New efforts!

[Codewalker]

For some reason I want to say that Absorption was actually already in the engine in I23 already, but I can't remember why.  If it wasn't, several I24 powers wouldn't be possible in I23.

Absorb appeared in Issue 22. I remember it threw a bit of a monkey wrench in my bin file decoder to have all of the attribs after where it was inserted shift down, so I had to do a bit of refactoring to make it more dynamic.. The whole point of my decoder stack was being able to support multiple versions at once to do cross-version data comparisons, after all.

I don't think it was actually used until Issue 23. One of the bosses in the Magisterium trial had an Absorb shield. Some enemies in Night Ward used it as well, and of course Nature Affinity, though it was released later.

Codewalker might know from City of Data differential requirements to support I24 data.

At the very least the data structure is different, so a direct copy would be impossible.

Doing a direct comparison is a little difficult since Issue 24 is where I fixed many of the field names in my decoder to be 'correct' -- i.e. the names used in the real source data files that had been extracted from the parser embedded in the exe. However, just a cursory glance shows the following differences:

ProcsPerMinute removed from the power structure and moved to the individual attribmods instead. You'd have to manually fix this for any power that used it. If any of the new I24 powers need to have two different PPM values for different attributes, there's no way to represent that in the I23 format.

AbusiveBuff added (though I think this was only for removing inspirations when entering an AE mission).

FaceTarget added to make it optional for some powers.

PositionCenter/PositionDistance/PositionHeight/PositionYaw added for the new Position target type which could include an offset. Used at the very least for Savage Leap, maybe more.

StackKey added for more complex attribmod stacking rules. Would need to check if any of the I24 powers used this, but there's a good chance.

I24 was all but completed except for small tweaks (and possible stability fixes) on the beta servers.  If copies of the beta servers exist, I would presume the negotiations would be to consider allowing the use of I24.  If the negotiations are focused on I23, that makes it unlikely I24 even exists in a form available to NCSoft to give out.

Enhancement proc rates were completely broken in I24 beta, which I'd probably consider a showstopper. I don't know if anyone knew about that, depends if Synapse had read my PM yet or not.

The exact details are complex, but the short of it is that whoever implemented the changes to how PPM is calculated in I24 did it wrong, and slotting recharge had the exact opposite effect it was supposed to. That's an engine thing and couldn't be worked around with power data tweaks. Kind of a big deal since ALL procs were changed to PPM in I24.

[Codewalker]

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, fast snipe would not work right in the I23 engine. ToHit was not added to the list of 'important' attributes to send to the client at all times until the early I24 betas, so at the very least making the yellow ring light up for when it's usable would be impossible. Not sure if that would prevent the redirect from working or not.

[mrultimate]

I guess you had to be there.  Yes, I believe I23 CoH was in every important way superior to Issue 0.  But at the time the playerbase itself was totally ignorant.  Completely, utterly ignorant.  There was a time when Fire/Kin wasn't a thing, and literally no one really knew what it could do.  We didn't all burst out of head start running those things around.  It was AR/Dev blasters and Ice tankers.  Ice tankers, man.  When everything is new, everything seems completely different.  I remember debating the relative merits of running an all toggle-SR build verses perma-elude in I2.  Perma-elude.

Sure, most Gravity controllers looked the same because all you had was power-10 SOs to play with, but then again if you've never even *seen* a Singularity before, that's not a big concern (and the game didn't even launch with Singularities in the first place: those were added to the set after launch, so people who only knew the game from reading the manual literally had no idea what those things were when they first encountered them).

Put yourself at Issue zero, and then take away Mids, take away paragonwiki, take away all the guides.  No Arcana to tell you how the powers work; no TopDoc starting measurement threads; no BuffyASummers even listing what the powers are.  No patch notes besides what the devs happen to post, that you might not see.  No powerset debate threads because no one has played enough of them to even compare them.  No idea what pets do.  No idea how mez works.  No idea what attacks the critters have.  No real numbers.  No tohit rolls.  All you have are people like Snipefu and Pulsewave saying essentially "I recommend total focus because it stuns bosses, yo" and something called the "Brawl Index" that people are trying to make that has like twelve powers in it.  How much diversity is in the game?  More than you could possibly navigate through, and more than everyone you know could describe to you.  Enough to make every replay through the game something you've never played before, never seen before, and never even heard of before.

Here's one of my earliest memories of the game.  I'm on my main, aka the only character I've rolled up to this point.  I'm a level 11ish energy/energy blaster.  I'm jogging through Atlas when I happen across a blinking box on the ground surrounded by what appears to be a soap bubble.  I can target it.  I creep towards it.  It doesn't shoot at me.  I take a shot at it.  I miss, but it still doesn't shoot back.  So I decide to open up with everything I have, which is not much.  I shoot at it for what seems like five minutes, run completely out of endurance, and its still sitting there, blinking.  I shoot it, I punch it, I'm basically completely drained and yet it just plain ignores me and continues to sit there, blinking.  Eventually I just give up and move on.

A couple weeks later I'm a level 17 energy/energy blaster, fighting a new enemy called the Sky Raiders.  Oh.  So that's what I wasted ten minutes of my life on.  Someone's level 23 Sky Raider ambush left a present, and I spend ten minutes stalking and five minutes shooting at a completely worthless shield generator.  I *know* there were players that saw that and thought "why?"  'Cause duh, that's why.

For all that I loved how the game improved itself over time, and for all that I think the newer players had it so much better than we did who started basically from launch, there is a part of me that thinks those players missed out on something.  They missed out on coming across a shield generator, and not knowing what it was, not literally but metaphorically (I'm sure I'm not the only one that happened to).  That game fundamentally didn't exist past about I5 or so, when we all got not just too smart for that, but too smart to let anyone else fall for that.  Unless you played the game completely solo, never read the forums, never teamed with anyone, never read any in-game chat at all, and never read any of the outside information sources, then maybe.  Even then, you had to know that what you didn't know, lots of other people probably did.  There was a time when no one really knew anything, and what you were seeing was relatively novel.  That's a unique experience.

\
Arcana

This was a great post.

Thanks MU

[blacksly]

That does bring up a point I don't think anyone's considered, and only just occurred to me now.  Even if it was possible to add I24 features to I23, there's the completely separate question of whether that would be allowed.  Hypothetically speaking, it is possible that whomever manages to negotiate a license for the software may be restricted as to what changes they are allowed to make.  But even beyond that, there is the completely separate independent fact that all I24 data and info would still be copyright owned by NCSoft, and if that data wasn't explicitly licensed to the operators it would technically be illegal for any of us to try to shove it into the I23 game servers.  Because we don't own the I24 powersets or the I24 missions.  That would come down to the specific legalese of how the licensing agreement worked.

In other words, even if NCSoft fully licenses the I23 server and client code to the new operators, and even if NCSoft locates and hands all the dev tools to them, and even if they tell the operators they are allowed to modify the game for their own purposes, none of that says we can use I24 beta data when we're doing it if we don't own a license to use it.

It should be far more likely, however, that we might have new powersets, or Blaster upgrades, that are not the ones that were previewed in Issue 24. That would bypass the copyright question for Issue 24 powers that were not included in an Issue 23 database.

[worldweary]

Just read the post on teams.My pick for a team would be.

Stone/Dark or Stone/Fire Tank
A Brute(any for damage)
Illusion/Rad Controller
Earth/Time Controller(Earth is very good all around)
Fire/Kin Controller
FF/Sonic Defender
Robotics/Nature Affinity MasterMind
Fire/Dark Corruptor

My Illusion/Storm,Earth/Storm and Illusion/Cold were my favorite characters
but it's hard to beat a Rad.

[Void Huntress]

Thanks Codewalker, that was the stuff I most wanted to know. :)

[Ultimate15]

....*siiiiiigh*

At this point, I'm kinda crossing my fingers and holding out hope that Codewalker and the rest of the PC team can just code the whole game back together. I knooooooow that's not a likely reality - both logistically and legally speaking - but my optimism with these negotiations is starting to wane hardcore.

Waaaaaaaaah. 

[Sharde]

I just wish there was some sneaky little offline version that I could play solo (and actually level up in) until the 'talks' prove to be successful :( Here's to hoping!

[pinballdave]

....*siiiiiigh*

At this point, I'm kinda crossing my fingers and holding out hope that Codewalker and the rest of the PC team can just code the whole game back together. I knooooooow that's not a likely reality - both logistically and legally speaking - but my optimism with these negotiations is starting to wane hardcore.

Waaaaaaaaah.

Atlas Park Revival

[Ultimate15]

Atlas Park Revival

I thought APR was contingent upon the negotiations going through - to continue on with the game past I23 should the disc image/IP be legally released to us via NCSoft.

[Arcana]

Enhancement proc rates were completely broken in I24 beta, which I'd probably consider a showstopper. I don't know if anyone knew about that, depends if Synapse had read my PM yet or not.

The exact details are complex, but the short of it is that whoever implemented the changes to how PPM is calculated in I24 did it wrong, and slotting recharge had the exact opposite effect it was supposed to. That's an engine thing and couldn't be worked around with power data tweaks. Kind of a big deal since ALL procs were changed to PPM in I24.

Arguably, I'm not sure they ever worked right.  I think they kept wobbling between different versions of wrong.

[Arcana]

....*siiiiiigh*

At this point, I'm kinda crossing my fingers and holding out hope that Codewalker and the rest of the PC team can just code the whole game back together. I knooooooow that's not a likely reality - both logistically and legally speaking - but my optimism with these negotiations is starting to wane hardcore.

Waaaaaaaaah.

There's no doubt in my mind that Codewalker and buddies can do that.  But how long would that take and how expensive that would be in time and resources, I couldn't say.  If you locked Codewalker and a couple knowledgeable friends in a room and shoved pizza under the door and took bets on whether they would be able to generate a CoH-compatible game engine in a year, I would probably take the under.  But we all have lives, and that includes Codewalker and most of the developers on the various reboot development projects.  And that also includes all the people involved in the licensing negotiations, on both sides.

[Azrael]

There's no doubt in my mind that Codewalker and buddies can do that.

Azrael.

[darkgob]

Azrael.

DarkGob.

[Twisted Toon]

Azrael.

DarkGob.

Twisted Toon

[Aggelakis]

Azrael.

DarkGob.

Twisted Toon

Bob Dole

[Aggelakis]

Oh, wait, I think I did that wrong.

[blacksly]

Oh, wait, I think I did that wrong.

I think you did that right. In fact the only way to have done it righter would have been to sign
Positron.

[Taceus Jiwede]

There's no doubt in my mind that Codewalker and buddies can do that.  But how long would that take and how expensive that would be in time and resources, I couldn't say.  If you locked Codewalker and a couple knowledgeable friends in a room and shoved pizza under the door and took bets on whether they would be able to generate a CoH-compatible game engine in a year, I would probably take the under.  But we all have lives, and that includes Codewalker and most of the developers on the various reboot development projects.  And that also includes all the people involved in the licensing negotiations, on both sides.

I dunno this sounds like a pretty good idea.  Unless of course Codewalker just bet against him self and purposely didn't finish in year so he could clean up and run off to the some sunny island somewhere.

Nice try Codewalker.

[Codewalker]

Azrael.

DarkGob.

Twisted Toon

Batman