Number Six
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Posts posted by Number Six
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7 minutes ago, Panthonca7034 said:
For Project: Hangover, you mentioned that at some point in the near future it will be rolled out to begin replacing Tequila/Island rum (at least that is what I'm interpreting from the announcement), do we have a timetable of when to expect having to download it once it is tested and confirmed as stable?
No precise timetable. We have one more round of internal testing to do, and waiting for one piece that's an external factor (we may begin public testing before we have that, it depends on how complicated it sounds like it's going to be). Rough guess: A couple of weeks before we start seeing public beta and early adopters?
The goal is to replace Tequila entirely. Island Rum will be mostly replaced, or at least sidestepped, but still has an important purpose on Macs they are notoriously annoying to get the necessary environment set up properly on. So Mac users please participate in @Manga's Island Rum beta, as the Wine 5.0 it installs will be required for the new launcher.
14 minutes ago, Panthonca7034 said:Does Hangover work with Senticon/Paragon Chat?
It does not. Those tools have not been updated in a long time and a launcher is not needed for them. We've also had sporadic issues with one of the Titan download sites not functioning and causing issues for Tequila. It wouldn't cause issues with the new launcher due to its different design, but it still is something that may be confusing for new players, so we decided to omit it.
15 minutes ago, Panthonca7034 said:Also do we have confirmation of it working on Vista Potatoes? 😛 (aka Windows Vista)
I don't believe it's been tested with that yet. Since it runs on both XP and Windows 7, I would not expect Vista to be a problem. If you do have a Vista machine lurking around somewhere, keep an eye out for the public test phase and let us know!
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45 minutes ago, FoulVileTerror said:
Ah, but is that a virtual potato, @Jimmy, or a genuine potato?
GLaDOS core powered by a potato.
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Just a heads-up, one of the things about the new launcher we're building is that it's designed with native support for add-ons in mind. While the first release won't have that support enabled, the framework for it is there and built into the architecture.
Now, I don't know how long after the release of that launcher we'll be looking at for finishing that support and building the UI for it. So I certainly don't want to discourage the work being done here which will undoubtedly be able to come up with something quicker. Whatever you all come up with, once we're past the initial launch and thinking about addon support, it's something I'll want to engage with the community on to get ideas and make sure that what we do meshes well with what the mod authors have been doing.
But so you can be thinking about a potential path there; here's what we have in mind for addons:
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The addon itself is a single file, probably a pigg but possibly a zip file.
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Addons can use the same package format that we'll be moving to for the game itself - a signed json file - so that mod authors can securely distribute updates that are verified to come from the author. This format already allows for things like specifying package dependencies for if one addon builds on another -- though we may want to think about adding some sort of priority system for situations where they need to be applied in a particular order but it can't be easily expressed in terms of dependencies.
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The user experience for installation will likely be a simple "do you trust this author?" message, possibly with a user-visible capabilities list that defines what types of files the addon package is allowed to contain -- texture overrides, popmenus, etc.
Kind of like "If you hit OK, this addon will be allowed to update textures but not touch anything else" permissions model similar to mobile apps.
- Instead of extracting the packages into data/, the launcher will instruct the game to insert the addon package into its VFS (above the standard piggs). The layering of the VFS can be crafted to ensure that overrides happen in the proper order, and this makes things a lot simpler and faster than wrangling extracted files. This also makes it very simple for users to toggle addons on and off.
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The addon itself is a single file, probably a pigg but possibly a zip file.
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That looks like something completely different.
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1 hour ago, ImpousVileTerror said:
No .NET? A step in a good direction, @Number Six! Thanks.
What else can you tell us about the new launcher? Any details on security/privacy and reliability? I remember the scare we had a while back about Tequila not being "smart enough" to avoid downloading malware from bad manifests. If some extra layer of protection could exist in whatever this replacement launcher will be, that would just be lovely!
We'll be talking more about it fairly soon as we get closer to public testing and release, but I can confirm that security is one of the two key design components that led to designing a new launcher from scratch. The other was alluded to earlier and is that it's built without needing any outside libraries or dependencies that the game itself doesn't have, so that if you have something that is capable of running COH (i.e. wine on linux/mac), it should be able to run the launcher. It also has a lot of streamlining of the new player experience to make it easier to get up and running, and several commonly requested features like moving architecture (32/64) out of the launch list and to a persistent setting, ability to download or not download beta updates independently, reordering the launch list, etc.
On the security front, while nothing that downloads files from the internet can ever be 100% bulletproof, it's about a hundred times better than Tequila.
While there isn't really a "manifest" anymore, all of the components that make up the closest equivalents are cryptographically signed to prevent a malicious third party from modifying them - regardless if it's in flight or on the server directly. There's a full chain of trust all the way from the initial bootstrap that tells the launcher how to install/configure itself down to the package files that contain the sha256 hashes used to verify downloads before saving them to disk.
If that somehow were to fail, all of the file operations happen inside a VFS layer that is rooted at the install directory, so it can't be escaped with ".." or absolute paths.
There's a lot more that makes it much more robust than the existing methods, but we'll be covering that later, likely in a community update along with some other related items. In general, it should no longer be possible to accidentally launch with half-updated files, and verification is something that will become a last resort to detect disk corruption rather than at the first sign of trouble.
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16 minutes ago, DoctorDitko said:
Have you guys tested your new launcher under WINE?
Yes, works out of the box with stock wine on Linux, and we've been working directly with the Island Rum developer to make sure it works on mac (it does, now anyway, macs are a lot more finicky).
Should be a much easier setup than Tequila since there's no .NET involved.
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Shark Week has been a running gag during development of the launcher and testing of the news feed. I couldn't resist sharing a little bit of that. 😄
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Thanks for posting!
Tequila is basically dead at this point, but server status is something we already have in our upcoming replacement for it. You should be hearing more about it Soon(TM).
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1 minute ago, Doc_Scorpion said:
Still, patch notes of some kind would be nice - as I said above, patch notes are how we the players know that it's WAI and not a bug or hack job.
Right here,
Patch notes were ready to go but hidden until the patch was actually deployed.
It was on staging briefly so we could double check it didn't affect the recent manifest updates to clear out bad mirrors. Only people using the beta manifest would have seen it.
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30 minutes ago, Apparition said:
Many, and I'd dare say most, of the people that complain City of Heroes is too easy refuse to play red side and gold side. So I don't think that they're looking for challenge when it's already readily available. Not really.
Goldside is amazing on a team. All the XP comes right to you!
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To be completely blunt, Rosetta 2 is probably the best bet for a while -- other than just not buying an ARM Mac while they are still making the Intel ones -- but I wouldn't count on much beyond that unless Apple gets a ton of backlash from users and it takes a bite out of their sales.
While I wouldn't put an ARM port of COH beyond the realm of possibility, Wine is probably dead outside of Rosetta since there's not really such a thing as a Windows ARM executable anyway. A native neo-Mac port would require porting to ARM, and Xcode, and a proprietary graphics API that isn't used anywhere else.*
That's... approaching a full rewrite from the ground up. A native Linux port is more likely, since at least the graphics engine doesn't have to be completely re-engineered, and some of the backend work we've been doing has been moving things in a more cross-platform direction.
* barring things like MoltenGL becoming mature enough, but most of those focus on restricted profiles like OpenGL ES or are non-free and expensive to license
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AFAIK they are all fixed. Powerhouse did the fix but I glanced at it and it appeared to be correct. Have not heard any reports about any that are still having an issue, but there are a lot of Interface powers.
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On 2/5/2020 at 6:57 PM, Oubliette_Red said:
Unless Corva or Neo Shadowdream make an appearance, or someone that was in the archived thread (and happened to download the whole 1200+ icon pack) finds there way to Homecoming, it'll take someone like Rylas to redo all that work.
Oh, I have Corva's icons installed! They were part of my standard 'data' folder full of stuff from live that I copied over. Not sure I have the original distribution for it but I could zip them up easily enough.
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15 hours ago, ArchVileTerror said:
Honestly, with the other changes that recently hit, that's probably by design . . .
Yes, it is intended to be an influence sink. By being more convenient, players who have inf to burn are encouraged to upgrade more often than strictly necessary in order to keep the enhancements at peak efficiency.
Players who don't have inf to burn can still make use if it by waiting until they are even level or yellow/red. Or buy them the old fashioned way to pinch pennies and pick and choose specific enhancements.
Alternatively they can buy level 30 generic IOs which will save more in the long run but perhaps not always be as effective (but will be consistent!). Not everyone wants to deal with the AH though, even for something relatively easy, and don't care if they're paying more for the convenience. There are pros and cons to both approaches.
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1 minute ago, psp07 said:
FYI, I believe this is a high-DPI issue. I was able to click on the color boxes and costume name field, but only if I clicked on the very top left corner of the color square, or text field in the case of the costume name. So the clickable area does not 1:1 match with the displayed area on the screen..
Thanks, I'll put it on the list to take a look.
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2 minutes ago, Abraxus said:
We have reached the point where we question the folks who look at this game from the code level?
Questioning is healthy, that's why we put these things out for public comment.
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11 minutes ago, Peacemoon said:
Its not bloat removal. There are very good reasons we don’t have SOs at low level.
But we do have SOs at low level. DfB drops them (and has since it was introduced).
As far as the exemplar enhancement scaling, that's something that may be worth looking at, but I wouldn't expect big changes there. IIRC a big part of the scaling was to account for higher-level characters having many more slots available, not just enhancement values.
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6 hours ago, Peerless Girl said:
I remember the old days of "Ok so, everyone take a break so we can all go level up and green out our SOs, then we'll pick this back up in say 30 minutes? Ok cool!" I do not miss those. I do worry that just having them purchaseable from the enhancement screen will make most of the game vendors pointless. (I do miss the old good feeling you got unlocking your Origin-specific store contact back in the day).
The upgrade screen only saves you from having to run back and manually buy a bunch of replacements. You do still need to visit stores to fill new slots you get at those levels, unless you're a master planner and carry around full trays for 20 levels at a time.
That is one advantage that generic IOs still have* -- you can buy them from just about anywhere with /ah. I almost wish Paragon had never put that in, but between that and emailable items, that ship sailed long ago.
* Technically you could buy SOs off the market too, but the supply isn't really there.
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42 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:
Poking about, my concern is costs. For a low level character - DO's are freakin' expensive, and SO's are practically an arm, and a led, and your first born. Retaining TO's allows a budget option.
Yes, I know there are ways for an extreme lowbie to earn merits and convert them into converters and make a mint... But players shouldn't be forced into such ruts.I don't know if it made it into this build or not, but one of the things we're planning to do is change the "vendor trash" drops from enemy defeats from TOs to DOs. Those sell for more and should hopefully help low-level characters afford DO "budget builds", while players who are into using the market and selling drops / taking advantage of merits can slot SOs or buy/craft IOs earlier. Though remember that generic IOs below level 30 don't expire but are less powerful than SOs.
It's something we plan to monitor during the testing phase, and if it's still too harsh, adjust the pricing on level 5-20 DOs/SOs while leaving the higher level SOs the same.
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15 minutes ago, Telephone said:
Future Potential Enhancements
Also add: Some sort of "interact" command to talk to targeted NPCs and open doors directly in front of the player so that it can be bound to a button instead of having to use virtual mouse mode to do it.
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The biggest problems this change (which incidentally required very little developer time and is something that could be slipped in between larger updates) aims to address:
1. The early-game slog, which is enough of a drag that it compels many people to skip it entirely by DfB spamming or farm sitting. We're not too worried about low-level power creep since this part of the game is often not even played.
2. SOs making for a poor player experience in that leveling up during a series of missions actually makes you less effective unless you stop to go replace all your enhancements. Leveling up should always be something to look forward to, not a stressor that makes you worry your enhancements are going to break and significantly diminish your power in the middle of a mission.
It's not a 100% fix, but is intended to be an incremental effort.
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2 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:
So the upgrade routine is creating DO's outside of the normal/expected ranges. It would make sense that it could be difficult coding to determine the character's Origin and upgrade to the proper SO's, but just to double check - working as intended or broken?
I'm not sure it makes sense to automatically upgrade DOs to SOs. SOs have significantly greater enhancement values than DOs do, so a DO build is not going to translate well to an SO build. A character with DOs might use 2 acc / 2 dmg, and switch to 1 acc / 3 dmg for SOs.
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11 minutes ago, Schinopiraph said:
Hmmmm, interesting idea. Though with SO's being available so early on it will make TO's and DO's mostly redundant. Though I guess it will depend on how much they end up costing as unless a character has help they might struggle to earn enough Inf to both buy and keep up to date with SO's. That being said it would hopefully really help the early levels where it feels like new characters can't hit the broadside of a barn most of the time XP
The current plan - subject to change of course - is to remove TOs from vendors entirely (except maybe one hidden away somewhere for if somebody really wants a TO for some reason) since they're mostly worthless and almost always skipped, but leave DOs available as a more affordable option at low levels.
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Minor correction, what you have labeled as "chain_max_targets_expression" is not specific to chain powers but is a generic parameter (MaxTargetsExpr) that can be used for any AoE power. I don't see the other advanced chain parameters but I'm assuming you're leaving those out to keep the output more readable.
The rest of the new stuff (DeadOrAliveAny, etc) all looks good as far as I can tell. 😀
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State of the Project - August 2020
in Announcements
Posted
In theory the new launcher should be able run under the old Cider client (which we can't officially support due to it being paid software that Paragon had licensed), though it may take a bit of finagling to point it at the right executable. It's intentionally built with a very similar environment as the game itself, so if whatever compatibility layer you're using can run the game, it should be able to run the launcher.
There should be plenty of time to figure that out. We plan to maintain the old manifests for some time even after the new launcher is available. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect everyone to migrate quickly. What we may drop manifest support for is the beta (Brainstorm/Aeon) and staging (Shadow/Reflection) clients, but not the live one.