New efforts!

[Vee]

.

And now we have to not only anticipate CoX's return but anderu's line, and various instantiations of a circle.

[Goddangit]

I'd be very happy to play on said 'CoH' project with a local LAN or limited player network with AE to make the missions with.  We could always recreate the original missions from the Wiki..?

Micro-server?  Yes please. ;)

Heartily endorse this.  IF the original came back in zombie mode I would play it enthusiastically.  But we had the rug pulled from under us once and especially if NCSoft had ANY involvement with it I would be deeply concerned it could would happen again.  Having the ability to play locally or better still a small personal server would enhance my calm.  In fact I am not a rich man, but I would throw a grand at acquiring this without blinking.

[Prism Almidu]

Hmm... I don't why it never came to my mind before, though I'm fairly certain others have thought of it as well, but advertising zombie mode CoX with... zombie character art. Statesman comes to mind immediately, obviously, and Ghost Widow hasn't had a body in years - which brings to mind a question what would happen should she ever come into contact with Praetorian Belladonna Vetrano, but that's going away from my original point. I'm not exactly a skilled artist, but this seems like a fun little idea.

[Todogut]

I don't *need* to know how long each frame lasts, or calculate and represent that number.  I only need to know if I'm doing thirty of them per second.

Sometimes, I've reinstalled an old game on my new computer and tried to play it. But, the old game ran too fast. The action on my screen zoomed by before I could enter commands on the keyboard or with the mouse.

I downloaded a clock speed emulator, which was designed to enable me to slow down my computer's processor enough to play an old game. It kinda worked.

Sounds like your time management scheme might enable precise control, which would be ideal for playing my old game?

[Abraxus]

And now we have to not only anticipate CoX's return but anderu's line, and various instantiations of a circle.

Pretty thought provoking, huh?  :P ;)

[The Fifth Horseman]

I downloaded a clock speed emulator, which was designed to enable me to slow down my computer's processor enough to play an old game. It kinda worked.

Sounds like your time management scheme might enable precise control, which would be ideal for playing my old game?

Not really - the "too fast" here means that your game probably does not rely on the real-time clock, but on processor ticks somewhere.
If it dates back to early 90's, you might get better mileage out of using DOSBox to run it (Windows 3 games require Windows 3.1 to be set up inside DOSBox, of course).

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

.

Reminds me of that guy from the original CoH forums, the one who had a habit of constantly being obstinately and aggressively wrong about how the game worked. i remember him insisting it was impossible for an FF/Energy Defender to solo the average group of even cons without running out of end and dying unless you used IOs and all sorts of special tricks and temp powers and how it was totally unfair because FF/Energy should be just like Iron Man. i took him up on this challenge by creating one myself and leveling up solo with no IOs, temp powers, vet powers, WW usage or outside funds. Just a scattering of DOs and even in the mid teens it was actually easy and not even all that slow. Even ran an AE mission he thought proved his point somehow. i can't recall whether he did the usual moving of goalposts or trying to ignore the topic once multiple people demonstrated how wrong his premise was in the end. Several people even used detailed, carefully explained math. Of course that was handwaved away first.


Anyway, he tended to end posts with a solitary period on its own line. At least that way every one of his posts had a coherent point.  :roll:

[Twisted Toon]

Reminds me of that guy from the original CoH forums, the one who had a habit of constantly being obstinately and aggressively wrong about how the game worked. i remember him insisting it was impossible for an FF/Energy Defender to solo the average group of even cons without running out of end and dying unless you used IOs and all sorts of special tricks and temp powers and how it was totally unfair because FF/Energy should be just like Iron Man. i took him up on this challenge by creating one myself and leveling up solo with no IOs, temp powers, vet powers, WW usage or outside funds. Just a scattering of DOs and even in the mid teens it was actually easy and not even all that slow. Even ran an AE mission he thought proved his point somehow. i can't recall whether he did the usual moving of goalposts or trying to ignore the topic once multiple people demonstrated how wrong his premise was in the end. Several people even used detailed, carefully explained math. Of course that was handwaved away first.


Anyway, he tended to end posts with a solitary period on its own line. At least that way every one of his posts had a coherent point.  :roll:

I think I recall that guy. I had made a FF/Energy Defender as well. Just to see what he was talking about. Didn't really see any issues with it, except when using Fly during combat. But that was an issue with ANY Power-set combination on Any AT. Well, with the possible exception of those using Regeneration. Of course, most of his issues were more subjective issues that depended on personal opinions on how they felt Endurance usage should be. I have noticed that some people had "horrendous Endurance problems" if their Endurance bar so much as twitched while they were running every toggle they had, plus using every high Endurance power they could, all while suffering a moderate -Recovery DeBuff.

[blacksly]

I think I recall that guy. I had made a FF/Energy Defender as well. Just to see what he was talking about. Didn't really see any issues with it, except when using Fly during combat. But that was an issue with ANY Power-set combination on Any AT. Well, with the possible exception of those using Regeneration. Of course, most of his issues were more subjective issues that depended on personal opinions on how they felt Endurance usage should be. I have noticed that some people had "horrendous Endurance problems" if their Endurance bar so much as twitched while they were running every toggle they had, plus using every high Endurance power they could, all while suffering a moderate -Recovery DeBuff.

And while running both Fly and Sprint.

[Abraxus]

Reminds me of that guy from the original CoH forums, the one who had a habit of constantly being obstinately and aggressively wrong about how the game worked. i remember him insisting it was impossible for an FF/Energy Defender to solo the average group of even cons without running out of end and dying unless you used IOs and all sorts of special tricks and temp powers and how it was totally unfair because FF/Energy should be just like Iron Man. i took him up on this challenge by creating one myself and leveling up solo with no IOs, temp powers, vet powers, WW usage or outside funds. Just a scattering of DOs and even in the mid teens it was actually easy and not even all that slow. Even ran an AE mission he thought proved his point somehow. i can't recall whether he did the usual moving of goalposts or trying to ignore the topic once multiple people demonstrated how wrong his premise was in the end. Several people even used detailed, carefully explained math. Of course that was handwaved away first.


Anyway, he tended to end posts with a solitary period on its own line. At least that way every one of his posts had a coherent point.  :roll:

In fact, the "." was the result of my hitting the "reply" when I thought I hit the "Modify" button for the previous post, and when I submitted it (creating a whole new post), there did not seem to be a way to delete it.  So, I deleted all the text except the "." to see what, if any conjecture there would be on what/why.  It has been entertaining so far, but I hope you don't cast me in the same circle as that guy you referred to.  I have been known to fall into a funk about NCSoft's frustratingly long process of negotiation on our I23 Zombie server, but I don't think I have gone over to the obtuse side in my comments....at least not yet.   ;)

[scope.creep]

gone over to the obtuse side in my comments....at least not yet.   ;)

He hasn't made fun of my lifetime sub to CO lately, anyway. That's something.

[Arcana]

Sometimes, I've reinstalled an old game on my new computer and tried to play it. But, the old game ran too fast. The action on my screen zoomed by before I could enter commands on the keyboard or with the mouse.

I downloaded a clock speed emulator, which was designed to enable me to slow down my computer's processor enough to play an old game. It kinda worked.

Sounds like your time management scheme might enable precise control, which would be ideal for playing my old game?

Only if I rewrote that game.  TFH has the right idea.  DOSBox is a virtual machine emulator, and it can run old versions of DOS and Windows (and newer ones, actually).  What you do is find a version of DOS or Windows that will run that old game, and then load it into DOSBox (its not hard to find old copies of old OSs online somewhere).  Then you load the game into that virtual machine as if you're loading it on a real PC.  The trick here is that (if memory serves) DOSBox had a way to slow itself down, so if you had a really fast PC DOSBox would deliberately slow down what its emulated speed was.  By tweaking that, you could cause DOSBox to not only emulate a virtual machine, you could cause it to emulate an old, slow machine that was just right for your game.

Incidentally, most old games did try some way to tune themselves to the computers of the time: they ran correctly on different computers of different speeds.  The problem is that some of them used idle loops like I described above, rather than a more sophisticated method involving real time clocks.  And the problem with those was that when computers got *really* fast, they got so fast they overflowed those loops - in other words the amount of looping required to pace the game correctly was higher than the game was programmed to be capable of doing.  At that point, the idle loop broke down.  So you probably don't need DOSBox to get absolutely perfect, you just need to get it to slow down to something approaching the typical speed of the computers that existed when that game was written.

The speed increases we've seen in just a few decades is really astounding.  The first PC I had was an Atari 800.  That had a 4Mhz 8 bit processor (a 6502).  I had an original IBM PC, a 12 Mhz 16-bit turbo PC, a 25Mhz 386 Everex, and up and up and up.  In my lifetime, the PC I'm typing this on now is probably at least a million times faster than that Atari I had 36 years ago in raw CPU performance, and possibly a billion times faster in graphical performance.  I can actually run VMware on my PC and emulate faster than it originally ran my previous PC (except for raw graphics performance), and within that VMware virtual PC run another emulator that emulates my old 2Ghz Athlon running WinXP also faster than the original hardware and inside that run DOSBox that emulates a PC still faster than anything that was running PC games in the late 80s and early 90s. 

(Not hypothetical: I did it once as a tech demonstration.  Incidentally, City of Heroes *double emulated* was running at about 0.8 frames per second.  Graphics emulating is still not as good as CPU emulation because of how ridiculously fast graphics cards are when running natively).

[Arcana]

Reminds me of that guy from the original CoH forums, the one who had a habit of constantly being obstinately and aggressively wrong about how the game worked. i remember him insisting it was impossible for an FF/Energy Defender to solo the average group of even cons without running out of end and dying unless you used IOs and all sorts of special tricks and temp powers and how it was totally unfair because FF/Energy should be just like Iron Man. i took him up on this challenge by creating one myself and leveling up solo with no IOs, temp powers, vet powers, WW usage or outside funds. Just a scattering of DOs and even in the mid teens it was actually easy and not even all that slow. Even ran an AE mission he thought proved his point somehow. i can't recall whether he did the usual moving of goalposts or trying to ignore the topic once multiple people demonstrated how wrong his premise was in the end. Several people even used detailed, carefully explained math. Of course that was handwaved away first.


Anyway, he tended to end posts with a solitary period on its own line. At least that way every one of his posts had a coherent point.  :roll:

Actually, I ran some experiments with FF/Archery designed to prove to the devs that defenders needed a DPE boost.  I discovered there were certain missions that the casual player would probably be unable to complete in a reasonable amount of time without heavy inspiration usage while solo.  I specifically recall running missions that spawned dual LTs in their groups often, I think it was a boat mission in Striga, spawning dual LT family.  At the level of the mission where a casual would be unlikely to be fully outfitted with SOs, I demonstrated that it was mathematically impossible to complete that mission running spawn to spawn at normal (non-sprint) speed without running out of endurance under any possible set of tactical gameplay short of slotting for all endurance reduction in attacks.  It was simply a matter of standard recovery giving you X amount of endurance per second, and defender attacks generating Y amount of damage per second with that endurance, and demonstrating it was simply not enough.

FF/Archery was probably approaching the worst case low level solo scenario, but the point was that no such power combination should be literally unable to solo certain missions without resorting to tactics casual players would be unlikely to employ.  I did get them to look at defenders after that, but not really in the way I wanted.

Interestingly, this was a problem that was introduced after launch.  At one time, archetype DPS and DPE were independently adjustable.  But at some point the devs decided to equalize endurance costs across archetypes, which meant damage modifier simultaneously altered DPS and DPE.  I don't think that was the correct decision.  Still don't: I think blasters, defenders, and tankers should have had an intrinsically higher DPE (separate from damage modifier) than they actually had.  Making stamina an inherent made the point mostly moot.

[LadyVamp]

I'm a little confused.

truncated to save space.

Arcana, I will clearify a few things which hopefully will make more sense.  Our need to replicate so many templates with such large vmdks comes from the need to copy between 2 clouds and by-monthly release cycles of a complete representation of the company's 2 production websites.  How they get so large is due to volume of data they contain and the size of the apps installed on them.  If we were to use puppet or chef to push out configurations to push install apps and then tell the apps to load up data from a network share, we tried btw, is would take several hours.  It takes us about 30 mins to spin up a vApp, configure it, configure support apps to control it (udeploy, splunk, jboss, jon, ganglia, nagios), configure Big IPs and reverse proxies.  Yes, they really are that big.  Were it not for thin provisioning on thinly provisioned storage (aka linked clones), we'd not be able to deploy 200 environments between our 2 clouds in any reasonable amount of time.  A typical environment is about 4 TB in consolidated vmdks.  And we don't do windows.  RHEL 5 and 6.  The storage system isn't capable of doing cbt with esxi mounted shares.  We're hoping Oracle will add the functionality (they've been working on it for 2.5 years so they tell us).

Oh and did I mention we use home rolled automation and a catalog system for self service deployments and life cycle management?

I wish I could go into more details but I've probably already said too much about the system already.

[Felderburg]

...but the point was that no such power combination should be literally unable to solo certain missions without resorting to tactics casual players would be unlikely to employ.

Why not?

[ivanhedgehog]

Why not?

because a balanced fun game shouldnt just be fun for scrappers(or fill in the blank with any powerful set). defenders shouldnt be told to find a team if they want to play. COH did this very well IMO. other games, not so much.

[brothermutant]

My first toon was a Grav/FF troller (made the FF/NRG defender afterwards). And let me tell you Grav is cool (and also lame in its dmg out). Its a shame too as it was the only class that felt like I had a telekinetic hero (big fan of Marvel Boy/Justice). It just didn't have the ummph that some of the other powersets got which I thought was a bummer. I did like my FF/NRG defender though. He was very fun in combat except again everyone whined about the KB (which I loved for the simple reason that if the enemy was on their back, they weren't shooting at me). I used him mostly as a boss killer though (usually immune to my KB, and lots of ST dmg). Plus, defender nuking things from the safety of my bubble was way fun.

[Auroxis]

And while running both Fly and Sprint.

I was running Fly, Sprint(stealth IO) and Super Speed (for stealth) at the same time. Though it wasn't for combat purposes.

[Azrael]

http://us.ncsoft.com/en/news/press-releases/ncsoft-accelerating-in-the-west.php

Worth a read.  If they really want to accelerate those efforts why not release a game western players can relate to and has a 100k loyal base to start from and put the standalone costume creator on iOS..?

They all look the same anime/manga style.  If you like that sort of thing..."great."  If not then you're stuck.  In much the way Coh failed in Korea..?

As for Defenders...  Always thought they were the poor relations of the archetypes.  Innovative and unusual, yes.  But a drag and underpowered solo.   I loved F.F/Energy.  Felt they could have made Defenders at range what a scrappers were at melee.  Is good defenses and good damage.  Ie. Allow deflection and insulation buffs to self buff and give base blaster damage.  That would have made a big difference just on that power set.  I think defenders needed a slight rethink in the way issue 24 blasters had an overhaul.

Azrael.

[HEATSTROKE]

 The moment Corruptors were available blue side I stopped making defenders..