New efforts!

[LaughingAlex]

CoH on the unreal engine should make the powers travel at believable speeds then, I say.  It's possible to make beams or super fast particle projectiles pretty after all :).

[umber]

I always thought the damage from propel should have been random commensurate with the particle you drew.  So like an old fan would do 1.0, that big air tank would do 1.96, and once in a while it would crit for 3.56 when you threw that rust bucket at them.

Wasn't the Propel object determined randomly by each client?  Seem to recall chatting with folks in-game and mentioning how cool my propel-car looked and they'd mention seeing a gas canister or table.

Would be weird if you landed a massive car-crit and everyone else was thinking "what was than desk fan made of, nitroglycerin?"

[FloatingFatMan]

Wasn't the Propel object determined randomly by each client?  Seem to recall chatting with folks in-game and mentioning how cool my propel-car looked and they'd mention seeing a gas canister or table.

Would be weird if you landed a massive car-crit and everyone else was thinking "what was than desk fan made of, nitroglycerin?"

Yes, it was client side. All physics calculations and animations were done client-side as far as I know, to take the load off the servers. Many a time I left a Hellion dangling from a fence, and my team mates see him on the floor, or whatever...

[Codewalker]

Yes, it's random each time the fx is played. That means even demo playback shows a different object every time.

The easiest fix for that would be to extend the network protocol (and by extension demorecord format) to include a random number with which to seed an fx-specific RNG instance to use for all randomness within the fx script. For efficiency, a single-bit flag could also be added so that only fx that actually need it (like propel) incur the extra overhead.

Yes, it was client side. All physics calculations and animations were done client-side as far as I know, to take the load off the servers. Many a time I left a Hellion dangling from a fence, and my team mates see him on the floor, or whatever...

That doesn't sound right. "debris" objects were purely clientside, but ragdoll was serverside and synced to all players. If an NPC was in the wrong place, it sounds like a bug.

[FloatingFatMan]

That doesn't sound right. "debris" objects were purely clientside, but ragdoll was serverside and synced to all players. If an NPC was in the wrong place, it sounds like a bug.

I always presumed it was left client side because once an npc is dead, the server really doesn't care about it whole lot any more. It's not like we had to click on them to loot or anything...  I know it happened many times though, as I compared screenies with people. The actual loc of the npc was the same, but not its body position.

[Twisted Toon]

I always presumed it was left client side because once an npc is dead, the server really doesn't care about it whole lot any more. It's not like we had to click on them to loot or anything...  I know it happened many times though, as I compared screenies with people. The actual loc of the npc was the same, but not its body position.

There were some instances where the server had to know where the already defeated NPCs were, because there were some powers that required defeated foes in order to work, and there was a range to the those powers. The one I'm thinking about at the moment is Stygian Circle. I'm sure there were others as well. They don't work on non-defeated NPCs and won't work on mailboxes. I think the server stops caring about the defeated NPCs once they fade away

[Tubbius]

Yes, it was client side. All physics calculations and animations were done client-side as far as I know, to take the load off the servers. Many a time I left a Hellion dangling from a fence, and my team mates see him on the floor, or whatever...

"There was Hugo. . . and there was Hugo. . . and there was Hugo, all over the place!"  -- Ray Stevens.

[Arcana]

There were some instances where the server had to know where the already defeated NPCs were, because there were some powers that required defeated foes in order to work, and there was a range to the those powers. The one I'm thinking about at the moment is Stygian Circle. I'm sure there were others as well. They don't work on non-defeated NPCs and won't work on mailboxes. I think the server stops caring about the defeated NPCs once they fade away

Those powers were specifically tagged to affect "DeadFoe" or "targets with an enemy faction and are currently dead" so the server did in fact track such entities, at least until they despawned.

But there were some very strange oddities surrounding dead foes.  For one thing, for about a year prior to shutdown I was trying intermitently to track down a very strange bug.  Sometimes, a dead foe would actually "skittle" across the ground, specifically after the devs mucked around with the ragdoll physics and started creating instances where critters would ragdoll to the ground and then on uneven surfaces wouldn't stop bouncing around.  The interesting thing was that demorecord was incapable of recording the phenomenon, and I was never able to catch it in fraps.  The fact that demorecord was not able to record the phenomenon suggested to me it was something that was happening on-screen, but not something the game client was "aware of" in the sense of either the server or the client tracking it as explicit entity activity.

[Shibboleth]

What was funny with Propel was that different people saw different things being tossed out. I assume the randomization was handled client side.

Edit: Ahh...see it was already mentioned.

[Shibboleth]

Malta Sappers had the same effect, whenever teaming against Malta first targets would be the Sappers, the Malta were one of my favourite Villain groups.

The great joy of my Dark Melee/Electric Armor brute was being able to recover endurance. Sappers were dangerous (being toggled off sucked) but could be recovered from.

[Psycout]

What was funny with Propel was that different people saw different things being tossed out. I assume the randomization was handled client side.

Edit: Ahh...see it was already mentioned.

It was the same with emotes. I could do the /e eat and my character would be eating a hotdog on my screen but a hamburger on someone else's screen.  Good times.

[FloatingFatMan]

Those powers were specifically tagged to affect "DeadFoe" or "targets with an enemy faction and are currently dead" so the server did in fact track such entities, at least until they despawned.

But there were some very strange oddities surrounding dead foes.  For one thing, for about a year prior to shutdown I was trying intermitently to track down a very strange bug.  Sometimes, a dead foe would actually "skittle" across the ground, specifically after the devs mucked around with the ragdoll physics and started creating instances where critters would ragdoll to the ground and then on uneven surfaces wouldn't stop bouncing around.  The interesting thing was that demorecord was incapable of recording the phenomenon, and I was never able to catch it in fraps.  The fact that demorecord was not able to record the phenomenon suggested to me it was something that was happening on-screen, but not something the game client was "aware of" in the sense of either the server or the client tracking it as explicit entity activity.

Yeah, I saw that many times... If was often really funny to watch.

[Arcana]

It was the same with emotes. I could do the /e eat and my character would be eating a hotdog on my screen but a hamburger on someone else's screen.  Good times.

That actually created some odd problems for the devs.  Hypothetically, suppose the devs wanted to make a cutscene in which an entity ate a hamburger and then started talking.  That was actually impossible to do, for several reasons.  The first was that there was no way to be sure the eat emote would eat a hamburger (you could make one specifically, but that's not the point here).  The second more interesting thing was that the eat emote cycled through some actions randomly, and not only could you not be certain *what* the entity ate, you couldn't even be 100% certain *when* they ate it.  That made scripting that action triply difficult.  You couldn't be sure what the entity did.  You couldn't be sure how long it took.  You couldn't guarantee everyone saw the same thing.  The whole point of the way the CoH animation sequencers worked was that they put a lot of the intelligence in the clients, removing the burden from the servers.  But the way they used them made them non-deterministic in some areas (fortunately and obviously, not generally in combat although errors did happen).  To guarantee everyone saw the same guaranteed thing you had to make animations that had no random or non-deterministic elements and have alternate logic choose from them.  But the game wasn't really designed to do that easily.

[Eskreema]

Was this true of melee powers like street justice? I think the second power could be animated as a left elbow or right cross - would peeps see that differently?

[Arcana]

Was this true of melee powers like street justice? I think the second power could be animated as a left elbow or right cross - would peeps see that differently?

Codewalker might know off hand for certain, but what I recall is that punching powers that had a left and right handed version used an animation sequence that had two possible next sequence options, and when the animation sequencer was presented with two possible next options with the same priority it chose randomly between them (and I say "randomly" to mean it picked one or the other, but I don't know if it literally rolled a rand() or did some other procedure for picking).  Because this choice happened in the sequencer, I don't think it was synchronized between game clients.  But I never actually tested that to confirm, nor did I get around to confirming it in other ways.

[pinballdave]

Yeah, the problem is that a planet is a big pile of stuff just held together with gravity -- any acceleration even remotely on the scale of a fraction of a G and the whole thing falls apart or turns inside out -- it's like trying to push a water puddle

It would be rather hard for Superman to do much to the planet -- he could punch his way through it at high velocities a number of times, but the damage would be almost entirely local -- even Silver Age Superman couldn't really do much more than the effects of a few several kiloton blasts unless he skimmed along under but near the surface at some high fraction of light speed for a while.  That should make things rather nasty for the biosphere, but probably wouldn't disassemble the planet or anything.

That is my point exactly. Enough force to move a planet distributed over the surface that Superman was pushing would just make a very deep hole.

The Spectre now, has and can move planets. I don't doubt a Green Lantern of the caliber of Hal Jordan could move a planet. Let's try to forget the mess Tomar-Re made of Krypton

[pinballdave]

The answer to every Flash physics question is "because the Speed Force".

The thing about Flash on the cosmic treadmill -- what kind of lubrication did those rollers use? Was it made of adamantium (oops not a Marvel universe). Barry Allen's costume wasn't so much to hide his identity as it was to protection him from heat caused by friction running through the air at superspeed. It should have been a one use machine and destroyed during a single use.

[Arcana]

I don't doubt a Green Lantern of the caliber of Hal Jordan could move a planet.

Presuming a green lantern ring is powerful enough (and they are supposedly almost limitless in their power, at least for limited times), green lantern rings operated on strength of will, and could create anything their wielders could imagine.

Ok, here's your green lantern ring.  Now imagine something that can move a planet without destroying it.  Not exactly easy, is it?  Nowhere was it stated the green lantern rings operate by magical fiat.  A green lantern can't just say "I imagine the Earth moving" and it moves.  They have to imagine something that can actually exist, that the rings can make real, that can move the Earth.  If you imagine a giant baseball glove encompassing the Earth, picking it up, and then moving it somewhere else, you really ought to have killed everyone on the surface of the Earth you just squished flat with the glove surface.  You could imagine a giant force field that surrounded the Earth and moved it, but how does a green lantern ring actualize such an intent?  What kind of force field can do that?

Green Lanterns could never just imagine a black (green?) box that could do anything and make it work.  Otherwise Hal Jordan could have just willed a "machine that can defeat Sinestro" into existence, and it would just happen.  So presume you have unlimited power.  Also presume you have indominable will to control a green lantern ring.  Now move the Earth.  Its actually kind of tricky.

On a smaller scale, this was actually explored a bit in the comic books, when Kyle Raynor became a green lantern and discovered that while he lacked the will of Hal Jordan, his imagination was in many ways superior.  This made him a formidable green lantern over time, because he had a weapon of sorts Hal Jordan didn't possess: a mind that could make more complex things than Hal tended to do.

The Spectre is magic (basically) and doesn't have this limitation.  In fact, depending on the writer and what year this is, the Spectre had no real limitations at all.  He wasn't limited by any rule of the physical universe.  He just had other limitations we poor meat bags couldn't understand.

[Arcana]

It would be rather hard for Superman to do much to the planet -- he could punch his way through it at high velocities a number of times, but the damage would be almost entirely local -- even Silver Age Superman couldn't really do much more than the effects of a few several kiloton blasts unless he skimmed along under but near the surface at some high fraction of light speed for a while.  That should make things rather nasty for the biosphere, but probably wouldn't disassemble the planet or anything.

If we assume Superman acts like a 100 kg mass on impact, then if he were to manage to accelerate to 99% of the speed of light and strike the Earth, the impact would have the equivalent energy of about a 13 gigaton blast.  For reference, the Chicxulub impact believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs had an estimated impact strength of about 100 teratons, or 100,000 gigatons (100 million megatons).  About seven thousand times larger.

For Superman to shatter the Earth completely, he'd need to at a minimum overcome the gravitational potential of the Earth (the energy needed to cause every part of the Earth to escape its gravity well).  Superman would have to hit the Earth about a trillion times harder to do that.  On the other hand, at 99% of the speed of light he would be hitting the Earth with an impact energy about 50 times higher than that estimated for the Krakatoa blast.  Probably not enough to severely damage the global biosphere, but no matter where he hit, everyone on Earth would notice.

[Sinistar]

Presuming a green lantern ring is powerful enough (and they are supposedly almost limitless in their power, at least for limited times), green lantern rings operated on strength of will, and could create anything their wielders could imagine.

Ok, here's your green lantern ring.  Now imagine something that can move a planet without destroying it.  Not exactly easy, is it?  Nowhere was it stated the green lantern rings operate by magical fiat.  A green lantern can't just say "I imagine the Earth moving" and it moves.  They have to imagine something that can actually exist, that the rings can make real, that can move the Earth.  If you imagine a giant baseball glove encompassing the Earth, picking it up, and then moving it somewhere else, you really ought to have killed everyone on the surface of the Earth you just squished flat with the glove surface.  You could imagine a giant force field that surrounded the Earth and moved it, but how does a green lantern ring actualize such an intent?  What kind of force field can do that?

Green Lanterns could never just imagine a black (green?) box that could do anything and make it work.  Otherwise Hal Jordan could have just willed a "machine that can defeat Sinestro" into existence, and it would just happen.  So presume you have unlimited power.  Also presume you have indominable will to control a green lantern ring.  Now move the Earth.  Its actually kind of tricky.

On a smaller scale, this was actually explored a bit in the comic books, when Kyle Raynor became a green lantern and discovered that while he lacked the will of Hal Jordan, his imagination was in many ways superior.  This made him a formidable green lantern over time, because he had a weapon of sorts Hal Jordan didn't possess: a mind that could make more complex things than Hal tended to do.

The Spectre is magic (basically) and doesn't have this limitation.  In fact, depending on the writer and what year this is, the Spectre had no real limitations at all.  He wasn't limited by any rule of the physical universe.  He just had other limitations we poor meat bags couldn't understand.

:D :D :D

Once upon a time in a PRE Crisis story of Green Lantern, Hal was summoned to the home planet of his predecessor, Abin Sur. The planet's orbit with its sun was bad or some such and the planet was entering an ice age as I recall.   Hal tried to move the planet by creating a giant sized device to grip the planet and then he attempted to move it.  Hal nearly burst a blood vessel or two just making the device and he couldn't begin to budge the planet, so he came up with another way to save it without moving it. 

If several GL's combined their rings and will power they MIGHT be able to move a planet, a Guardian of the Universe probably could move a planet as their upper power limits were never clearly defined.

If a Blue Lantern was nearby and augmented a GL's power it still wouldn't work, blue lanterns can super charge the RING's energy but the will power of the wielder remains the same they just have more power in the ring to use.