New efforts!

[Angel Phoenix77]

Wow all this time I thought it was Godzilla or Mothra doing it.

I thought it was Mecha Godzilla :D

[Arcana]

Wow all this time I thought it was Godzilla or Mothra doing it.

Yes, when a mommy Godzilla and a Daddy Mothra love each other...

...


... and that's where we get GM's.  Any other questions, Timmy?

[Graydar]

Curious, has anyone had any contact with Cryptic about the whole NCSoft dealydoo?  Perhaps they would have an earlier backup of character information or something like that lying about?

[Arcana]

Curious, has anyone had any contact with Cryptic about the whole NCSoft dealydoo?  Perhaps they would have an earlier backup of character information or something like that lying about?

No, no, no.  First, of all Cryptic sold the game to NCSoft in 2007.  Second, Cryptic wasn't supposed to take character data - or for that matter, server backups of the live severs.  Third, any data someone at Cryptic might have would be there without authorization, so they wouldn't tell you.

[Rejolt]

Curious, has anyone had any contact with Cryptic about the whole NCSoft dealydoo?  Perhaps they would have an earlier backup of character information or something like that lying about?

Yes, I'm sure NCSoft fires people, lets them keep work product, customer information and those former employees freely admit it completely free of legal issues.

Aka, NDAs still exist for Paragon Studios with NCSoft.

[Arcana]

Yes, I'm sure NCSoft fires people, lets them keep work product, customer information and those former employees freely admit it completely free of legal issues.

Technically NCSoft didn't fire them.  Since not everyone understands how this worked, its worth going over.

When Cryptic was developing City of Heroes, NCSoft was the publisher.  The relationship between them was comparable to the director of a film, and a theater operator.  Cryptic made the game, NCSoft screened the game.  Although Cryptic did all the work to produce that final product, they had exactly nothing to do with how people saw it.  They did not drive to the theater and load the projector.  They did not run the projection system.  They were not even allowed into the back offices of the theater.  They mailed the film to NCSoft, and NCSoft took it from there.

Cryptic developed the game on computers in their offices.  They then send game updates to NCSoft, along with written instructions on how to load that game or game update onto the live servers.  They did not log into those servers and do that themselves.  They were not even given access to do it if they wanted to.  They were not standing over the shoulder of the guy who actually did that either.  They had to be sure their updates and instructions would work, or it would just go kablooey that night.  The NCSoft operators that did this had no possible way of knowing how to fix it: they were not developers of the game themselves.

Not only did Cryptic not have access to the live servers, they also did not in general have access to our character or account data.  Character data they could get to do things like analyses, but they had to *request* that data from NCSoft, whereupon an operator would run the queries they were told to run and send Cryptic the data.  If Cryptic had asked for account data, like logins and which accounts used which characters, they would have almost certainly been told "no, are you kidding, no."  Cryptic did not own and had no right to customer data as such.

Because they had to access to the live servers, Cryptic also can't have any backups of said servers.  NCSoft operated the servers, they would have made and maintained any backups of them.

This type of separation of developers and operators is not uncommon, although the details can be different.  When Paragon Studios took over development of City of Heroes, this basic operating structure was essentially maintained.  Even though the devs were now NCSoft employees, they still had no access to NCSoft's operational servers.  Everything someone thinks either Cryptic or Paragon Studios might have, based on the assumption that they were always logging into the live servers and doing things or had direct access to things, is based o a false assumption.

[darkgob]

No, no, no.  First, of all Cryptic sold the game to NCSoft in 2007.  Second, Cryptic wasn't supposed to take character data - or for that matter, server backups of the live severs.  Third, any data someone at Cryptic might have would be there without authorization, so they wouldn't tell you.

Fourth, it would be profoundly out of date anyway.

[Rejolt]

My mistake on typing Paragon, as Cryptic sold to NCSoft while Paragon was let go and the initial question was about Cryptic.

Very interesting on the workings, Arcana. Any possible hard feelings for Paragon Studios over time in a such a system?

[Ohioknight]

*twitch twitch* But... but you... you... you just CAN'T rhyme a word with the same word! That's not the way it works!

Dammit, TYPO.  "The wrong cannot endure the RIGHT"  >:(

[Arcana]

Any possible hard feelings for Paragon Studios over time in a such a system?

No more than any other multiplayer game dev.  As I understand it, for a variety of reasons from logistical to legal to operational, this is mostly the way things are everywhere.

[srmalloy]

Good to know I'm not the only one that loved flight!

Flight more than anything else has been what I've missed in other MMOs, with their world/instance design specifically set up to force players into absurdly-long roundabouts to get to someplace physically close but separated by an uncrossable cliff or canyon. Even Aion, which gave players wings, but only let you fly in certain narrowly-defined areas, forcing you to glide everywhere else, and with its heavily-restrictive limits on how long you could use your wings at any one time, didn't come close to the freedom that flight gave you in CoH.

[srmalloy]

The critical aspect of Cap's shield throws that make them superhuman is that human beings are literally biologically incapable of measuring angles in three dimensional space that precisely and consistently.  When baseball players play the ground ball, the ball is moving towards them.  Its doing so in an area they are familiar with, with sight lines that allow for computing angles intuitively, with sufficient practice.

In connection with this, there have been a number of studies of the way outfielders catch flies, and in every case the player moves first into the plane of the ball's flight, reducing it to a one-dimensional problem -- is the ball's elevation increasing or decreasing from my point of view? -- and moving out or in as necessary to reduce the ball's change of elevation to zero, which means it will come down where they're standing.

[Eskreema]

A bunch of stuff about Captain America's geometric ability.

Having a metric tensor as a cerebellum would have profound implications.  I wished they would have fleshed that out more explicitly.  You should hear my thoughts on the cerebrum ;-). 

Energy Torrent was my shield throw, with logic ala stone melee as someone else pointed out.

[Arcana]

Having a metric tensor as a cerebellum would have profound implications.

I assume you mean metric tensor calculator since having a metric tensor as a cerebellum would have the profound implication of your head exploding. 

Technically, the cerebellum has to have such capabilities, in order to regular certain motor coordination and to compute proprioception.  The problem is that it doesn't seem to be directly involved with visual spacial calculations which are the function primarily of the visual cortex.  And the limitation is on the visual system's ability to calculate absolute depth of field, particularly while in motion.  Its not just about adding motion vectors, its about the fact that motion disrupts some of the stereoscopic cues the visual system uses for fine spacial calculations.

[Eskreema]

I assume you mean metric tensor calculator since having a metric tensor as a cerebellum would have the profound implication of your head exploding. 

Technically, the cerebellum has to have such capabilities, in order to regular certain motor coordination and to compute proprioception.  The problem is that it doesn't seem to be directly involved with visual spacial calculations which are the function primarily of the visual cortex.  And the limitation is on the visual system's ability to calculate absolute depth of field, particularly while in motion.  Its not just about adding motion vectors, its about the fact that motion disrupts some of the stereoscopic cues the visual system uses for fine spacial calculations.

Yes to the ability to perform metric tensor calculations, which you go on to talk in spacial dimensions.  More fantastically, I'm thinking that some implications would be getting compensatory information from even higher dimensions, like Star Wars used midi-chlorines as the means to detect things like The Force.

I hereby declare the reason my mutants had incarnate powers was because mutations of this kind gave rise to using my characters using their powers in ways more and more sensitive to being boosted by fluctuations in The Well's behaviors, and ultimately influencing and mastering the well and onward to the Font of Existence.  (Thankfully, in my world, they don't need bigger heads due to the increase in neuro-architecture 8))

[darkgob]

I thought I had read that the most recent research suggests that the brain doesn't do a lot of these calculations and actually operates more on instinct and past experiences to estimate where free-moving objects will go.

[Eskreema]

I thought I had read that the most recent research suggests that the brain doesn't do a lot of these calculations and actually operates more on instinct and past experiences to estimate where free-moving objects will go.

I think most tensor level calculations are for coordinating both sides of the body.  Visually I don't know if there is adequate representation to do it with high enough certainty to rely on, so it's in the best interest of the players to get into proper position an make the problem one dimensional.  In my fantasy, all vectors would have as unlimited wireless data  ;D.

Edit:  in order to make it easier for itself, the brain may check its memory and if it has come into a similar situation before, it would extrapolate based on that data.

Out of curiosity, are clouds and other condensates represented by metric tensors?

[Felderburg]

I feel like the movies so far have shown Captain America doing a LOT of training. Certainly more than other heroes. It's not inconceivable he goes out to a practice field and runs around throwing his shield everywhere, reducing places he "hasn't seen before" to places "close enough to the practice field" for his brain to figure out the throws. Plus, it was established that he's a really smart guy.

but C'MON what ELSE are those wings for?

I sort of thought they were for speedsters. *shrug*

They couldn't just change the granite armor visual appearance, because that would just cause an uproar from the players that liked the visual appearance.  They would have needed to create a way for the players to be able to choose whether to inherit, or suppress, the default granite appearance, and that probably required some new tech to make happen.

How / why was this separate from the existing power customization we already had?

[Kyriani]

I feel like the movies so far have shown Captain America doing a LOT of training. Certainly more than other heroes. It's not inconceivable he goes out to a practice field and runs around throwing his shield everywhere, reducing places he "hasn't seen before" to places "close enough to the practice field" for his brain to figure out the throws. Plus, it was established that he's a really smart guy.

I sort of thought they were for speedsters. *shrug*

How / why was this separate from the existing power customization we already had?

I believe the difference was that Granite REPLACES your character model with a specific model so it wasn't customizable. They would have had to make all new FX for an alternative and allow you to chose either the replacing model or the new customizable toggle FX. I'm not sure why exactly that would have been any harder than what they did with Peacebringer's Lightform.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I believe the difference was that Granite REPLACES your character model with a specific model so it wasn't customizable. They would have had to make all new FX for an alternative and allow you to chose either the replacing model or the new customizable toggle FX. I'm not sure why exactly that would have been any harder than what they did with Peacebringer's Lightform.

From the perspective of someone not familiar with the code used to create the two powers it seemed that the Lightform VFX was functionally equivalent to Granite, but then again PBs may have used a different approach since they were implemented a fair bit later.