Herotu

I don't want to stereotype... who am I kidding? I LOVE to stereotype. All artists are incredibly lazy. FACT! If we want them to do anything, I suspect we'll have to prod and poke them all the way to the finish line.

I love masterminds, but for me I have an issue wrapping my head around the combination of Primaries with Secondaries. Getting a concept that works is really hard. Personally, I think the Secondary selection is really meh, I dislike them all. I don't do Defender sets. There are NO fun options - can we have assault instead of support? That said, I recognise that this discussion is specifically about Primaries and so I will say this: Things I love about MM: Thugs, Robots, Mercenaries, Whips in Demons, The IDEA behind Ninjas. There's an old trope/adage that goes, "Keep it Simple Stupid". This is something that I'd HIGHLY recommend people who are creating a hero designer/costume creator. There's a reason Lego is so successful - it started with a simple brick. The point I'm trying to make is that the onus for being creative should be on the PLAYER not the developers. And the conclusion is my suggestion: Men in Suits. Simple, elegant and can be used by a HUGE variety of character concepts. This contrasts with Ninjas. Complex, off-the-wall design that is admirable from a creativity point-of-view but lacks versatility - who has a Ninjas MM? Too complicated, not compatible with players' concepts. Demons audio could do with a pass. I think the triggers need to be reduced in their frequency and the sounds themselves made less jarring.

Billboards offer the opportunity to create a lot of fancypants artwork. We could even have rotating billboards (I mean people could generate new art each ... week, for example - not that the billboard itself rotates). Hey here's one: Advertise Upcoming Costume Competitions, Tanker Tuesdays, other events, Base Design Competition! Advertise your Supergroup! Ofc, these designs should have dates on their names so people don't download old ones (or out-of-date ones could be removed from the mod site). There's loads of scope for interesting adverts! Where are our artists? What do you think of THAT eh?! Well?! WHAAAAATTTTT? Tell everybody in the oblong box below.

Radio Radio!

It seems like there's a plethora of problems in working with these ancient and arcane filetypes. I can't find anything about .GEO files on the internet. I'd like to try to summarise the filetype information Six has kindly provided. 3DSMax 3dsmax [via plugin] -> nonstandard VRML -> converter tool = Anim/Geo file. Source files we have are all in max format and the concepts used don't map 1:1 to other software. Blender geo exporter [Python] for blender is not complete, has some bugs, and doesn't fully/correctly implement all the sections of the geo format.

Dropped: Blue Lantern Robotic Underlord Inferno Contraption

The accordion is dead. Long live... no I can't say it, I hate the saxophone. Curse you Terry Edwards! CURSE YOU!!!1111

Thrown weapons. Stones, Knives, Bombs, Grenades, Molotov Cocktails, Sticks of Dynamite, etc. This is the Mastermind->Thugs->Call Thugs->Arsonist (Upgrade 2) Look at those cool bags brimming with sticks of dynamite!

...

Looking at the applicants for future development, the skillsets of the players are deep and broad. I'd be extremely surprised if none of those people knew how to create a plug-in/library/whatever. The filetype itself seems like it might be unique, however, so we need to fathom how it lays out it's data, and that might be very tricky because it could be a flexible filetype. I've been hex editing Dragon Age Inquisition's EBX binaries for a few years - I hope it's not as complicated as that.

Yes, but the costume change ...

Hero 1's costume change was pretty radical.

Yeah... No. I saw no "call" whatsoever. That's your interpretation of my interpretation of their statement. As the interpreter of their statement I can categorically state that your interpretation of my interpretation isn't what I intended. As you can see, I've merely quoted a statement from Cobolt which suggests that until they have better tools, development is bottlenecked. You can call that a "call" or not. It's not something I'm interested in. I just want to solve the tools issue and remove the bottleneck. Let's stay focused here, people. There's far too much nonsense about whether or not they're asking for help. I don't care whether they're asking for help. I want to provide it regardless. Let's remove this bottleneck!

... but I think this one looks even better!

This is going to be a good one, I can tell!

Yay! I got honorable mention. Turns out I could make it after all! I thought it was going to be Saturday.

Well I wasn't aware of all this politicking and I'm not really that interested. Perhaps we can contribute without engagement? Not ideal, but we can always just suggest stuff and hope something is useful? If we consider the notion that the devs don't have access to Maya (it's very expensive) and are animating in another tool. That would explain why they're not able to produce .anim files (- it's one scenario, there are probably a great many more). What alternative animation tool doesn't have the ability to export in .anim file format?

I looked via Pigg Viewer Pro at the files. There are many of filetype .anim The internet says that .anim are Maya files. Examination of the Maya website here... https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-87541258-2463-497A-A3D7-3DEA4C852644 ... says this description for the file format. I wonder if the problem is that the format has changed over the years?

Cobolt Arachne stated here that the devs' tools are holding back development. Surely we have people who have the know-how regarding this matter? I will jump to ill-informed conclusions below. Terms: In the below Ill-informed conclusions, the term old format means the format of file which the game would use. Ill-informed conclusions: I would imagine that the problem could be alleviated if modern tools had either the capability to export animations in old format or if an exported modern file could be converted to the old format. Would this involve the writing of libraries and suchlike? If we know what's required, some of us have such knowledge or contacts who do. I invite you all to offer opinion and assistance if you can below.

There might be a reason it's not possible or very hard.

The theme for the costume contest is Criminals this week. Sadly I can't be there (again), so I'd like to post my traditional burglar costume: Sly Old Fox Sylvestre Renard, The Original Fox, The Onion Seller, The Bicycle Thief. Robbing museums, galleries and banks since way back in the 20th century ... no safe is safe once the Fox gets a sniff of it! You can't really see in the image but he's got the moneybag and the money aura.

Yay! I've made it into a mod for easy use. It's called, wait for it... Music Character Creator Music Silenced I wanted to put music at the start because that's what people will probably look for, so it's called music twice. And double music is never bad, except when it is. ... I'll get me coat.

The source for this project is here: https://github.com/CaitlynMainer/piggtools/blob/master/Pigg Viewer Pro/Pigg Viewer Pro.csproj Is there any chance of further development of the project? Specifically a tree "search" function would be great and having the files and folders sorted in alphabetical order would be beneficial too. As it stands, it's quite tricky to find files. Thanks for your time.