claim as your "main alternate story areas" (that are not claimed by others). This gives you a good deal of freedom.

The only problem is if one project (Titans) writes a mission based in the universe of APR and using NPC X, and then APR does a major event that kills off NPC X. But that would be, IMO, rare enough that you could communicate with each other and either set some NPCs as "always available for other universes to use", or have Titans update their missions to contact through X's successor.

[Wizzyboy296]

JanessaVR, cut it off...

[Codewalker]

I never found out definitively if the live servers were actually virtualized, but I have strong reasons to believe they were not.

I'm going to bow out of this line of discussion after this as to not risk poking bears, but a little bird hinted that mapservers were not virtualized (after all, what would be the point since all shards dynamically balance maps across them), but dbservers were along with some of the global stuff. Which makes sense as you need a dbserver per shard, so virtualizing allows them to pool resources and not need as many physical machines for them.

[Shard]

I never found out definitively if the live servers were actually virtualized, but I have strong reasons to believe they were not.  That option was not practical when the game launched, and what I know of the server architecture is that it would not have benefited significantly from server consolidation.  It could have been virtualized by default eventually just as a server standardization practice, but its also possible they were kept in legacy configurations on bare metal.

My understanding is they were, that there was significant refactoring done in order to pull that off around the F2P time.  That said, I have no data on the actual vm footprint so I cannot commit on the number of bits of metal needed to minimally run, let alone provide redundancy for maintenance, etc.

[Darkfaith]

I have not said that, nor is that my intent. I simply stated that I had no intent one way or the other, and my reasoning behind that decision. I have every intent to take some time and dig through the links that were given me, and the i24 patch notes on Paragon Wiki.
It would be inappropriate for me to just dismiss something in that manner, and I have too much respect to dismiss Posi' and team's work without serious consideration.

Typically, if I'm talking about a decision that people might have strong feelings on like this. I lean, publicly, towards the least popular one so that players are prepared for the worst.

It would be my fond wish that even if the story content of I24 doesn't make it into 1.5, things like the unfinished power sets and the blaster changes eventually do. I was really excited about the new Pools!

[downix]

To be fair, that rate is the maximum rate based on ad hoc recording needs.  Yeah, if you only need one minute of voice recording, that's what they'd charge.  It also notes "...or $1500 for a 45-minute recording," or $33 per minute.  Like most things, the more you need, the cheaper it is.

In the case of most video games, I strongly suspect that the work is contracted by the job, not by the minute, although based on some reasonable expectation of how long the actual dialogue is.  Think of it as the difference between taking a taxi if you just need to travel a few miles down the road in a pinch, versus renting a car for the day if you have extended travel plans over a longer period of time.

The $10 million figure is ludicrous, and without some kind of detailed accounting, you'll never convince me that it would cost that much for even the most expensive voice actors to do voice-over for a triple-A game title.  For that amount, to extend the analogy, you could just buy a car--or in this case, hire on a full-time cast of voice actors to do as much recording as you want, whenever you want.  Seriously, an average voice actor makes around $50k per year, and even if you double that to account for insurance, taxes, etc., you'd be able to maintain a staff of 100 full-time voice actors.

"Oh, but that's not including studio time!"  Okay, an average rate for professional studio time is around $200 or $300 per hour, call it an even $250, and that includes the sound engineer.  That would cost you around $500k per year, or the salaries of 5 of your full-time voice actors (remember, their total compensation plus taxes was doubled for this example), so you'd only be able to maintain a staff of 95 full-time voice actors, including studio time and a sound engineer, for $10 million.

In reality, it wouldn't cost nearly that much.  For one thing, if you contract voice actors from a company like Interactive Voices, they supply all of the equipment and expertise to do the recording.  You just need to supply the script and do any post-production necessary, which probably won't be much once they give you the finished product.  Second of all, like I said above, $100 is a maximum rate based on ad hoc recording needs; the cost of a full job such as what would be required for a game would be much, MUCH less, and likely could be negotiated as a whole project instead of a per-hour or certainly a per-minute deal.

Third of all, this is assuming that you want to go the route of using a company such as Interactive Voices.  One of the advantages of a project such as City of Titans is that we have a community to draw upon here that could do the work.  Not that they shouldn't be compensated, but I daresay that most people in this community would probably be willing to do the work for much, much less than even the cheapest rate quoted by a professional voice services company.

In short, if you don't like voice-over, there's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't like voice-over."  Some folks will disagree, but you know, thems the breaks, as a developer you have to get used to that.  But holy crap, man, don't try to justify such a position by quoting some outrageously exaggerated cost for having it.  Some of the times when I was most irritated at Paragon Studios was when I felt like they just didn't want to do something and tried to handwave it off and shut people down by saying it was "too expensive" or had vague "legal issues".  I'd like to break that culture.  And with a topic such a voice-over, which could easily be turned off by a click of an option by someone who doesn't like it, I don't see what the downside would be; it should at least be a fair topic of discussion without resorting to, "It would cost $10 million..."

Also, 100k hours?  Geez, man, even that's split across seven languages, that's 10 days straight of dialogue without stopping.  An average audio book is 15 hours long; a game with 10 days straight of dialogue would be around 16 read novels long.    I'm sorry, but I'm not buying that number either, even if that's supposed to account for retakes and whatnot.

I am going by the numbers given to me only. I have no reason to doubt the word of my contacts in Bioware, Cryptic or Trion, and they all gave similar numbers.

[Felderburg]

I want to see the game again.  When I installed Windows 7, I lost my City installation, so Icon is no longer an option as-is.    Here's hoping everything works out reasonably soon and completely well.

The installer programs (Tequila for Windows) don't need the CoH files. I also installed Windows 7, clean install, and used the installer to get Icon in all its glory - the only thing I manually downloaded was Tequila, which took care of everything else.

So, a question for @Downix - If this, ah, "holding company" comes into being, whose primary purpose is to act as a licensor of the CoX IP and possibly a "publisher" of the I-23 server, would this company be limited in the types of licenses it could grant? That is, would this IP company be able to license a novel, or a CCG, or an action figure, or would it be limited strictly to licensing MMORPG versions of CoX?

Theoretically no, though there may be outstanding agreements that NCSoft could require to still be honored as part of the ownership transfer. For example, let's say in 2009, McFarlane acquired five year exclusive personalities (Iconics, etc ) license.  Frequently these kind of agreements are ended when a rights transfer - but not always. NC Soft could require it be honoured as part of the transfer.  THAT IS JUST AN EXAMPLE!

Are you saying "Theoretically no" to the "Would it be limited?" question, or the "would it be able to license CCG, novel, etc.?" question? If it's the former, great! I am super excited to see things like CCG expansion, MOBA, comics / novels, etc. If you're saying "no" to the latter question, why would that be the case?

Additionally, who are you? I'm curious - your sig indicates you're with MWM, and your posts indicate you may have knowledge of the negotiations, but you've never been officially introduced in these threads.

In short, we are not "almost there," unless one has a very...extended definition of the word "almost."

Yeah, I've found the "we're almost there" 'signature' to be annoying, because it is not true at all, and may give false hope to people that something will actually happen soon.

Side note: why type it in to every post, and not just add it as a real sig?

"It is a perfect deal with no risk - because they can just close the game again if needed."  Uh, this is far from perfect, in fact it is terrible.  So it can be "Goodbye CoX once again" at any time on the whim of NCSoft once again?  Yeesh.

Perfect for NCsoft, assuming that's the sort of deal they work out. I am sort of wondering if the holding company for the IP, even if it's independent on paper, will be beholden to NCsoft in any way.

[BadWolf]

Technically, this is irrelevant. But I'll mention it anyways.
I never got to try i24. My account was Premium when the shutdown notice came, and before that I had a policy of avoiding test until Issues went live. Preferred to experience the new content Live.

On to the more relevant part!
For starters, when it comes to some thing, Story especially... I'd prefer not to yay/nay anything just yet. My maybe wasn't a coy way of saying no, I've just not made a decision one way or the other.
I don't know the specifics of i24, I've neglected to go actually dig into the details quite yet. Personally, I consider it cannonical grey area.
It was content made by Paragon Studios, led by Positron. So that gives it serious weight.
However...it was not Live, finished content... So that means I can argue it's not canon.

Speaking personally, my preferences (which should, of course, be given accommodation because I am the Most Important Person in the World) would be to at least see the gameplay changes incorporated into APR--the things everyone was looking forward to like the Blaster changes, the new powersets (already had ideas for a Dual Pistols/Martial Combat and a Spines/Bio-Armor character) and the Rogue/Vigilante-specific storyarcs (as I thought it added a lot to the flavor of the alignment system if those alignments went down different story paths). I care substantially less about the specific story content.

And I don't so much mind not being able to import my Sentinel files, but I'd be a trifle upset if the APR migration didn't allow you to import active characters from the re-released game. Starting over once is frustrating, starting over twice is doubly frustrating.

[Felderburg]

My intention is to include all current content from City of Heroes, then add new content to it...New stories and such. Then perhaps later on look into updating older content.
I don't think I can give more detail on story and such at this time.

I don't know anything about actually making a game, so that's why I'm wondering about it. Wouldn't it be easier to just build all the content in with new tech from the start? Older missions were created before things like phasing and choices within missions were offered, and have a certain mindset underlying their structure (go here, kill X amount, kill X boss, for example). Plus, contacts that change could actually be built in somehow - if you read the Lore AMAs, they talk about why it was going to be hard for Scirocco to switch sides - all the stuff he was involved in, the missions, everything would have to be changed. Why not build some sort of mission / contact designing thing that allows for more fluid changes to the game from the get go?

I have to say that some of what motivates this is my editing of the Wiki. Because of the way the Wiki formatting is set up, it can't deal all that easily with things like the Statesman and Psyche's deaths in their individual articles. And the pseudo-static nature of MMOs has some similar type of issues. So I think building from the start for a dynamic world, and missions that use cool options, is better than just porting over old school "kill all" style missions.

Isn't that easy enough? Just make a character with the name you want.

I would suggest something similar to STO - global handles. There's a certain amount of uniqueness needed in a superhero game, to be sure, but I think it's better to make more people happy.

I hope that at least some, if not most or all, of I24 and of the stuff planned mentioned in the Loregasms eventually makes it's way into the game. But it's understandable if it doesn't. Those writers are no longer participating in your project.

As far as the Lore AMA stuff, I think it would be worth really getting a more in-depth description of the nature of powers / reality. Even if the storyline (Coming Storm, Battalion, etc.) doesn't happen, there's already TONS of stuff in game built on these sort of grand ideas about the nature of the universe.

Most of the stuff built on it is Incarnate stuff, which I never liked, but it's still there.

A good for instance on why I24 should not be portioned in the Cannon is that there were still issues being worked out.

There were issues with it you can see just by logging into Icon Beta. Such as Dual Pistol damage for corrupters was higher than that of blasters. and much of the corrupter damage was... different than expected.

That's game mechanics, which is going to be different anyways, probably. I think that the storyline stuff is good to include - the Praetorian arcs do need some resolution. Mechanics, power sets, things like that: take them if they're good, but leave 'em if not. Power sets should be added as much as possible - even if they weren't finished, we can see the design intent behind them, and build from there.

[downix]

Additionally, who are you? I'm curious - your sig indicates you're with MWM, and your posts indicate you may have knowledge of the negotiations, but you've never been officially introduced in these threads.

I figured everyone knew who David was. He's my right-hand man for the technical department in MWM. Also means he knows everything I know, to serve as bus insurance (as in if I get run over by a bus...). You cannot keep a secret from someone in IT.