srmalloy

I'm not sure how much support the game engine has for glowing objects -- if you look at the 'neon' signs and structures like the Golden Giza, none of the components that should be glowing have any real illumination, they're just bumped in brightness to stand out more. The 'glowing' effects in auras show just how primitive the support for glowing objects is in the game engine.

After the first mission from The Pilgrim, each of the subsequent missions is from a different contact -- Mender Lazarus, Mender Tesseract, Twilight's Son, and Mender Silos. I think the Pilgrim will point you at the correct contact if you talk to him, but if not, you can just go through the roster above until one gives you a mission again.

The game still belongs to NCsoft. Someone makes a direct and obvious clone of a DC or Marvel character, the company is made aware of it, and they decide to send a formal STOP THAT notice; it's going to go to NCsoft, because they hold the IP. Because NCsoft isn't running the game, they'll take the path of least resistance and issue C&D notices to all the rogue servers... and the game goes away, this time for good, except perhaps for tiny private servers kept carefully hidden.

Dr. Aeon has been notified of your complaints about the lighting that he personally selected for the AE buildings. (scrambles frantically to escape the ensuing blast radius)

I can confirm Lazarilo's description; I had 30 in a salvage bin, and pulled 10 out for making two Winter sets Superior, then forgot to close the salvage window before I started the upgrading; after doing the first five, I had no catalysts in my personal inventory, but the salvage rack had 25.

The problem is that the adjective is scaled within each loose group of effects, not objectively. For example, the "Huge Recharge Bonus" set bonus is 7.5% -- while most people would regard 7.5% as pretty small, as recharge bonuses go, it's huge. The Paragon Studios staff tried to play things close to their chests in an attempt to reduce min-maxing (a lost cause from day one, in my opinion), leaving us with vague and misleading descriptions.

That's a Sisyphean task, given all of the places in the big gray tunnel maps where the walls slope inward, so a prone mob can be knocked to the edge and stand up outside the map from the waist up.

And with quantity modifiers if necessary; I had Kilodyne, an En/En Blaster, back on Live. Or you can go with Dogbert's suggestion to use an astronomical reference as a modifier, although Dilbert's retort of "Uranus-Hertz" shows the potential problems with that.

I could see modifying it so that if the caster goes down with Triage Beacon active, it teleports them to the beacon, rezzes them to half HP and no End, consuming the Triage Beacon in the process, and then puts the power on an extended cooldown, likely longer than the other rez powers, because of the additional functionality. It would make for interesting tactical changes in play style -- put the beacon down where it helps the team in a fight, or back somewhere safe so you get evac'ed if you go down?

I had a Bored of the Rings moment this morning, flying toward the last mission of Heather Townsend's arc: [NPC] Frost Shaman: Rip! Sunder! Shred! [NPC] Elder of Sorrow: Rip! Sunder! Shred! and I immediately thought of the missing third mob: [NPC] Corduroy Thesaurus: Rip! Sunder! Shred! See Tear.

I haven't had any cases where I've been able to use text in a character's bio, but not in chat -- and for most of my characters with non-English-speaking backgrounds, I've taken to making up chat popmenus with stock responses in their native language -- 'congratulations', 'thanks for the team', 'thanks for the invitation', etc. -- plus some insults to use against hostiles in combat. The biggest annoyance I've had is that, since Unicode characters are 16 bits, while ASCII is 8 bits, each Unicode character takes up two spaces in the bio, shrinking the 1023-character limit further and forcing me to be more penurious about using words in other scripts -- for example, the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry ('Институт Эволюционной Физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова') is a tenth of the bio space all by itself.

Is this change being applied to the Rikti corpses in the examination room in the Vanguard building in Atlas Park? It can be amusing to see what poses the bodies change to if you zone to RWZ and back, then look through the examination room window again.

For a first implementation, just use the same determination as the snowstorm effect. It's not perfect, but it's there already.

It's the second or third mission from Unai Kemen, the same map you get for Tina MacIntyre's first mission, where you 'investigate the psychic disturbance', as well as a number of other missions; it's essentially the NE section of Boomtown that's been barricaded off by energy walls from the rest of the zone.

The game supports Unicode, but the game font has odd holes in the characterset mapping. Ever since I happened to see someone say 'для' in chat back on Live, I started making characters with foreign backgrounds, both to get names easier -- 'Ice Fist' may be taken, but 'Ledyanoy Kulak' (Ледяной Кулак), the same name in Russian, wasn't -- and to have fun with some additional characterization by replacing the binds for stock messages like 'Ready!' with 'native' versions ('Готовый'). However, I found that, probably to save space, the internal font CoH uses only has a limited support for other character groups in the Unicode space, causing some characters to appear as blocks and others not at all. I understand that there's a way to make CoH use a different font file, but I don't know if the increased size of a font that supported more of the Unicode range would cause problems, and replacing the font for your client doesn't change the problem of characters not displaying properly on everyone else's clients.

We've got the example of the 'snow' in AP during part of the winter event, and the Instant Snowstorm power; it should be possible to create a similar 'rain' effect; even if it doesn't actually make things wet, it would still add a little life to the zones. Before playing with NPC dialog, though, you would want to fix things like the NPC talking on their cell phone and saying (working from memory) "Umbrella? No, there's not a cloud in the sky" with a mostly-overcast sky in the zone.

If you're going to increase the cone size for Full Auto, then you should look at increasing the target limit as well; there is little more annoying with Full Auto than to hit Boost Range, Build Up, then Full Auto, only to see a third of the mobs in the beaten zone completely unaffected because you hit the target limit.

When you're doing the "Cure the Lost" mission at the end of Montague Castaneda's arc, you can encounter something like this. If you go to Perez Park to cure the Lost there, you'll find that when you cure one member of a spawn, the rest will whip out their weapons and attack the newly-cured civilian (who is immune to their attacks). If you find a spawn with eight or nine minions around a lieutenant or boss, then hit the leader, sometimes the cloud of minions will all pull out shotguns in perfect synchronization, then all fire at once; the stacked shotgun sound can be actively painful.

Then you're whacking him too close to the rest of the spawn; with sufficient distance, he goes down and the rest of the spawn remains oblivious. Even better than hitting a peripheral mob with a low-damage attack, though, is missing a mob with a low-damage attack; if you do that, you're virtually guaranteed to get just that one mob.

I don't know how it's implemented internally, but if the 'levelless' mobs for invasions are stored as separate database entries from the 'normal' versions, then they may not be tagged as counting for Zookeeper. The Nemesis Jaegers, Warhulks, and Fakes count for the associated badges, but except for Unveiler, those were added by the HC staff; the Zookeeper badge, IIRC, predates the Rikti invasions, and may not have been updated by the original devs when the invasions were implemented. And I seem to have a memory that the very early invasions were level-based appropriately to the zone they occurred in, and it took some time for the devs to make them levelless; the raid monkeys may have fallen through the cracks in the process.

I had a mission for my Seismic/Electric Blaster to rescue a scientist, and found myself in the end room of the lab map, with only the two Nemesis jaegers guarding the scientist: Since it was recharged, I decided to unload a Meteor on them just to see their flaming wrecks fly across the room, and used a popmenu I'd created to execute "powexeclocation target Meteor" with one of the two Jaegers targeted. The meteor arrived... and hit the floor below the balcony (below where the fan greebly sticks out from the wall), rather than on the balcony, leaving the two Jaegers not only undamaged but oblivious to their having been attacked. This suggests a targeting issue with powexeclocation and balconies.

And I'm just grossly unobservant. 'Animal Fur' is in the 'Tight' list in alphabetical order, not directly under 'Monstrous Fur' as it is in the other selections. I went into the costume editor to see if I could make a costume and edit the 'Animal Fur' top from another costume file in place of the chest piece to see if it would load for a screenshot, and then found 'Animal Fur' was already in the list. Never mind...

Legs, boots, gloves, and the Sleeveless Robes costume choices all have the option for 'Animal Fur', which takes the 'Monstrous Fur' style and uses the primary color for the whole piece, allowing a fur pattern to be selected for the secondary color. However, with the other types of tops, chests only have the option 'Monstrous Fur', which has fur shading to bare skin, and allows no fur pattern option. Is it possible to give the other chest options the same 'Animal Fur' and fur pattern option, so that we can create characters with more exposed patterned fur? The option already exists for Sleeveless Robes, so it shouldn't be difficult to add it to the other categories for chest selection.

That was one of the things I noticed shortly after I joined the game in early May 2004 -- the roaches running around the pavement in the sewers and the flies around the lights there. Little graphical touches that increase the immersion. Like the fact that each of the different boot pieces has a different sole pattern. I admit that it took me a bit of time seeing the mostly-transparent arcs in mid-air in the sewers and warehouses to twig to the fact that it was a graphics artifact of the illumination cones from the lights -- the graphics engine didn't support actual lighting effects, so they were faked with mostly-transparent 'light cones'.

Five minutes without using an offensive ability or being attacked.