srmalloy

Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur. Unless you're trying for "sounds snooty".

I sometimes wish the ragdoll code was a little more sophisticated, with limits on the movement of body parts; it can be disturbing to defeat, say, a Council Marksman and have the body lying there on the ground doing an imitation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, except that they're spinning at the waist and making five or six turns.

Turn down your graphics settings. I was having continual CTD problems with MSRs, where I would get down in the bowl and have my client blow up within two minutes. Reducing my graphics settings to 'Recommended' solved the problem, and I haven't had it recur since.

Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.

When the team clicks, it can be awesome. And sometimes the setup makes all the difference; I remember being part of an all-Kinetics ITF that Kay ran on Guardian; it was a steamroll mostly because everyone was hopped up on boosts, with pets zipping around like hummingbirds on crack.

That's been in the game since fairly early on live, and there's never been a fix for it. I suspect that it's actually a communications problem between the server and your client -- you one-shot a mob, and the server sends a packet to tell the client to make the mob fall down, but the packet doesn't go through, and the client leaves the mob standing; the server 'knows' the mob is dead, so it never sends any more directions for it, and it will just stand there until there's a wider scene update and the server tells your client, "Oh, by the way, these mobs are dead", and your client updates by despawning the corpse.

I'm not sure about the aura mission, but I distinctly remember getting a notification, when I got a character to 20, that I'd reached the level where I could earn the right to wear a cape, and was directed appropriately to the contact.

A reference from the past:

Just to play devil's advocate here, since turning on SG mode to earn prestige reduced your Inf accrual -- at first across all levels, then changed so your Inf accrual only started to reduce in your 20's, dropping to 50% at 30 -- with so many characters running around with the double XP buff earning no Inf at all, what would that do to your prestige earnings? You're advocating a return to having to pay for everything in your SG base, which leaves all the SGs who already tricked out their bases sitting pretty while penalizing new SGs (which won't be able to create similar bases for quite a long time), and further penalizing them by making them forgo the XP boosters if they don't want to gimp their prestige gain. And all for the purpose of getting back a dick-measuring contest (SG prestige ranking) that has absolutely nothing to do with actual game play, and is driven more by how many different players -- not characters -- you can get to join your SG. So I'm going to have to vote a hard 'no' on this; it adds nothing useful to the game, and just adds another form of elitism.

You're missing the relevant point -- the camera always points at your character. With 'normal' mouse movement, moving the mouse up raises the camera, which, because the camera is pointed at your character, aims the camera down, and moving the mouse down lowers the camera, aiming the camera up. Inverting the mouse movement means moving the mouse up lowers the camera, aiming it upward, and vice versa.

Back long before XP modifiers, patrol XP, and Ouroboros -- but after accolades -- there was a thriving business in selling access to the "Rescue the mystic from the Circle of Thorns" mission that awarded the Spelunker badge; low-level characters would charge for signing up high-level characters that had either blown past the 10-14 level range of the contacts that offered the mission, or were already past it when the accolade powers were implemented. So, yes, outleveling content has been a thing since launch. As SurfD describes, it was easy to do with any AT.

That's why I said it was a silly proposal; it's something that you essentially have no control over, so it's a gauge of your luck. Going in blind, did you pick the right entry?

If this was going to be the result of having an "outleveled but incomplete" category for contacts between Active and Inactive, I would like to see it made a game option to select either being exemp'ed to the max level of the contact/arc or retaining your actual level; sometimes you want the feeling of total superiority that being able to casually blow through a mission gives you (without having to wait for the first mission of Mender Ramiel's arc).

IIRC, the only things that are applied to the character as decals are some of the chest detail entries -- all of the symbols, Greek letters, etc. -- basically, all of the 'flat' decorations. Anything that's 3D is additional geometry on top of the base character model.

Everything is rendered by the game engine. The world, the characters, the NPCs, the power visuals, etc. Back during live, there was interest in exporting character models from CoH, either to use in other rendering tools or for something like the arrangement Blizzard has with FigurePrints to 3D print color figurines of players' characters. Unfortunately, CoH's character models are just the shell of the body, with (if I'm remembering the accounts of people who were trying to make it work) some annoying glitches in the saved polygon data that had to be cleaned up by hand, with the textures of the patterns overlaid on the model. Now that the code's available to look at, though, I suspect that it would be possible to get all of the model data and the surface patterns without requiring manual cleanup (if someone hasn't done it already). But it doesn't change that the surface textures and patterns are overlaid on a relatively low-polygon character model.

Aargh. "Add a 'half layer' to the other side of the torso/legs" as if it were a SMOP (Small Matter Of Programming). Change the costume pieces database to allow for torso and leg patterns that have both left and right halves. Change the character costume database to allow for these as well. Change the character rendering code to recognize a two-sided chest/leg pattern so that it knows to render it differently from the one-sided patterns. Change associated code affected by the changes, like the demorecord code, which immediately breaks all existing demorecord files, making them unable to be played back, or the costume save/load functions, which either breaks every single saved costume file or requires more changes to be able to recognize and appropriately handle both old and new costume files. Then comes all the art work, where the tools for developing patterns for costume pieces have to be changed to allow creation of patterns that have left and right sides, before any work can be done on actually creating the art for these new patterns, and because these will be separate left and right halves in the database, not single whole-body patterns, every single one will need to be tested against the range of body scaling to ensure that they render properly, feeding back to the game client code for changes there if pattern changes can't fix the problem.

It is technically feasible to do, in that it's possible to make the code changes to the character model database structure and the rendering engine to allow it to work. It would impose a performance hit on the game engine, although I can't say offhand to what degree. However, given the limited development resources, I believe that the effort that would be needed would be better expended in other directions.

IIRC, salvage storage predated the Invention system, because you needed both Prestige -- obtained by playing in SG mode -- and base salvage, which was drops of components that were needed to craft base items. Virtually everything you did with your base needed some combination of base salvage and paying the Prestige cost for it. Base salvage was eventually eliminated, but the Prestige cost for base items remained.

It's also an incomplete answer that doesn't explain why the current costume model can't have asymmetrical patterns on the chest and legs.

They're not left and right halves; they're one half, which is mirrored on the other side. That's why asymmetrical chest and leg pieces don't work -- the costume models only have data for one side of the chest/legs; there's no place in the database to store the information for the other side of the body. It would take a character database redesign to add the 'other half' fields to do this -- and then all of the UI changes to handle it.

Go to Echo:Galaxy City, get all the badges and plaques, go to the tram, go to Echo:Atlas Park, get all the badges, then go to Ouroboros. And just as a bit of trivia, there are two separate plaques that are in Paragon City twice. One is the plaque under the statue of Atlas in both Atlas Park and Echo:Atlas Park; the other is plaque 5 for the Just Said No to Superadine badge, on the wall of a building north of Yin's Market in Faultline and on a marker stone adjacent to a building in the same location in Echo:Faultline.

I picked up the habit, whenever I did the Wheel of Destruction arc, to tell Azuria in local chat "I'd like to put this under 'Will Call' for the Banished Pantheon, please" whenever I delivered a piece to be put in MAGI's 'secure' vault. I kept wondering why there wasn't a pick-up window on the outside of City Hall back where the MAGI room was, so the villains don't have to actually go inside City Hall to collect the artifact(s) they want.

I'd be willing to bet that you could program either a Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS or Saitek X-65F HOTAS (joystick/throttle combinations) to do it, but it would be a pain in the ass learning the switch configurations, since you wouldn't have the association between the keys and the trays. Besides, joystick and throttle for movement doesn't work well for an MMO.

They do work the same as the tailors elsewhere; the NPC is a tailor, not a plastic surgeon. Tailors allow you to change your costume and powers; plastic surgeons will allow you to change your body type and sliders, as well. The plastic surgeon at an Icon or Facemaker is generally in the right rear of the location. Having plastic surgeons as one of the NPCs you can put in your base is something that has been requested a number of times.

"Radiation Illusion", "Steel Maiden", "Archer" (that one was basic, an Archery/TA Blaster), and "Overgrowth", actually. Others I have would be, in Cyrillic, Теневой Огонь ('Shadow Fire'), Обморожение ('Frostbite'), Умственный Улан ('Mental Lancer'), Дева Молния ('Lightning Girl'), Влияние Кинетика ('Kinetic Impact'), Удар Молний ('Lightning Strike'), Ядерная Тень ('Nuclear Shadow'), Черная Молния ('Black Lightning'), Темный Знатокъ ('Dark Adept'), Лезвия Разума ('Mindblade'), Термоядерный ('Thermonuclear'), Буревестник ('Storm Petrel'), Ядерная Зима ('Nuclear Winter'), and Голубая Молния ('Blue Lightning'). As much entertainment as I'd get by watching people try to refer to them in chat, the transliterations 'Tenevoy Ogon', 'Obmorozheniye', 'Umstvenniy Ulan', 'Deva Molniya', etc. make communication much easier, even if the meaning of the name is opaque to them. Allowing special characters in names might have made sense when the game was being regionalized for the "City of Hero" release in Korea (and despite the Unicode support in chat, it was never enabled for names), but I don't see that making things more difficult for other players to enter names is worth the increase in name variety.