mechahamham

I'm afraid I don't understand the geologic processes that are responsible for 'veiny' metals other than 'a bunch of gold got dissolved in really hot water a long time ago'. As for natural diamonds, I can't imagine that they're terribly rare if you've got SOME kind of coal/carboniferous deposit, but that digging around in coal is a real good way to tear up your lungs.

Metallurgy's a heck of a thing, ain't it? Add a little bit of aluminum to your alloy mix and, blam, purple. More copper, pink.

And here's the rub. I DO actively work to build event teams and still have all the problems I mentioned. If I have a team of three 20ish people on the Talos hill or in Blyde Square, they see a 50 join and then immediately leave, it becomes much harder to keep them on the team as well.

Non-sprint run is already 15mph. I think that's before Swift, even.

I have a level 18 Archery/Mental Manip blaster that I copied over from Excel. She took Telekinetic Thrust as soon as it was available and slotted it. On Brainstorm, it shows that she still has it unlocked. It's just in the t9 position. If I respec, it becomes unavailable. Moving Telekinetic Thrust to the t9 bothers me deeply. It's basically the same utility as Energy manipulation's 'Power Thrust' with more damage. I use it as a 'get away from me!' power the same way I do with Power Thrust. I'm not at all concerned with the damage it has. it becomes less useful with Drain Psyche, but only by a small amount. Honestly, if I were going to choose an order for Mental Manipulation, it would be like so: Telekinetic Thrust Subdual Mind Probe Concentration Psychic Scream Drain Psyche World of Confusion Scare Psychic Shockwave Psychic Shockwave *seems* like the obvious t9 in this group to me. It's a powerful PBAOE that recharges often enough to use as part of a rotation.

I ran this on my existing Lutris install by selecting 'run EXE inside wine prefix', selecting the installer exe from my downloads folder. It installed and ran with zero hiccups. The copy-over from Tequila was flawless. I updated my Lutris runner for CoH to run the new launcher executable in the bin folder. The new launcher is done well and 'correctly' from a programming POV, as far as I'm concerned. It's blazing fast. Kudos.

Reading through the comments in this thread, I see most of the conversation is about tweaks to powersets and concerns about nerfs. There was an important factor that was only glancingly mentioned in the OP, but one that's fairly important to me, and doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention: How endgame affects the rest of the game. One poster tried to make an explicit warning about 'not turning off incarnates'. I'm probably in the other camp. I had my fill of the incarnate system during the Paragon Live era. If I never see another incarnate while I play CoH, I wouldn't be very upset at all. That said, I accept that there are players who want to play to 'be powerful', and I respect that they and I have to live together. Here are my concerns: Many players become so attached to their incarnate abilities that they refuse to play below level 50. This is not a serious problem for taskforce teams and leveling teams. Where it becomes a problem is world content, especially for events like we have currently with the Halloween event. The only zone event team that manages to keep any kind of traction is the 'Murder Motel' league in Peregrine Island, frequently run with multiple players who have Incandescent league teleports to zip masses of players around to monsters and banners. With multiple incarnates spamming their powers constantly, the amount a player in their 20s contributes starts to get close to meaningless. It's not just at 'Murder Motel', but also against any other zone event that garners the attention of Incarnates. I was with a team in Crey's Folly fighting the zombie invasion event earlier in the year. I was on a 35ish blaster, but there were seven or eight incarnates in the assembled league. I couldn't even target the non-boss enemies before the Judgement spam obliterated them. The bosses and EBs lasted for maybe one or two hits before they too were annihilated. Not only did I have no impact on the event, there was also no challenge. If I stopped attacking for a while, there wasn't enough enemy spawn to make me regret it. I could just sit there and earn passive exp. It was pretty disheartening. This is where the 'things don't live long enough to make x worthwhile' complaint comes into my take on the equation. Likewise, if a lower-level player tries to organize an event team, such as for the Zombie apocalypse team or a Deadly Apocalypse 'banner' team in another zone, assuming they can get any kind of buy-in for the event, they're constantly barraged with complaints that they need to 'promote a 50'. I've had maybe half a dozen or so instances this year where players simply leave an event team as soon as they see it's being run by an under-50. I haven't had much luck at all organizing teams in Talos or Steel Canyon at all during this particular event. The 'close to meaningless' problem is also very apparent against zone GMs like the Council Goliath or Adamastor. These guys are pretty much farmed for reward merits as soon as they're able to spawn. People make jokes about how quickly Adamastor dies. In the event of a less common world GM spawns, the difficulty curve of the encounter goes upside down as soon as the team facing it is dominated by incarnates. A good example is the Malta Zeus Titan that shows up as an ambush during the 'World Wide Red' arc. If a single team of below-40 players with a moderate amount of IOs slotted try to tackle it, it's a pretty rough fight, but completely winnable. A Single team of below 25s would have serious problems with it. If there are a handful of incarnates whapping away at it, it's trivial. The Zeus Titan goes down in seconds as opposed to minutes and things like debuffs or team buffs cease to matter in the face of the sheer amount of damage Judgement is able to pump. The basic problem here is that the 'Giant Monster' level compression code that's used for all these zone events does not (or cannot?) take Incarnate abilities into account. This is the unfinished problem that the Paragon Devs had to leave behind. Certainly applying a nerf to Incarnates now would be so massively unpopular that it'd be hard to justify. My suggestion is to somehow add the following to the 'Giant Monster' code: If the player is not an incarnate, no change should happen. If the player is an incarnate, the event should make the GM-scaled enemies significantly more resilient to their damage and able to hit them for somewhat more. In effect, the GM-scaled enemies should get an 'incarnate shift' for calculations against the incarnate players, but not against non-incarnate players. I know I'm likely in the minority of players with this kind of concern, but this is a major detriment to my enjoyment of events. I'm pretty much soloing Halloween this year.

Somewhere a former Paragon coder is sweating. "We had DEADLINES, Okay?!" I haven't had any crashes on Linux/Wine with an Nvidia adapter if that helps narrow it down in ANY way at all (which I highly doubt), Number 6.

I have adored magical girls and magical girl anime for a very long time. (Hurl your derision upon me!) One of the things that's really missing from the costume editor that 'finishes' a magical girl costume are bows and ribbons. Just before Paragon got evicted, they did add a few bows to the game, particularly as part of the gunslinger set. They're attached to other pieces. I'd like to be able to use them independently of the veils and half-skirts they're attached to. I'd also like to be able to use one as a chest detail as depicted in this gorgeous fanart of everyone's favorite sailor-themed Pretty Guardians (Art by Sayaka Inumori). This one will actually require new model work since I don't think they exist anywhere in game. However, there are many free 3d meshes of something that I'd like to see used as weapons and back details, especially with the new sonic set coming out. Guitars have been sadly unrepresented in CoH, which is a shame because they quite literally rock. (Also, everyone knows who Haruko is from a certain 4-letter anime, right?) Doll joints, desu. This one would be texture work rather than mesh work. I actually had a hard time coming up with an image for this one since they either go really creepy or borderline NSFW territory. Think Chachamaru from 'Magical Sensei Negima', Lime from 'Saber Marionette', or any of the dolls from 'Rozen Maiden'. This kind of texture would work well for both magical characters and tech characters... think not just animated dolls, but humanoid androids with visible joints. Another good example of the latter would be Gally from 'Gunm' aka 'Battle Angel Alita' I have no illusions about how much our current volunteer team is already doing, going above and beyond, and I understand the amount of work I'm requesting here. I don't expect such things to just 'materialize', even at the rate new costume pieces were created by Paragon's staff. (I still love you, Jay!) That's just not possible right now, when the devs are fighting to manage what was once done by a team of many dozens. However, I want to plant seeds for the day when art and modelling work like this can once again be added to our wonderful costume creator. Thank you, HC devs, and please let these images simmer in your mind for the days when costume pieces can be added again.

The character DB uses a UID now? Fantastic! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making that little step in the direction of data integrity

You sound like you're having a great deal of fun with this.

I really like how Flambeaux is fleshed out:

"People will tell you that Incarnates are the end-game. They're lying. Altitis is the real end-game and well all know its true, even if some of us don't want to admit it." The character select screen was great when it was designed to hold 8 characters. Then it was reshuffled to hold 12. And then pages were hacked into it so it could hold 36. Then others had to cram in features to it as gracefully as they could manage so that it could hold a theoretically unlimited number of characters. It's likely HIGHLY due for some refactoring and re-engineering.

While they're a staple in anime and serialized manga, we don't see many 'timeskips' in western Superhero comics. Rather than 'let's have lots of filler while the characters age to this point', manga fans often get a 'Five years have passed since the climactic battle and our characters are more adult than children now...' line. Western comics typically have a more Soap-opera-like sense of time. Some characters may age rapidly in the story while others don't budge. Some skip ahead or even backwards, with or without time-travel. That WAS the case until a certain climactic comic-book movie dropped a stunning 'FIVE... YEARS.... LATER...' on us just before the curtain rose on its second act. And we, City of Heroes players, have experienced our own timeskip. Eight years ago, NCSoft pulled the plug. Now we're all back in Paragon City. So while Kallisti Wharf may have been intended as a battleground for players to fight against the mysterious aliens known only as 'The Battalion', I suggest re-purposing the zone for 'The Timeskip'. "I was just a little kid when the Battalion invaded here. It was pretty epic watching all the heroes and villains come together to save the planet!" The people of Khalisti Wharf have somehow been shunted forward in time 8 years. They remember a fight against the Batallion that no one else in the city recalls. The only person in Paragon City who can make sense of the temporal mess is Montague Castanella, who senses that his own history has been significantly disturbed. He's our first story-arc contact, who helps the player uncover a plot designed to either skip the Battalion invasion entirely, or to make the people of earth *think* they've skipped it. Both Praetorian and Primal Penny Yin, helping each-other to navigate the chronal madness, act together as our second story-arc contact with wonderfully chaotic dialogue. In this arc, the true history of Giovanna Scaldi's mask, the same mask worn by both Praetorian and Primal versions of Vanessa DeVore and later by Desdemona, is revealed, along with its importance in restoring the fractured timeline. Our third contact is Mender Tesseract. Her tragic journey across time into our pasts and futures is explored, as is the founding and eventual demise of Ouroboros. Tesseract's secret identity as the daughter of [REDACTED] is revealed, even as we and she use the knowledge gained to try to keep time itself from unraveling. "I was only getting Pizza," is the excuse given by our fourth story-arc contact, Mender Derek. Yes, he's an idiot, but an idiot-savant when it comes to navigating the twists and turns of temporal paradox. He'll act as a temporary temporal guide for the Heroes and Villains who set about repairing time and replacing what has been lost. The last story-arc contact is none other than the Dark Watcher, who has been tracing different timelines, different parallel Earths, for far longer than anyone should have to. He'll help us to understand what ramifications 'repairing' our 'damaged' timeline will have, and why it must be done anyway. Scarred, older, but wiser for his sojourn in an almost-alien world, Hero One has returned from where very few others have-- complete Riktification. Few understand the Rikti and their history better than he. Most importantly, he knows of their conflict with the Battalion and how it changed them. He'll charge the bravest of earthlings, hero and villain alike, to undertake a grave responsibility: The newly repaired timeline puts Earth back in the sights of the Battalion. Many of Earth's most powerful leaders, hero and villain alike, desperately want to avoid this conflict. Both we and Hero One know that the conflict HAS to take place, or our future will simply fragment again. Defend the repaired timeline from the greatest super-powered individuals Earth has ever known and hope that they can forgive you for doing what must be done.

17 souls? I wonder if this is supposed to line up at all with the 22 Major Arcana: If we remove the 5 'individuals' referenced in the Mystic Fortune artwork, that leaves 17. However, you'd have to count Manticore and Sister Psyche as '1 soul' and then NOT have them be either of the lovebirds mentioned. 0 - The Fool (Synapse in Mystic Fortune) 1 - The Magician (Numina in Mystic Fortune, Dark Watcher in Praetorian Penny's arc) 2 - High Priestess 3 - Empress - 4 - Emperor - 5 - Hierophant/Heavenly Messenger 6 - The Lovers (Manticore and Sister Psyche in Mystic Fortune) 7 - Chariot - 8 - Strength 9 - Hermit (Dark Watcher in Mystic Fortune) 10- The Wheel 11 - Justice 12 - The Hanged Man 13 - Death (Ghost Widow in Mystic Fortune) 14 - Temperance 15 - The Devil 16 - The Tower (Cryptic/Hell Forge in Mystic Fortune) 17 - The Star 18 - The Moon (Midnighters in Mystic Fortune) 19 - The Sun (?? (Carnival of Light, Maybe) in Mystic Fortune) 20 - Judgment 21 - The World (Paragon City in Mystic Fortune) I think your picks could fit into the arcana, like assigning Romulus as the 'Emperor', but the arcana are SUPPOSED to be vague and subject to interpretation. Recluse and Red Widow could be 'Emperor' and 'Empress' and also be 'Lovebird 1' and 'Lovebird 2' Hmm.... I'ma have to think about this one.

Here's a banner in the 'standard' aspect ratio Lutris uses for its tiles. Also attached is the XCF gimp project. Along with the large PNG @Jimmy posted of the HC icon, these are my CoH icons now. I'll update this if the art changes so that 'Homecoming' is on top and 'City of Heroes' is on bottom, as alluded might happen in the 'State of the...' thread. hc-coh-lutris.xcf

Drugs don't make people evil. Addictive drugs make people desperate. Desperate people make extreme decisions. Good and evil come from the choices we make. Fallible creatures that we are, if the only tool available to us looks a lot like a hammer, then problems all start seeming nail-shaped.

I haven't read the HC NDA, obviously, but a lot of NDAs forbid you from even disclosing that you are under NDA.

Brax, can you tell us if it's been through a pass with WINE/Lutris yet? (I'll volunteer myself as a guinea pig once general testing begins if necessary.) GM Tahquitz already got it: Also, @Jimmy, is there any way we could get SVGs or similar of the logos so we can have HQ icons for our various launchers? I'm already using the 'HC' PNG in place of the old and busted Statesman Square.ico

Yes. The original justification for not giving us this and other NPC costume parts was that they were too computationally expensive. Solaris' long, flowing dress, for example, is made of two cape systems. (Ghost Widow's/Belladonna's) hair is a cape system as well. Computers are much more powerful than they used to be. Hands up everyone who playing CoH on the same computer they were in 2012? Exactly. I think we can afford for players to have more complex costumes in this day and age.

Defiance is pretty damn good right now. The only thing I'd even POSSIBLY consider would be adding the t3 blast to the list of powers that can be executed while status'd. Even then I'm not 100% of that.

A lot of the 'Classic' games on GoG run via Dosbox, which is an open source DOS emulator with features like frame limiting, etc...: https://www.dosbox.com/ It's definitely worth checking out the project if you like those older, DOS-era games.

As someone who has written a lot of computer code to transform data types, the idea of translating the xml generated by Mission Architect into csv generated by MS Excel is not really that intimidating. You need the following: a reasonably complete description of the comma separated value structure of a mission file and a library to extract information from the XML file based on tag names and data id (there are lots of these, many of VERY high quality). Translating XML to serial data like CSV and vice-versa is an 'old' problem, relatively speaking, and there have been a LOT of tools written to facilitate it. However, my understanding is that a tool like this already existed as part of Paragon's arsenal of mission-creation software, and that the AE editor was built in tandem with a 'Dev' editor with the same kind of features, but with dev-level control, and that the newer mission writers at Paragon were using it to create missions rather than a spreadsheet editor. Maybe we didn't get that tool as part of what the SCORE developers received. If we have any documentation at all as to how csv missions are structured, this is something that wouldn't take a serious amount of time, even starting from no existing code.

In Penny Yin's TF, one of the freaks in the cooridoor leading to the reactor room says " [19:07] [NPC] Enforcer Smasher: You can control the chaos, Task Force Aftershock!" Should that be 'You can't control...'?

One of the things that made me think that the star rating system was useless and tagging was the only way to deal with searching was seeing my first '3 stars. Not a farm.' type review back when MA first dropped. It was followed shortly by the 'I don't give anyone five stars' review in terms of 'Yeah, 'stars' ain't gonna work for this at all''.