Night

Question for everyone: How difficult was it working with the spaghetti code that is City of Heroes and what were some unusual ways you overcame those difficulties to make it do what you wanted? Question for Melissa "War Witch" Bianco, John "Protean" Hegner, Hero 1 and Manticore: Regarding the incarnate lore and plans for future character development, from other AMAs it seems the idea was that after defeating Battalion our characters would become an Ascended in a way, take in those stolen Wells of other species to become one themselves. I was always curious, how would that have been balanced in story? Would the character be bound to watch over their chosen species as a Well, offering most of that Ascended power back to the people of their chosen planet while retaining only a fraction for themselves for gameplay balance? Visiting and influencing a world your character would be the guardian of would've been all kinds of cool. How far was the cosmic story set up to go? Bonus question: Would it be possible to get the most recent up-to-date version of the CoH lore bible? It would be amazing to have a look into all the lore ever as it was at the time of the game's sunset!

As an update, it seems to apply to your own personal ID when viewing it yourself, but not others'? Definitely has to do with the new tick to display your first character appearance, somehow it removes the scrollbar on the side, it's weird inconvenient spaghetti code...

Zone: Crey's Folly Location: [1225.4 8.7 1984.8] A floating cardboard box ignoring the laws of gravity

Just hangin' out This specific sign in Steel Canyon at [-3552.9 -61.8 762.1] seems to lose its physics after a few seconds of swinging, Interacting with the sign makes it swing, but it will shortly get stuck mid-swing instead of continuing to swing until rest like the other physics-having signs. It doesn't even seem an issue of it clipping into the building it's attached to because it's not close enough, neither is it clipping with the metal parts that it's attached to the pole, it's odd.

It seems to be a recurring issue that whenever I come by Brickstown, the Prison Break event is ongoing but it doesn't spawn enemies even after waiting for 15 minutes since it began, specifically during the Freakshow phase which is the first one. Not on the bridge to the Zig, not where the PPD are stationed, not to the sides where they would normally be running in from. Having come across it being void of enemies but having progressed a fair bit it seems to prove that they do spawn sometimes, somehow, but whoever was doing the event seems to have ran out of enemies too because there were none around and neither was anyone doing the event at the time. I don't know how long it's been this way for.

Zone: Talos Island Location: [-2070.5 160.2 7295.1] One of the large chunks of floor/geometry is moved slightly to the side into the other chunks, creating a slight gap along the ground. You can target through the gap with placeable powers, but not teleport through.

For some spaghetti code reason, when looking at a character ID the scroll on the right-side of the window no longer appears if the text is longer than the box allows to display all at once. As a comparison, ID box in normal size, and expanded, the normal-sized one should have a scroll tab on the right to allow for scrolling down and reading the rest of the character's bio but it no longer appears anymore.

No time for doors! Using Team Transporter on the final mission of Positron TF Part 1, the mission "Save Atlas Park!" instead of not working or placing you right in front of a tram door to be taken into the mission, when accepting the use of TT you load right into the mission itself. It's handy and also curious as it's the only instance of this happening that I know of, perhaps the same happens when using TT for any "Board Train" mission.

There's a minor graphical issue with the Vanguard HVAS model where there is a plate of armor on their backs that seems to have accidentally tilted, moved or that shouldn't be there at all since it's a bit off-center of the model's back, with the see-through back of it facing outwards while the textured part is facing into the model.

I don't think it has, I don't remember having to use the command to adjust my visscale to a higher one after every game close...and now I'm not sure if I had to because I can't test it. But it would be a nice quality of life addition if it didn't reset either way.

The graphics issues regarding rendering and world fog seem to have been fixed so that's awesome! Although there seems to be an issue with this patch release, and the current live patch, where the /visscale setting is not remembered between game launches, as in you might set your setting through the command to /visscale 4, but upon closing the game and launching it again it will reset to /visscale 2, which I think is the maximum available through game options UI. The /visscale setting also resets back to /visscale 2 when you open the game options UI.

Thank you for figuring it out, I'd have never guessed it was the gamma setting that's at fault for this. Is it the same cause for the sudden seeming lowering in render distance as well? The distance finer detail on trees, rocks, rooftops and cars load in at seems to have been lowered and requires you to be much closer now before they suddenly pop-in, whereas normally the higher detail would begin loading onto an object and be a bit see-through when you were still a fair distance away from it, and become more 'solid' the closer you got, but I think it would fully load when you were still at a larger distance from it than how close you must be now for the details to suddenly pop-in. It's easier to check by flying back and forth along some trees and seeing their higher-detail bits just pop instantly once you get closer.

I made some posts about this issue in the patch discussion and was hoping the devs would respond to notes about it from others as well, but since it doesn't seem to get much traction as people are discussing other issues so you did a good thing of making a bug thread of it. With my initial lookaround, and then following that with more testing, the recent patch somehow broke render distance and water rendering. None seem affected by /visscale and are an issue even on the default visual distance. The issues seem to be in heavily lowered render distance, testable by just flying back and forth along some trees and seeing the details on them pop in instantly once you get close enough whereas the details would face in gradually normally and the objects load in with more detail before the patch. You didn't need to be very close to the object to see its model fully loaded, which seems the case now with trees, rocks and even cars, as well as rooftop detailing. The water texture also is rendering on top of every other map effect, causing really uncanny views and in open maps it allows you to see the edge of the world. The third part to it is the seeming removal of world fog that would blur the edges between the skybox and the rest of the map. All of those issues can be tested just by going to Ouroboros as it even has some trees, and just looking to the side you can see both the water textures rendering and see the square of it in the distance, as well as the lack of map fog which causes a weird bright ring to appear around the map area.

I usually run on /visscale 4 and the issues I described and screenies I posted were on that setting. The issue seems threefold: 1. The render distance seems to have been lowered, as objects (very visible on trees) will have their higher-detailed parts pop in instantly instead of the usual gradual fade-in that they always had, it seems to affect trees, rocks and cars in particular, but also details on building roofs. 2. The water texture is being rendered on top of every other visual map effect, causing such uncanny effects as in the screenshots instead of following the rule of fading out with the map level of detail fog. 3. The actual map fog is disabled. The fog effect is still active on ground and buildings, but not on water or the skybox itself. Normally you'd be able to see a blurring along the horizon that would meld the skybox and the map itself to give a nice effect, but now it's a clear, sharp line separating the map from the skybox itself. As to what I mean with point 3, here is a comparison of the horizon line of before and after the update (taken from the same spot and angle), I tried to get the screenshot roughly at the same time of day as I had originally but it was difficult to time, note how in the second screenshot there is a clear divide of the horizon as everything below is way brighter:

All water textures just render no matter the distance and make things look really weird, it's odd. There's also the pop-in of details that should gradually phase-in instead. Fly back and forth along some trees and watch all their detail instantly appear and disappear as you move past certain render thresholds, it's wonky.