mechahamham

In this case, that might mean the HC team needs to do the caching step ANYWAY. We know that the script runs on lower population servers like Victory, but dies on Everlast and Excel. While I'm certainly not privy to its working, that just screams 'SQL join is exhausting all its resources'. Doing a 'select top 1' style query might also help with that.

I was a mod in Victory Badges for a long time during the live era. I never got frustrated on the 'Gotta catch 'em all!' front, but I did like to help others get badges. For me, EVERY run is a badge run, even if my character has those badges. I will likely never be in the top 5 or even top 50. I don't think people should be ashamed of showing off their characters' badge counts. It's a big part of the fun of that game. When one individual takes all the top 10 spots, it's maybe not so fun for others. They have achieved a lot and should rightly have kudos and recognition, but so have those other players. My suggestion is that if you have one character on the badge leaderboard, the clicked leaderboard entry will display other characters from the same account that would also be on the leaderboard. Currently, it looks like so, when it's not broken: When you click on the name, you're taken to the list view of that character's badges. On the character page, list other characters from the same account that have more badges than the #100 spot. So if you're #1 and have 80 characters with more badges than the number 100 on the list, your displayed badge list is topped by a list of those characters. Difficulty: Medium, but not moreso than the existing functionality. This is likely 2 somewhat hairy, but still completely feasible SQL joins, one for the top 100 list page and one for the character badge list page. However, the badge tracker script already breaks on RAM usage and joins can VERY hungry. My suggestion is to schedule the joins to happen once per day and then cache the result. If the Badge Tracker select runs once per player click, simplify it to use a 'select top 1 *' style query rather than a join.

You can see the following if you do Officer Field's introductory arc in Atlas, but there's no text to go along with the display. Reaper: "I wanna talk to my lawyer!" PPD Cop: "You're going to have to wait. We're trying to find one who'll wear hazmat gear." PPD Cop: "*You* cuff him!" PPD Cop: "I will very literally quit the force and go work in the Rogue Isles before I touch that." Mortificator: "Oh, the fitness requirements for new police officers! They look..." Reaper: "Delicious?" Mortificator: "Deli... You just had to go and make it weird, didn't you?" PPD Cop: "When we make it back to the precinct, I'm going to shower. Then I'm going to have another shower. Then, you know what? I may well just have a third and fourth shower and possibly even a fifth." PPD Cop: "Dispatch, we need a coroner here in Atlas. Send some bodybags with him. How many?" Mortificator: "..." PPD Cop: "All of them. Good lord, this job..."

...Is no longer entirely true. You can zone in to RV at level 1 if you so choose. It might be better to rephrase this with just the zones that have hard level requirements like 'The Hive and The Abyss have a minimum level required to enter.'

At the peak of the hill in Moth Cemetary lies an obscene altar that runs continuously with the blood of the damned and dead. The air is foul, stinking with rot, war, and the worst, most vile of unending desires. Here, the Veil between life and death is thin, and the gibbering creatures beyond it reach for the light, desperate in their hunger to devour the pain and torment of the living. At their pinnacle, towering above all else in evil, hatred, and lust for blood is Adamastor, the unwavering, slavering fiend that champions the Banished Pantheon's return to Earth. Adamastor *must* be destroyed, and frequently. Champions of the Living must gather to oppose him. Counterintutively, the best way to weaken Adamstor's lust for agony and death is to draw his undead, unholy form across the Veil, destroying his power before it has time to reach its pinnacle. But how? Rumors exist of a ritual to do just that. Knowledge of the ritual and the reagents for completing it lies in three pieces. The Pantheon's undead warriors and husks run with Unliving Blood. Reinterring enough of those zombies grants the Champions of Life a single drop. The Pantheon's spirit masks are known to contain Fragments of the Veil. As the dead and banished cling to the living world of light, these fragments allow the spirits of the Banished Pantheon to reach into the waking world. Finally, the Parting of the Veil is a text that has been seized by the zealots of Orenbega in their unending duty to oppose the Pantheon. Defeating the spectral Orenbegans will grant the champions knowledge of the ritual necessary to summon Adamastor into the realm of the living. Combining these three components at the obscene altar will summon Adamastor. Those who seek power, those who seek redemption, those who lust greedily, and those who simply want to protect the living will face the undead and unholy. May they not be corrupted by Adamastor's creeping touch. Goals: I really like that you have to work to spawn PEACE Keeper in Kallisti. It's not hard to do, and he still appears frequently, even with the requirement. Adamastor currently spawns every hour on the hour, with only a single click required to summon him. I think it would be pretty awesome if there was a mini-game of collecting salvage and then combining it at the altar in Moth Cemetary to perform the summon. It's an opportunity for world-buidling, in-game color, and player engagement. The drop rates on the ritual components can be tuned to allow the ritual to take place more or less frequently. The 1-hour timer can be kept in place. Importantly, a goal here is *not* to inhibit spawning Adamastor. Instead, it's to make the process more interesting than 'Click here to start the fight.' Right now, it's basically a 'Click to receive merits' thing. That's not terribly fun. Difficulty: Medium. This may require code changes, but we've got items in the game that can be repurposed or retrofitted to achieve this. In particular, we've got the computers in Bloody Bay and various crafting tables. A recipe can be added to an altar 'console' in Moth Cemetary. Combining the three salvage items grants a 'Summon Adamastor' temp power. The pieces are all there. Just like ingredients at Taco Bell, we need to make an Adamastor Crunchwrap Supreme.

I hopped over to KW to try to get the badge for PEACE Keeper and decided that, while my character was a hair underlevel for the zone, it'd be fun to see some of the new mission doors. I tried to take a tip mission, only for the message to pop up. I was able to investigate the same tip in Peregrine Island, which is arguably further out from Paragon City than Kallisti. So... yeah.

The chat UI has always been just a bit wonky. I can't count how many times I've had to answer the question 'My split chat box disappeared' with 'Drag the tab back into the middle. It won't look right until you let go.' I'd personally like to see a reworking of the chat UI in general to fix this and other issues, but, as a friend put it, UI work is MUCH harder than it looks. CoH doesn't use a GUI toolkit, either. so anything it doesn't already provide, you have to somehow hack in or repurpose... which is why our difficulty settings are in the emotes menu.

A lot of the i27 Skulls in KR speak in a broken English that I think is supposed to evoke an Eastern European accent. The new Skulls in KW have their Slav roots in their description text. I saw that and immediately said to myself, "They need to not be walking around idly. They need to be doing the Squat, preferably with a bottle of something illegal in hand."

Before we begin, I am not Slavic. However, my understanding is that many Slavic people out there are fairly proud of the 'Slav Squat' and purposefully lean into the stereotype a bit. Fitness folks even say it's a healthy practice and helps strengthens core muscles. Please feel free to correct me if you know differently. With the new, higher-level Skulls hanging around KW, many of whom lean into the gang's Eastern-European origins, it seems like we missed an opportunity for a relatively easy-to-animate emote in the memetastic Slav Squat: (Some attractive young folks living out the Adidas-clad stereotype.) Blender, for example, comes with built-in Inverse Kinematics constraints, as did animation packages I personally used more than 20 years ago. What that means is that you can animate things like squats and jumps simply by dragging one or two handles around in your modelling application of choice. If you think of taking an articulated action figure and pushing it into a squat pose by its hips, that's more or less the same thing. What I don't know is how much access or ability the HC team has to modify animations, but it seems like this one would be fairly straightforward if they did have at least limited power in that direction. So maybe someone with more knowledge about CoH's animation backend can do some animation work?

After the restart this morning, KW's time seems much more in line with other zones: I wrote up a suggestion for a 'Time Skip' story line for KW a while back. I was almost kinda hoping that there were time travel shenanigans happening!

I don't know if this should be treated as a typo or not. It looks like bad or misdirected string interpolation to me.

/citytime in Atlas reported 10:42 on Excel this evening. I immediately zoned into KW from Atlas, only to see it reporting 0:38

I've been on sabbatical a bit, but logged in this morning to spend mah saved merits on anniversary badges. I noticed that the 2024 anniversary badge shows up with a p-string in Luna's shop dialogue: Upon purchasing the badge, it properly shows as 'Reunited' in the chat window/rewards channel, and in the badge menu as well: I checked with another character that didn't have the 'Reunited' badge, and it shows up for a pstring for her as well. I did a search for pstrings here in the bug reports forums, but didn't immediately see this particular issue. Mods/GMs, please feel free to move/consolidate this if need be.

If it's of any use to anyone, I'm currently using Wine 10.5 with no issue: > wine --version reports wine-10.5 I'm still using Endeavour, so that's from the Arch repos rather than WineHQ's PPAs. Unlike the 9.2x versions, the 10.x versions have been VERY stable for me.

According to the in-game story, most of the stuff they used, including the Excelsior drug, was initially stolen from (or actively clandestinely provided by) Crey. A lot of Freakshow parts are probably supposed to be stripped-down Crey power armor parts. The Freaks then branched out, stealing stuff from the Council and other tech-focused groups. This is the point of the Sister Psyche TF. The various sonic Tanks are using Council robot or Ascendant armor parts. Doc Buzzsaw talks about this a bit in her issue 6 arc. She then goes a step further, kitting out the Freaks with Nictus fragments. The Sneaky Freaks you encounter about this same time are using... Arachnos armor parts? I may be mistaken about that. Later on, we see Freaks with stolen Rikti tech. They *try* to incorporate some Circle Thorns into their cybernetics, but that doesn't really end happily for them.

As the saying goes, if you're not afraid of water, you simply haven't thought about it enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalassophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquaphobia There's a 'horror' subreddit dedicated to images and videos of terrifying aquatic phenomina: https://old.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/ Water's pretty damn deadly, especially for how little we think about it.

No, if people *want* to use them, that's reason enough to unlock them. I'm just honestly and genuinely surprised that people want to use them.

The problem I have with this is that if you spend time really looking at them, the Freakshow parts are nasty and rusty. They're very low-poly-count compared to even the issue 1 costume pieces. I've seen images from other servers where the Freakshow parts are unlocked for players and they look very out of place in my opinion. You have a person wearing a Playstation 3 quality suit and then Playstation 1 quality rusty spikes sticking out of it.

You might as well say the same thing about guns or fire or, frankly, any of the other powersets that can be used in a lethal fashion. How many people drown every day? Compare that to how many people die of radiation exposure every day and you'll see a pretty ridiculous contrast. People think of 'radiation' and immediately go to 'Nuclear Weapon' or 'Chernobyl Disaster'. It's been made out to be hugely scary when car accidents are several orders of magnitude more dangerous. Far more people are burned by fires than radioactive isotope exposure. Far more people are medically helped by x-rays, radioactive imaging like PET, and oncological radiation therapy (cancer treaments) than will EVER be harmed. Radiation is very literally all around us all the time. Even if you discount all the forms that pass through us without harming us, we're immersed in damaging, ionizing radiation. It comes from LED lights, your smoke detector, bananas, granite countertops and a plethora of other sources. The Sun, giver of life, bathes us in ultraviolet radiation the second we step outside our homes. Our bodies have developed to be resistant to the constant damage. For a hero, imagine a person that could locate and murder cancer cells at a distance with gamma beams. Or could use microwaves to jam radio communication between rogue robots. Or could forcibly cause a reactor to power down, leaving a warship stranded. Like any of the powersets, radiation is presented purely as a tool. How you use that tool, positively or negatively, is entirely up to you.

Every time I've seen Max outside a mission, he's inevitably got a GM right with him. I imagine he gets reported all the time and so the GMs just hang out with him. It's not something he does or even wants to do on purpose, but he's apparently attached to the character. The GMs and devs are obviously aware of the problem, but there are two issues facing them: CoH is SPAGHETTI, and a lot of the dev work that's been done on it since volunteers have been working on it is untangling the mess. There's always a noodle of code touching something it shouldn't. Max's bug is an example of that. Changing the way it works may (almost certainly *will*) have unintended side-effects. Second, it's that volunteer thing. We have an entirely volunteer dev and GM staff who work on the game for free. They have to do the coding on their own time, at home, at their own expense, and largely with their own computer hardware. They've never been able to accept financial compensation for their work and nobody buys them laptops to connect to the development server instances. Do you want those volunteers fixing a highly visible, but very limited scope bug, or do you want them fixing less visible, but more important bugs? Prioritizing development work is always a difficult problem, even when you can pay people for the work they're doing.

I've always wanted to convert the full-screen windows like the costume editor and enhancement manager to modular windows. When CoH was first a thing, it seemed to be optimized for 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 monitors. The smaller elements become like grains of rice on our newer displays. I know me, and I know my skills at c and c++. The closer I am to real hardware addresses, the less useful I am, so I don't think I'd be a great match for someone to work on the CoH codebase. However, I was *okay* at understanding Win32 calls, and window management like that is *usually*, but not always just window handle properties, and then layout work.

There's always a spaghetti noodle touching some other important part of the game in CoH. Tweak hat models and we might find that Regen was taking some of its values from the hair geometry.

I don't like the huge. laggy, crowds, and the extra exp doesn't really do anything for me. I don't begrudge those who do enjoy the Mapserver Invasion event, but it just ain't for me. That said, one of my biggest complaints about the event is that the huge crowds tend to drag entire zones to a crawl. Please consider spinning up non-invasion zone instances during the event to allow those uninterested in the invasions to bypass the lag. Thank you, and enjoy the event!

I kinda wish /stuck would nudge enemies out of walls as well as nudge the player out.

I joined a delightful Defeat All Penny Yin TF a few days ago. The hard part of organizing it didn't seem to be getting people who wanted to do the content. Rather, it was keeping them from jamming that 'Exit' button out of habit. The team leader made the statement, "Every last enemy on the map must die. I'll stay on the map until everything's been killed," and the team seemed more than happy to try to stay with them. I suggested at one point that there should be a 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting for TFs and story arcs, a suggestion I've made before. Most of the team seemed to agree with me. Accordingly, here are some suggested badge titles to go along with such a setting: Completionist Complete a taskforce, strike force, or story arc with the 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting enabled. You came. You saw. You defeated every last enemy in front of you. Unresting Complete 5 taskforces, strike forces, or story arcs with the 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting enabled. There's no rest so long as there are enemies in front of you. Action Addict Complete 10 taskforces ' ' ' ' It's not the reward that matters. We're Not Done Here Complete 50 taskforces ' ' ' ' They can run and they can hide, but not from you. You Heard Me Complete 100 taskforces ' ' ' ' "I said 'Defeat Most' is for amateurs. Problem?" Delivery Driver Complete 200 taskforces, strike forces, or story arcs with the 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting enabled. Because you absolutely, positively HAVE to deliver every enemy you see into another world, parallel or otherwise.