RogerWilco

There are my two cents: I always liked games like this, and the pen-n-paper games like GURPS and Star Wars: SAGA Edition, because they decoupled your powers and abilities from your backstory and how you got them. Things like the Patron powers are only linked to the in game missions if you want to. If your headcannon makes how your character got them different, then that's fine too. It's a strong superhero trope to be the odd one out. Think Blade and all the "other vampires". You can be the Daywalker. SW: SAGA edition stressed in it's chapter on classes that you could be a Jedi without any levels in the Jedi Class, or have many levels in the Jedi Class and not be a Jedi or Sith, but Chirrut Imwe. I see City of Heroes in the same way. I always understood City of Heroes to not be a game that tries to achieve "balance". I think in games like World of Warcraft, it was the death of the game when PvP was introduced and everything had to be viable and balanced. City of Heroes wants to give you freedom of choice and fun options. And that means some options are weaker or have gaps in what they can do. It's not designed to make every option equally viable. I have a friend who plays really whacky characters as a result, and we have a lot of fun, but solo he would struggle at -1. (I think one has Plant Control/Nature Affinity).

All of the "places" I mentioned would likely get some people riled up. The big question is, which countries exist in the CoH universe? And in Preatorian Earth? I am always puzzled by what both the DCU and CoH seem to to: Fictional cities (Gotham, Metropolis, Paragon City, Galaxy City) but then real countries (often only the USA, maybe Canada and the UK). I prefer the Marvel approach, which uses mostly real places and cities, with the possible exception of Wakanda and such. I think the best solution in a universe such as CoH would be to also have fictional countries. e.g. the Union of States of Columbia. (I don't mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Colombia). Then you avoid most of the flag discussions as well.

Who needs stars? 😉 I"m fine with just three horizontal bands in colours I can pick. I suppose you could add three vertical bands, those seem to be quite common as well. You could add something with a cross, that seems to be somewhat popular as well.

ImpiousVileTerror has set me and my friends up quite nicely with a starter fund. 🙂 I didn't know Super Groups and bases are now free 😄 Other candidates for donations could possibly be found in such places as the Reconnect forum https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/47-reconnect/

It can get iffy, if parts of that work would be based on things for which NCsoft owns the IP. Then the HC team might be in the clear, but the asset creators could not. This could be an issue for new costume pieces for example. For now I'm just happy to play i25 and the game as it is. In the longer term, some kind of mod engine could be devised, maybe even linked to a Steam Workshop, if a legal CoH could be put on Steam. Then servers could publish which mods they run, and those would be automatically downloaded and put into /data

This Google sheet seems to contain a nice overview. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uHUi6BWFTYj4wbfGBs3LjZL88Fym6B-8EwDr18YZcY8/edit#gid=0

I've added it to the wiki: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Macro_image_(Slash_Command) I thought this was on live as well, back in 2012 ? I remember creating macro's with icons for my CCs and pet commands. It's why I went looking for it. It's not on the old Paragon Wiki though.

I think that's too naive an approach. Will you allow all flags that get requested? Will you only allow the flags of UN members? Will you allow the flags of countries or states that are not nations? You can say "I'll handle that on a case-by-case basis", but then who are you to judge this? How about the flag of Taiwan, or Kosovo, or England, or Scotland, or Isle of Man, or Catalonia, or Texas, or Kurdistan, or Northern Cyprus, or Palestine, or the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, or the Confederate States of America ? Which ones would you allow, and which ones not, and based on what criteria? You might not get requests for all of these, but are almost certain to get requests for some of these.

My point is that I did not have to do anything with homebrew, wine, or anything else (I had Xquartz installed) It's a one click install.

I understand that /stuck might also work, as it should get you to the entrance room.

We are forever in your debt. 😀

I am from a smaller country. I have led a World of Warcraft guild with close to 300 people, from at least 20 countries. And few things get people riled up as much as national symbols. Especially in the Balkans, but in Europe in general. (trying to get people from Serbia, Macedonia and Greece to get along was interesting especially around the time Kosovo declared independence) Secondly, I would not want this decided by a voting system, as the larger countries have enough advantage as it is already. You very quickly end up with a discussion on which flags are "significant enough" to be represented. I would not want a discussion on where my small country falls on that scale. It's like asking which US states are "significant enough" to be represented in the US senate. And does Puerto Rico count because it's the 31st largest "state" of the USA by population? In other words, I would feel discriminated against, if the flag of my country was not included, but my main point is that it is a subject that can inflame tensions very easily. Something like this might be an interesting read on the subject: https://blog.emojipedia.org/emoji-flags-explained/ Some of the lists of flags they mention are now up to over 3000 flags. Even for CoH standards that would be a long list to scroll through. Very true. You easily go into the 4chan direction. This might seem a simple discussion from starts-n-stripes country, but is a sensitive subject in a lot of other places.

We can dream. I have no experience developing for ARM, so it's certainly not something I'd be thinking about picking up. I'm just happy it runs on OSX and Linux.

I don't need any credit, I was just pointing out the good work others have done, in the hope it gets picked up in the community, so more people get to install and play this awesome game! I would be interested in getting in contact with the developer(s) of Island Rum, to see if I can help out. I know from experience that testing install procedures is half the work in developing such an application. (I made my own .msi files back when I still wrote Windows software). I'm happy to help support this on Apple.

Very nice guide. I never got to level much on the Hero side, because I had a friend who always wanted to play villains. We have just found the game again last week. I think this will be our run of missions, as we love the good story arcs.

Nice explanations from both srmalloy and Aberrant. What a lot of people don't realize, is that because anything can be changed in software, that does not make it easy. Something like this would be a major undertaking, and not something someone would be able to do in their spare time. Changing software is even harder if the original guys (and gals) are no longer around to check your ideas, and explain why things work the way they do. Lot's of things have unforeseen consequences.

I'm not sure the game engine would be able to handle what would be required. Because it would need to be all flags, otherwise you're discriminating. I think the game engine would be able to handle that, but what we've seen with Unicode, that's not really where these things stop. How about England or Wales or Scotland? The Soviet Union, Imperial Germany, Imperial China, Roman/Byzantine Empire, etc. The same can be said about other "missing" emblems. It needs a different kind of game engine, where players can upload images or make designs in game. But with the base building in this game, it would get really out of hand and become impossible to manage for the server. The request sounds easy, but on a political and technical and human level, it is not.

Awsome guide.

I think you and the OP do have a good point here. I can't think of any solution that would not also crowd out new suggestions.

The client or the server of CoH? What are you talking about here? My guess would be that CentOS 8 is certainly possible, if you otherwise have the RAM, graphics card and storage space. 6 and 7 maybe be?

That uses a Broadcom 2711, Cortex-A-72 which is an ARM processor. You cannot run x86 code on that. It is a completely different CPU architecture.

I had a friend just install the game on Linux. We used the installer from http://telstar.eekstudio.com He had to do two things: Where 1000 is your user ID. For the rest is was smooth sailing. Hope that helps some people.

I do not think that all the different guides should go away. They are indeed useful for all kinds of specific solutions, where things like Wine or the game are already installed, or you want a custom location, want to use this Lutris, or you run into trouble with something. But to me it seems that whatever telstar.eekstudio.com is doing (who is behind it and Island Rum?) should be the default for new players, and then point people to the more elaborate guides when things don't work. It is dramatically easier, as you put it, than giving people a "wall of text" guide. Leave those for when they run into trouble.

I had a friend install the game on Linux (Debian 10.4) yesterday. He had not played the game before 😉 He said it was a breeze. Had to do two things: Where 1000 is your actual user ID. Other than that IslandRum from http://telstar.eekstudio.com ran flawlessly as far as I understood. I've tried the Windows 10 install from there myself, and it ran without a hitch. City of Heroes in 4K is glorious!.

Very nice post.