Shenanigunner

There's a parallel discussion about collisions between mouselook and context menus. I didn't know that was a thing, although I have some notions about the why of it. Fixable with various changes to the mouselook control key, I think.

This. It's trivial on the same page; takes a little experimentation and practice to go from page to page.

I've been running a superstrength alt since day one: that guy, over there on the left. I've simply never had any huge existential crisis with Rage crashes. it's one of the things to cope with in a great power set, and no deal breaker. I can't think of a time it needed more than a momentary adjustment of attacks, even in boss combat.

This. I've never had a collision between holding down RBUTTON for free-look, and context menus. At a guess, this is a player issue involving a collision of frequent switching from free-look to pointer, especially while accessing various clicky-points in the UI. If such users can't train themselves away from combining the two actions so closely, there are alternatives to mapping the free-look action. (I've just been reminded/refreshed in that there are players who continually switch between the look modes; I think most, including myself, tend to hold down RBUTTON more or less continuously unless stopped and accessing the UI.) There's another discussion active right now about camera control alternatives. One is to change RBUTTON from a hold button to a toggle for free look. Another is to move it to a key like LSHIFT or LCTRL, although I dislike mapping those as controls.

Yes. It's easy but "all manual" — no shortcuts. You have to call each line in the display with a separate command (and then dismiss each with a separate command as well). There is no "call this list of lines" function, and, although there's a screen function, there is no "close whole list" command, either. This basic list should work well as a start. Edit the actual attribute names as desired, and add or subtract lines as you like: /bind F8 "monitorattribute Endurance Consumption$$monitorattribute Recovery Rate$$monitorattribute Regeneration Rate$$monitorattribute Running Speed$$monitorattribute Flying Speed$$monitorattribute Jump The caveats, besides the slow and clumsy call method — which does at least toggle the lines, meaning only one bind is needed — are that the list can get screwed up, meaning the bind will likely toggle between two subsets of your choices, and that there are bind (and macro) file line lengths and total character limits. So these very wordy commands eat up a lot of that space, with no short aliases. If your display gets screwed up, as it did for all of us from some general Page 7 change, use right-click/stop all to clear the display, then use the bind to call it back correctly. There's a comprehensive reference with all the Combat Attribute names in the Tech Guide, section D.2.

Just went to play with this, and forgot a mod I used for a while: change — RBUTTON +mouselook —to— RBUTTON ++mouselook Toggles mouselook on and off. May be more comfortable for some players, and then we can talk about that pesky turn/strafe issue.

Hmm. I guess a bind could be written for that, just as they've changed the mouse-forward bind with Page 7. But there's no good way to use the mouse button as a shift key... hmm. No, this is in the "player/UI has to adapt" realm. I tend to hold down RBUTTON/mouselook more or less continuously but I know players have mapped it to another button (LSHIFT, for example), or even toggle it on and off. If you use the WASD keys for all movement and don't use look-around continually, it might make more sense to map A and D to strafe and use mouselook to steer. My updated bindset uses Ctrl-A and Ctrl-D for strafe, but you could just as easily map the strafe movements to Z and C... so while looking you can shift the left hand. Map X to backward and you're almost there. (Or put strafe on Q and E...) Another would be to bind right-click to a toggle bind that would switch the key functions... click to switch to strafe, hold down for look; click again to restore turn function. Or reverse the RBUTTON function so that the UI is always in mouselook mode, with the keys bound to strafe, and holding RBUTTON would put it in pointer-select mode. Honestly, I've never had enough dissatisfaction with the WASD+mouselook combo to consider changes to it. 🙂

Since it's an open air party zone... maybe the question is why it has day? 😄

That's... that's more than two people at the same time! I cry Photoshop/AI fake, here! 🙂

BTW, you could extend your system life with a used-but-new-to-you video card upgrade. Get something a gen or two newer that is still compatible with your system, and you can probably improve CoX and everything else graphics-based for some very modest amount.

Visscale is your friend here. I think the menu calls it something generic and is limited in adjustment range. There are four or five settings that affect distance. Oddly enough, we just had a discussion of them with notes for balancing between visuals and framerate and using a bind to lock down your preferred settings, since they seem to get nudged by the server or reset fairly often. Look for the discussion VISSCALE blah blah something over in General Discussions. Should be in the first page or so.

Make them all manual, bound to numpad keys. That gives you ~40 sayings to amuse your teammates with. As noted, it's amusing in its sparing place, but a little goes a long way. Maybe note the on/off bind option and just turn it on for a few minutes at a time while teaming.

Technically, it sounds like you have it set up properly. As for content... pretty much on you. If these are power-bound comments, three suggestions: As we've pretty much all discovered on our own and are reminded by the noob in Atlas or on a lowbie team, any form of "The Thunder God smites thee!" on every instance of that attack gets old, real real fast. Throw some blank files in the string so that the comment is both updated and irregular, from every other to every third or fourth activation. Add another bind that toggles it on and off. On: write a rolling bind string to the power key. Off: write a no-bind string to the key. I only have one remaining alt with such a setup, a staff fighter. The "multitudinous strikes" or whatever that pokes viciously at a foe's feet is just too stupid to ignore, so I use a rolling set of "Dance, you bastard!" and "Eek, eek, a mouse!" and a handful of others, bound to the 4 key with the power icon in slot 4. With blanks so it's not every time. SHIFT+4 writes in a no-bind string; ALT+4 writes in a starting chat-bind string.

The name for the left mouse button is LBUTTON (AKA LCLICK or LEFTCLICK). You may or may not be able to bind it to any other input, as the mouse button binds are... quirky. Especially the ones used for integral game functions, as left-click is. The menu mapping list is the last place to look for complete info. The HC Wiki, recently updated, isn't bad. But really, if you're going to get to this level of mucking around under the hood, that's what the Tech Guide was written for — and just updated end to end. (www.Shenanigunner.com, if you can't see the sig info here.) Trying to customize the UI by looking up one item at a time is like trying to find all the Exploration badges in a zone by wandering around. 🙂

...well, except for those. 😄 (Thx)

To expand on that, part of the reason teh game is broken into zones (unlike some newer games that are 'borderless') is that only the map you are in needs to be actively loaded, and sometimes then only a radius of detail elements are loaded. CoX was designed for much more limited systems than, likely, even yours and has fairly efficient memory and asset management. (It sometimes seems a little constricted to those of us with modern-spec systems; zoning every five minutes gets tedious. 🙂 But as @Rudra notes, the whole game is not loaded at once. Only the elements you are currently 'experiencing'; the rest are no part of loaded image maps, alt details, etc. If you're getting actual memory leakage, slow loss of available memory until your system acts up, that's likely some other app or OS issue. CoX doesn't have any general memory-leak problems (as some apps and games do).

The name cloud actually has pretty complex color shifting, if you're paying attention. Hang around Atlas Plaza with name displays on, and hardly anyone has a single-color name cloud. I thought for a while that selecting /roleplaying make it all purple, but not the case. What you point out may be more of a bug or an oversight than anything else, but other than the switch to team mode, all name clouds are vari-colored.

I think all the details are what make the game. If your essential argument is the very tired, overwrought one that nothing that doesn't benefit leveling and associated tracks is worthwhile... well. We all ran CoX on those same computers, twenty years ago. Just dial the graphics back to what was usual then, probably a little better, and try to appreciate the game in a broader sense than just combat-2-level.

As someone who regards the costume mavens with a... twinkling eye, I find this a bit precious. 🙂 But no one wants to lose a billion because the light was all wrong. I wouldn't argue against a fixed sky for EP.

A user poked me on the old issue of binds not being able to correctly command pet_say emotes. (Direct commands do; macros do; binds just pass any 'emote' string to the pets to babble nonsensically.) A clumsy bind-call-macro system can be used as a workaround, but really, it's been five years. I imagine the command parser is fairly delicate code, but since the strings can be parsed correctly in two parallel ways... maybe that patch could be applied to the keybind interpreter? ETA examples: /petsayall "Yay! <em victory>" works fine. /macro V "Yay! <em victory>" works fine. /bind Y "Yay! <em victory>" returns your pets all saying 'Yay! <em victory>' but /bind Y "powexecslot 1 1" for the location of the macro above... works. And no, using $lt; and $gt; doesn't work, as it does in chat bubble codes.

To be honest, I'm thinking this for most of your posts here. You've made your point. No one agrees with you, for what I see as fairly solid nature-of-game reasons against your "but I wanna!" viewpoint. We ALL have "wannas" but most of us seem to be able to differentiate between the ones that might be reasonable and the ones that will change fundamental aspects of the game — in generally negative ways — for all other users. I know. I know. If only there was a simple, completely effective workaround short of having the Devs drop everything to break the game for you. Do you want us to form a support group to come over and play the game for you, too? All that button-pushing gets so tedious after a while.

There should be a NO PETS ALOUD perimeter of at least 150 feet around trainers and vendors. The clanking thunder of one set of robots is enough to make me mute the game; add a second set and I quit for the day with a headache. That the game can be hacked on this point is irrelevant. All of the pets make too f*cking much pointless noise and should be muted if not silenced in crowd areas.

As noted, visscale can hammer your FPS. Just as a general reply, each player should experiment with each of these adjustments separately, to find the optimum balance between visuals and framerate. City's engine is outdated and settings that might work fine with newer games even on modest video hardware will choke the life out of Paragon City. FSAA in particular is bad; anything over 4 has a disproportionate FPS affect for me and always has, across multiple "good but not uber" video cards. Let's break it down: visscale sets the visual distance scale and greatly improves the look and view; it's worth some FPS to carry it high, for me. If max FPS is your thing, leave it at 2. FSAA smooths diagonal lines and jaggies: try 4 or higher, settle for 2. texaniso controls texture definition and blurring: 16 doesn't have any FPS affect on my system but you can back it down in even numbers. DOFweight controls distance blurring (when UseDOF is set to 1). Start with 1 and adjust up and down across a detailed city vista to find the balance between nice "realism" (e.g. things 500 feet away should not be in sharp focus...) and FPS. I carry it at 0.5 most of the time. LODbias controls toon detail. Zero is hilarious, 1 is normal, up to 4 (I think) increases detail on characters at distance. Select between visual preference and FPS. And then write those values into the bind string so you can reset your video no matter how or when the game resets/changes it.

I've followed citz around like that. Never thought of it quite in that way, though.

Allll I can thhhink is of an NNNNNNPC grinnnding out commmments like AAAAgent SSSSSmith...