[An Update from The Homecoming Team]

25 minutes ago, duane said:

You're a space janitor.  Get back to scrubbing toilets.

Exactly.

Astronomers need to do their business safely and cleanly as well, especially now with this virus going around.

And we don't want to accidentally contaminate Mars either.

 

Please put down the toilet seat before you flush, and wash your hands

 

[Wealth - How to spend?]

Might I selfishly suggest giving some to new players.

 

When I joined in late 2010, I got a donation from "Biscuits Deluxe" and "amasing flame" as a new player. It allowed me and my friends to start a Super Group, build a base and get in on the Auction House/Black Market and crafting. It was so important to our starting experience that I can still tell you the names of these players 10 years later.

 

I only discovered the game's return this week, and after telling my friends, I now have four of them installing the game this weekend. 🙂

[City of Heroes "lifehacks"]

On 6/5/2019 at 1:08 AM, Roughtrade said:

You get six costume slots.  You have unlimited for free costume tailor sessions as long as you do it before level ten.  BEFORE Level Ten. 

 

Create multiple costumes for your character during creation and save them.  When you get to Miss Liberty, do a quick run through to save them in the slots. 

 

Then do your DFB runs for quick leveling.

 

Addendum

The Icon Employee (or Facemaker) in the back labled “Surgeon” can let you change height.

The surgeon can also change gender.

 

And I was really happy with this, when I re-created all my pre-2012 characters (saved them with SentinelPlus) this week. I had 88 costumes saved. 🙂

[Isn't this easier than the complicated install guides?]

My point is that the existing guides that are referenced in the Getting Started section of the forum, have all kinds of steps like installing Wine, which are (recently?) part of the IslandRum install itself.

The way IslandRum installs these is much less likely to cause problems for most people, than the complicated solutions that are in the guides on the forum.

 

This could be a recent IslandRum development, I've only joined here a few days ago.

 

My personal experience just has been that all the complicated guides don't seem to be needed any more, and having people install Wine separately for example, might only lead to many more support questions.

 

I did indeed install on Mojave. Catalina is indeed probably more complicated, it's a pain for a lot of things. I don't have a Mac to test that with right now. I might be able to test it on Catalina on Monday. I will test on Windows 10 and Mac High Sierra over the weekend.

 

Is the source/development for the IslandRum tool available somewhere? I might be able to help with the development/testing. I used to help a lot of Mac users on the old Paragon forums back before 2012 and have some Linux skills as well and am a professional software engineer.

[Isn't this easier than the complicated install guides?]

The Getting Started part of the forum points to all kinds of complex guides.

Instead I just went to http://telstar.eekstudio.com/    where I picked the correct IslandRum for my operating system (MacOS 10.14) and chose to install Homecoming 64-bit when I ran IslandRum.

 

Am I missing something?

 

Pointing people to http://telstar.eekstudio.com/

just seems a lot simpler than https://forums.homecomingservers.com/installation-guide/

or

 

or

 

What am I missing?

 

I will try to install it on Linux over the weekend, see if that is as easy as the Mac install went.

[An Update from The Homecoming Team]

6 hours ago, Abraxus said:

Well, as it happens, Saturday (May 30) is the next opportunity! 

 

Typically the window opens around noon ET/9-ish PT.  There is an announcement in the Homecoming Discord, and here on the forums, and they accept donations until the pre-established goal is met.  In the past, that has taken anywhere from 2 to 3 hours.  Sometimes a little longer, depending on the goal.

I work in Astronomy, I only think in UCT timezone, but I understand that it's about 16:00 then.

[QOL - Can the character height slider be enabled at the tailor?]

On 4/30/2020 at 3:00 AM, Six Six said:

You can. you have to talk to the Cosmetic Surgeon (Icon) or Facemaker, and not the hired help up front. You can even change body type/Gender the same way.

Oh yeaah, I forgot!

Thanks!

[Online Character Build Browser]

A REST interface type of access to this data would also be awesome. It would open up a whole slew of possibilities.

[May 2020 Donations & Finances]

On 4/29/2020 at 9:37 AM, Hells_Hound said:

Completely missed this one!  But thanks a TON for the great work and the awesome resurrection (Defibrillation inbound!!!) of this super game!  I played it from day one (got a pre-release version from Game Stop back in the day) and missed it terribly when NCSOFT bailed on it.  Soooooo glad you could bring it back to life!  Keep it coming!  And, while I know the peculiarities of the not-for-profit status prevent you from moving to any sort of direct pay-to-play model, if there is a legal way to add some developer time/value to the overhead, count me in!

I understood that at least until (?) things get sorted with NCsoft, and it's clear what the rules will be, they want to avoid being seen as "profiting" in any way "personally" from this undertaking. It hopefully makes the situation with NCsoft easier to resolve.

 

But I totally agree that the team is doing awesome work. Never hoped my characters would by flying and running and jumping around the city again. I'm glad I saved everything 7 years ago with help from SentinelPlus).

[An Update from The Homecoming Team]

I would be happy to not only contribute to running the servers (I would otherwise try to run my own, I run ARK, Conan and Minecraft servers as well, and have been with friends since Battlefield 1942 days).

 

But also contribute to any lawyer fees and any licencing that would be needed for a deal with NCSoft. I really hope they can find a solution there.

I would easily spend a month of my income if that means we get to keep the game around.

[Just checking, is there an unofficial Asia server?]

8 hours ago, Apparition said:

 

Sorry.  Instead of just saying, "No," I (and some other Gen Xers), sometimes say, "Negative, Ghost Rider."  It's a quote from the popular American 1986 film Top Gun.  @SwitchFade was just completing the quote.

 

If you can, check this out.

OOOhh, that's where it's from.

[Homecoming Statistics: March 2020]

On 5/21/2020 at 12:13 AM, merrypessimist said:

All of mine?

Yeah, mine too.

[Launch game Via Mac]

I got my IslandRum fixed by editing /Applications/coh/islandrum.sh

 

There were garbled characters in the first line. I removed those, so the file starts with #/bin/sh as it should.

Then made the file read-only to prevent IslandRum from overwriting it again.

 

Then I could start the game.

 

Your mileage might vary, as I have a somewhat non-standard setup, but this fixed it for me.

[Laptops and COH: A Modern Guide]

Moore's Law was always going to end. Simple Physics. You need at least a couple dozen atoms to squeeze your current through, without losing where your electrons are. Heisenberg Principle.

 

Designs have been getting a bit better over the years, but clock speeds have been stagnant and lithography sizes have only shrunk a bit over the past decade.

This would have been completely impossible in the eighties or nineties. The computer I bought in 1992 ran at 16 MHz, the computer I bought in 2002 ran at 1.4 GHz.

 

I like it that AMD is finally having some success again. I don't like how nasty Apple is with NVidia, as I still need those CUDA cores.

[Catalina Island Rum]

On 5/1/2020 at 9:58 PM, RobRauff said:

 

Here is what I am getting from doing that.

For me the problem were the garbled characters on the first line of this file.

After I removed those, so the file starts with #/bin/sh

And then made it read-only so IslandRum could not overwrite it.

I can now start the game.

 

I think the developers of IslandRum need to make a small fix, as this fix will probably break on the release of the next version.

[Laptops and COH: A Modern Guide]

My experience has been that any Macbook Pro with a dedicated graphics card from the last 10 years or so, will run City of Heroes.

I have a 2011 model and a 2018 model. (AMD 6750M and 560X) The first one, I used to play on back in the day, the new one runs the game even better.

Mac Pro's 2009-2012 will also run the game, if they have enough RAM and a decent videocard.

 

My Mac Pro 2010 is my main gaming machine: Xeon X5690, 32GB RAM, MacVidCards Nvidia GTX 980, HyperX PCEe SSD. Only runs High Sierra (OSX 10.13) though, as NVidia drivers are not allowed by Apple on newer OSX versions. (NVidia and Apple don't like each other).

[From Running SafeMode on MacOS to 64bit AND how to install the New Mac based Mids]

Just for the record, I'm running on a 10.14.6 Mojave Macbook Pro, and I just had to install IslandRun.

I had to remove an old wine install (mostly ~/.wine was still left).

 

Initially IslandRum would try to start the game for a couple of seconds, then return to "ready-to-play).

 

I then had to edit /Applications/coh/islandrum.sh remove the first line with garbled characters, so it starts with #/bin/sh

Then make the file read-only

 

After that it worked flawlessly so far. I have recreated all 13 of my old characters that I saved in 2012 with SentinelPlus

I still had my old install, so I copied over the Costumes, keybinds.txt, PowerCust directories from 2012 as well.

 

I already had Xcode and Xquartz, which might have helped, I did not need to install anything, either with brew or anything else.

[Safe Mode Discontinuation Support - Mac OS X]

On 4/29/2020 at 6:18 PM, Darkstirm said:

I too am having that issue. The installation of Island Rum went smoothly, everything appears to be there but when I click the button, a green tick appears for a few seconds, the writing above the blue bar says "Launching Homecoming (64-bit)" and then it reverts back to "Ready To Play"

 

I'm using a new iMac with Catalina

I discovered a possible solution to this problem:

IslandRum seems to write a file called /Applications/coh/islandrum.sh

But it seems to add some garbled characters as a first line.

If you remove those, so the file starts with #/bin/sh , then make the file read-only so IslandRun can't touch it again, the problem went away for me.

 

There is probably a reason IslandRum writes this file (it writes a command which version of the game to start). So this is only a temporary fix.

[An Update from The Homecoming Team]

I just learned of this project and made an account yesterday. Here's to hoping they come to a good solution with NCsoft.

[islandrum.sh contains problem characters]

I just found out the game is back!

I've installed it on my Mac, but IslandRum was unable to start the 64-bit version.

Some other people had reported the same issue already in the Getting Started thread.

 

I looked into it, and found that there were some garbled characters in /Applications/coh/islandrum.sh

It might be a conversion error from Windows?

If I remove the line with garbled errors, so #/bin/sh is on the first line, as it should, then the game starts, IF I make the file read-only. Otherwise IslandRum seems to rewrite it and add the offending characters again.

 

It seems like a small fix, to get people to run it on Mac again. (Which otherwise seems to work fine, I'm level 4 now, and have imported all my characters that I had saved 7 years ago with SentinelPlus.)

[Battlestar Galactica]

On 2/26/2020 at 1:14 AM, WanderingAries said:

Mmmm, Space Vegas

 

(plz ignore the idiot title)

I was a fan of both Buck Rogers and the original Battlestar Galactica back in the day.

Colonel Deering is still awesome, and Erin Grey has aged well.

I got to meet Dirk Benedict at Dutch Comic Con a few years ago, not much chance seeing people like that over here in Europe.

[(Re)Union!]

I only just discovered that the game is back.

I used to play on Union as well.

I hope to get some of my friends back as well, we had quite a nice super Group going, even though we only discovered the game a year before it went down.

 

I had saved all my characters with Sentinel Plus, and still have my builds saved in Mid's so I was able to re-create most of my characters tonight.

Unfortunately all my levels and hours spent are gone. If some of my friends rejoin as well, that is something that can be fixed.

 

I was quite invested in the game, and devastated when they suddenly pulled the plug during my holidays, so I was unable to renew my subscription and could not even access most of my characters for the last months.