battlewraith

Are you doing anything to address the layer lines before you paint? Resin printers are definitely better for smoothness and detail, but I've stayed clear of them because the resin is a lot more toxic than working with PLA.

Thanks for the links!

I tried holding a pvp event a while back. Team captains, win or lose, would've received a custom sculpted and 3d printed bust of their character as a participation prize. Not something grabbed from the game assets, a custom sculpt done in ZBrush of their character. I did not get enough response to run the event. If you would be game, I would actually be interested in getting the 3 basic figures in the costume creator (huge, male, female) in OBJ. format to use as reference/base meshes for character sculpts.

I'm honestly asking this: as someone didn't know anything about this incident or this person, what kind of response would you hope to get?

Where did that image of Sister Psyche come from? Is it from a placard from one of the TFs or something?

Interesting hot take! While other people may be worried about posters flaming each other, your main concern is with originality. No parroting other people's ideas! Wonder what that would sound like--maybe a dementia ward?

I agree. I understand the anger of people that donated to a successor project that has still not delivered. However, the people pissing on them are leaving out some key facts. Homecoming is here because of being stolen goods. The initial illicit server ran for years with people working on the code and running it. Then when word got out, coh fans lost their shit and harrassed the guy running that server into turning the code over. My understanding is that he then helped the new teams get going, who are now continuing to improve and update an existing game, not something they own or made from scratch.

The topic is vague to me. I'm not sure exactly what you're after. If the question is about what the Homecoming team can do, then I think it's actually "what makes for a healthy playerbase?" The answers are going to involve things like content updates, events, promotion, etc. "What makes for a healthy game community?" 1. What community are you talking about? 2. What is your criteria for saying it's healthy?

The game engine is typically responsible for a variety of things--lighting, rendering, collision detection, simulating physics, etc. Game engines also generally have tool sets to help develop content for the game. So animation may be done in the engine, or produced in an animation package and brought over in a format that the game engine can use. Characters may be animated by canned animations that the game is cycling through (meaning the mesh is going through a series of deformations over time) or they may have skeletons in them that are actively deforming the mesh. I suspect the latter is the case with coh based on how enemies ragdoll when you knock them around--seems like collision physics being applied to a skeleton. Powers could involve some sort of modeling or they could be 2d animated sprites, or both.

The coh models are extremely simple. Making models of that quality should be fairly trivial for pretty much any current respectable polygonal modeling software. The industry standard generic 3d file is OBJ, which was around before coh launched. If the coh engine can use obj (or other proprietary formats) then introducing new models should be easy. If coh uses some esoteric file type, then you would need a translation app to convert the file type. I suspect the biggest hurdle would be pinning the new meshes to the existing skeletal animation system/patterns in a way that various moves still worked properly. Also adjusting costume pieces, weapons, etc. to the new shapes to avoid crazy clipping.

What exactly would you be reporting them for?

Oh it's far worse than radioactive moon leeches. Far far worse. Someone in a video game forum (which is not the public square) said that a WP tank was bad at taking an alpha. How could I possibly walk away from that ignominy?

I think you're allowed to spew your own garbage. I think they just want people to keep things civil. That's what they keep calling for. Did Diantane personally attack you by posting things you think are false or don't agree with? "Responding in kind" seems to mean "you keep saying things I think are stupid so I'm going to ridicule you for it." That's not your place. I don't think you understand trolling. It isn't a rigged game. You and the troll are not playing a game together. You are not going to win an argument with the troll or shame them away with ridicule. The troll is having fun by mocking you and/or the community at large. They are making you the butt of their joke. The first and most obvious thing is the inability of people to simply walk away from a troll post. The troll wants attention and it's even better when people argue with moderators about their right to give the troll the attention they're seeking.

LOL. He didn't threaten anybody. He said to be polite. Diantane's supremacy over this forum continues. He/she definitely scored troll points with that reaction.

Power leveling is probably keeping the game alive. The majority of the playerbase has played the game for years (or are maybe related somehow to such players--kids, etc.). They don't have the time or the interest in playing the traditional way. PLing allows people to fast forward to the content they enjoy, experiment with builds, get the resources they need in a reasonable amount of time, etc, Take away the farming and it would wither away. IMO challenge has never been a strong point for coh even before the development turned away from teamwork and started catering to soloists. That doesn't mean things weren't/aren't challenging to do. It's just that the difficult things all boil down to a formula that needs to be followed. Once the conditions are met that more or less static challenge becomes routine. The difficulty is getting the proper pieces in place from the get go. The strength of the game is in creativity and immersion. It allows you to really make you own character in a way that most games don't. It allows you to make stories and have an experience of the world that other games in my experience don't. The fact that it's a really easy game supports this.

What you're describing to me is a marketplace. It's Amazon--where can I find the cheap goods I want, whenever I want them, with reviews of the vendors. It's not a community. The artists there were active on the coh forums back in the day posted art, gave feedback, did tutorials, ran contests, etc. I for one did at least a dozen free pieces before even offering commissions. So it really came across as a big FU to that idea of community when people starting promoting outside artists and their sales. Still does. Would people have saved up for more expensive commissions if the cheap stuff wasn't available? Who knows. I think the more relevant question is: are people going to buy a single well rendered piece when they can buy multiple lower quality cheap ones. I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no. At that point it becomes a race to the bottom. That's when your $15 quickie headshot is competing with somebody's $7 fullbody sketch. I don't do commissions any more.

I know right? It's like... I got $50 in my wallet. I can't buy a tv with that. And without some sort of magic I can't budget or save up for something like that. So I guess I'll never own a tv!

It's not unfair to say that, it's the truth. I experienced it and tracked it myself. A lot of people want art, very few are willing to pay much for it. You flood a market with fast cheap work and that becomes the new normal. As an artist you can lower your prices, offer some shoddy low-price option, or just bow out. The majority will eventually bow out because hustling for peanuts eventually leads to health issues and is seldom financially viable. But in a global economy there's always going to be someone to replace them. An illustrator with years of experience and expensive equipment would do better financially to just go flip burgers than try to offer an "affordable" option to people who have grown used to paying close to nothing to begin with. But it's great for the consumer who doesn't want to feel guilty about paying much for something.

Well, this strikes me as mild karma. Many years ago on live, there was a small but active art community on the forums. It inspired me to start drawing again. There were several of us that did a lot of art for forum regulars, most of it free. This lead to brief period where people started to do more involved pieces, lots of people were getting commissions, etc. It was a really good scene. But then people started shopping around on other sites like DA. That's fine, of course, but they'd not only post the artwork on the forums--they'd advertise those artists and their sales and whatnot on the game forums. I wasn't the only one that was rather miffed that people who had no involvement in the game or the community and weren't paying a subscription fee were getting access to that space. It got worse when the artists from the Philippines started-- Taclobanon, Cric, John Becaro, etc. It pretty much destroyed the idea of getting any kind of reasonable rate for your work. That was the end of the golden age of commissions on the coh forums. It's probably the same guy. $12 quickie commissions are probably not enough to pay the bills any more and he's looking to monetize work he's already done.

Money isn't an issue. This arguably superior version had a much lower budget:

Well it's 2021. There are a ton more options for getting 3d models to print. That's part of why I was asking.

There was a guy that was making ball joint dolls based on the game files. You can see examples in Wild Claw's thread. The majority of the information in a coh character design is in the textures. Printing out the meshes will give you, for example, a faceted approximation of the volume of the head. All of the specific detail of that character would need to be painted on those flat planes.

I understand the desire to have physical copies of your character. But the actual 3d models used in the game are very low rez, triangulated meshes. Would you actually want that printed, vs a more realistic treatment of the characters?

But are we talking real world or superhero comic fantasy? If it's the latter, you're only limited by your imagination. You could take over the world by offering a better world. You could subjugate people through some way that doesn't involve violent force. A super sexy race of aliens come to Earth. They are so damn sexy that people just do what they want. etc. Not saying any of these possibilities necessarily make for good storytelling btw.