Piledriver

I got some multi-aura combos working in Paragon Chat many years ago by swapping auras into other costume slots, but it was fidgety about what would or would not work and often even when it did render locally it wouldn't propagate over the network. It's cool you've removed the hard limit. Hopefully there won't be too many human roadblocks in the way of actually using that power here.

You've latched on to the angle that AE farms are technically detrimental, but you're only fooling yourself. Things like this betray that you just resent AE for the same domineering reasons all the other nerfherders do, with no real concern whether the content falls into that particular heavy AI workload category.

This is my version. It's got the advantage of being constant and easy to hear, yet not quite so dissonant. download from tinyupload.com

Way back on live the rewards table for AE missions put a severe decrease on rewards for spawns that lacked any of the three lower classifications (minion, lieutenant, and boss). This was done to discourage what was a popular lowbie farm type in which a large map like a city map or the troll cave would be filled with spawns of just one AV or EB. Since these farms were usually locked at a low level, players would gang up on the enemies one at a time and try not to aggro more than two or three. It was actually some good mindless fun for a bunch of low-level characters, with the occasional bit of excitement from accidental aggro. Too bad it got fixed. You can still use solo spawns or other configurations for storytelling reasons, but it will not be worthwhile for the rewards. As well, mobs that cannot hit you at range or do poor damage will not give full rewards. There is a very low cap if you try that. I think you are probably ignorant of the popular farm maps in normal game content, also. They're set up on big open maps with demon or freakshow spawns waiting around to be mowed just as you describe. People could multibox some support in, but that would just slow down any proper farmer. If I were to multibox farm, I'd make multiple scrappers with leadership pool powers giving them tank-level defense and maxing their DPS. Or maybe Arachnos, since they can double that effect. Then I'd go into a demon farm and use the whole team as one to herd like before the aggro cap. No AE needed. AI spiking like mad just the same.

/signed! The nerfherders are never happy. It's not in their wiring.

A game that had the aforementioned glaring flaws and "a ton of people" not only willing to accept them but to blame other players for being the problem? Yeah.

Damn!

Always, ever, obviously a design flaw. Leaving players to sort it out instead of fixing it was even shittier; they don't have the means to fix it properly. Players continuing to play such badly designed games is why things don't get better. Someone tried to bring me over to Everquest from Asheron's Call back when they were still the chocolate and vanilla of 3D MUDs (I'm thinking it was around Christmas '99, since I'd been going heavy in AC throughout the Beta for most of that year) and that was something encountered in the first five minutes, right there in the starting area. AC had that problem scouted in its core design, sorted before it even got out of Alpha. I dropped EQ like the hot piece of garbage that it was, and still resent every player who put up with it. Mind, that wasn't its only failure -- the almost complete lack of character customization and forcing fantasy religion on players was also awful. Sadly, they had more players, because, I suppose, most people have terrible taste.

I don't agree this is a way to go. Especially throwing knockup on a bunch of blasts would look strange to anyone who didn't absorb a bunch of stylized anime before they could throw a ball in the real world. Instead, if the wealth of knockback is viewed as an issue on Khelds, perhaps a global "knockback to knockdown" proc could be added to one of the Kheldian ATOs.

I think it would be best not to create continuity issues intentionally. Instead, let's assume that servers will be around for years to come without incident and community modding/development can take things forward with new story arcs and other content: would it not be best to keep moving forward? In such case, I propose not simply restoring the Galaxy City map from 2004 as a starting zone competing with a refurbished Atlas Park, but a "New Galaxy City" project, building up a new, much larger, zone map with elements of the original Galaxy mixed in. Create a new story to go with it -- how it was zoned near the ruins of the old Galaxy as the first new borough/suburb expanding outside the War Walls of Paragon -- maybe new Praetorian technology is being used for defense against alien invasion, similar to the invisible boundaries in the Praetorian maps. It could still be plugged in as an option when speaking to Coyote in Outbreak, same as the original Galaxy City, and Back Alley Brawler could take up the training position there instead of standing around a rarely-visited part of Atlas looking bored and pounding on the occasional passing Hellion.

Back in the 80s we useta rent video tapes and copy them with a second VHS machine. Even go to the flea market and sell those copies sometimes. We copied music the same way with cassettes. Then in the 90s came CD-Rs, and then Napster, and DVRs. We started stealing everything! Yes, stealing. Own that. Because we don't own any of this. We are stealing it. They stole it. It is stolen. Feigned ignorance isn't much of a protection if the lawman comes for you. Doing it on such a massive scale that law-enforcement can't afford to chase everyone down is how we get away with it most of the time.

I stand corrected. Happily so, at least in relation to the 3DS Max plugin sources. Thank you!

Nothing to do with i24 or i25. This is not a code issue. The game code does not give us tools to write the formats. Those tools either were not leaked or were leaked to other parties who have yet to come forward. The game code does not unfuckulate all the machine-generated definition files that organize game resources for the engine. That tool, too, either was not leaked or was leaked to other parties who have yet to come forward. There are obviously some new things in i25 proving that additions can be made. SCORE has not provided whatever tools they used to do this. Even so, there's a very good chance that theirs are coder-oriented tools, even if they were provided; that is, command-line converters for mesh and texture resources and just plain manual editing of configuration files, which would not be trivial. Homecoming is not SCORE. From what I can tell, GM Jimmy and crew haven't shown they can do anything without Leandro spoon-feeding them, yet. What they say has no more weight than well, what I say as an anonymous poster on the forum. Less. At least I can say I've modded CoX resources before (not meshes; SCORE has something for those that I've never had, though I have heard of a 3DS Max plugin for the format released to the public fifteen years ago or so, bearing in mind that that would be a plugin made for a long-obsolete version of 3DS Max that would also have to be dug out of mothballs). Yeah, I don't know where you get that "1024x1024px" size limit from, though I have a guess. The map textures replaced by vidiotmaps were probably 1024x1024px to start with. So far as I can tell, the engine may not even have a hard limit. Not that it should be pushed too much. But that's beside the point: the scale of the texture is defined in a custom header in the *.texture file. All the community-created tools out there for *.texture file replacement don't actually write the headers, so they can't change the resolution from whatever was originally defined. You might be able to attach that header data to a smaller resolution DXT and have the engine accept it, but the header tells the engine to display it at 1024px, so it probably blows it up on the screen. *edit* Alright, I see now that SCORE's *.texture tool (pretty sure it came from SCORE, anyway, since it bundles i25 source texture components in with the tool and the script's creation date is April 6, 2017) has been published on the OuroDev wiki, and it does write header data. It uses a Perl script, so needs Perl installed, and does the whole compression internally so you can't get any visual feedback in your DXT conversion tools, but it is enough to finally allow increased resolution client-side texture mod(s). Extending the functionality of existing textures (adding reflection, glow, or transparency where they don't already exist) would still require alterations to the definition (text/xml) files as much as adding new textures, but resolution overrides could still make quite an impact.

Okay... so maybe not everyone is anticipating the giant foot of NCSoft to come down on public "rogue" servers like some Monty Python cartoon.

I'd rather see a dozen knockoffs of the Big Two's pantheons running around than what passes for superhero/villain character concepts in the minds of some players, but I don't normally say that because it's not my place to dictate other people's entertainment. As for why I dig recreating specific characters, or types of characters, in CoX: it's actually quite creative, shuffling powers and slotting around to viably approximate the character's abilities, and make it play in a way that feels natural to me (something actual licensed game adaptations have missed, often enough). Sure, it can be a bit hacked-together, especially if the game is working against you with cockamamie powers that seem out of place in any concept (Umbral Beast, anyone?), or doesn't give you even the right base combination of powers, but there's arguably more challenge in recreating a known character well than slapping together whatever the game hands you and labeling it "your own unique character."

I wasn't getting a CTD, but some stuff wasn't showing up, among other issues. Adding -patchdir score to the command before -demoplay fixed that. It might work for the CTD if new stuff in the base is the cause. It looks like different private servers can define different "patch directories," but the contents are probably identical at this point.

I am so with you on this one. Very specifically, that introduction to Miss liberty godmoding everybody's characters in the interest of a lame cheap-shot cliche.

I wonder which side of this political divide loves the hyperbole more? I'm pretty fond of it in moderation, but man... 100-200 vs 8?

The fact that this thread exists ensures I'm going to gank things at random when I see people fighting them in-world instead of just running past hitting you with a buff or heal. The game mechanics here are more in line with Asheron's Call than Everquest, so "kill stealing" was never an issue, but I certainly "frown upon" people who get butthurt about it.

Nobody's a dev here. The server operators are just players with the means to run a server now that it's been leaked. Some players have always been hostile to AE. Some have always been autocratic about how others play the game or being able to get more than some arbitrarily determined fair share of loot. This could become a political issue dividing different servers in time... if there even are public servers for much longer.

You might have your wires crossed a bit there. The accounts database that was apparently leaked has been swept far under the rug, but that is unrelated to Sentinel+, which was a community-created tool to record your character out to a text/xml file. The backup it was able to create was incomplete, because the tool couldn't see any more than the client, but it would be enough to reconstruct your character at the correct level with all the slotting and costumes in place. Although the files could be manually edited, Sentinel+ had a built-in security hash to prevent people buffing characters up artificially or creating new characters from whole cloth (in case the then-supposed server operators didn't want to just hand out wishlist toons to players willy-nilly). Now I've seen what the OP was referring to. Codewalker on the Titan forums made a new importer: https://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php?topic=13387.0 (server-side only, natch).

More for me. But actually, I encourage taking advantage of your freedom here. Make knockoffs. Make modded textures to be as accurate as you can and publish them proudly. If you don't someone else will. Why behave like a mouse now, when you are publicly skirting the law and stealing this game as far as the law is concerned? Everyone behaving like mice is a part of how the Mouse (and it's ilk) got so powerful in the first place, and unlike Cryptic/NCSoft with their massive commercial interests, we've very little if anything to lose if these publishers ever did make an issue of it.

It looks like a lot has been added to Ouroboros. If there's still stuff not there, it'd make more sense to add it. Most low-level enemy groups in the game don't scale up. Those groups would all have to be redesigned to make those missions work at higher levels, which would probably break their placements in the open world. Better to just add anything to Ouroboros that isn't there already. Unless it is all already there in i25.

Not even kidding! So long as we're all thinking the public servers are on borrowed time, though, it'd be great, if possible, to fire up all the holiday events at once. The only downside would be it would be dark all the time from the Halloween event... but imagine the Winter Lord going on a rampage and meeting up with Eochai while there's a zombie apocalypse going on, and everyone's at the theater for the Heist and Gladiator action anyway. The LFG system needs to be working for a lot of that stuff.

You act like we have something we didn't before regarding these file formats. We don't. The source code has routines for reading in the assets, which I suppose could be inverted to reconstruct the format specs. That still doesn't give us tools to work with unless someone writes them. Sad thing is, reverse engineers already figured out most of that years ago, but nobody was willing to turn that information into tools or plugins. That's not all. The resource files can't just be plugged in and get automagically detected. Far from it! There is a big set of text files that tells the engine where to find those resources and how to put them all together. These files were always in the client .piggs and we've known a bit about them for a long time, but they're a gawdawful mess. They weren't produced manually in an orderly way but spat out by some software (that we still don't have) that arranged things in very cocked-up ways. Truth is: without the software Cryptic & Paragon Studios used to manage those files, that whole file system probably needs to be taken apart and put back together. Manually.