Number Six

Cool, and again I don't want people in this thread to think I'm calling them out on this specific conversation, since there was some prior back and forth on the topic. It just reminded me that I've been meaning to say something about it as a more general matter.

Right, the amount of work to implement has to be taken into some consideration. Changing how the AI works does require a lot of care and caution to not break other things, but the team at least has tried to be cautious and conservative about all changes*, so it's not significantly worse than anything else. *(There are a lot of people who are very passionate about this game just the way it is, so we try to expand and enhance without pulling the rug out from under them) The actual difficulty is also something that is often unknowable until somebody takes the time to actually go and evaluate what it would take. That's why I don't think it should be wielded as the sole overriding factor to shut down discussion. Just as a purely hypothetical example, let's say the PVP community had a strong and overwhelming consensus that reverting to pre-I13 PVP was necessary and the only way to fix things. If that happened, despite it looking like an absolutely overwhelming amount of work, it might be worth examining if there was any way to automate parts of it and reduce the burden to something that would be manageable. Maybe possible, maybe not, but I wouldn't want to completely take that option off the table without even looking. If somebody wants to say, "This is how the game has always worked, we shouldn't change it just because we can," that's a valid argument to make and by all means build that case. I just ask for people to please be careful about invoking "can't be done" when what they really should be doing is discussing why they don't like it.

Yes, the Issue 25+ engine has a lot of improvements specifically in order to make things like this possible. You'll notice the power customization screen has a new "Inherent" section that is was not present on live or the I24 beta, though there are not yet any powers that take advantage of it. One of the reasons the Paragon devs never did that was that UI work is a huge pain, but that part is done now. It would just be a matter of some Fx work to make a tintable version. There have been some internal discussions about this, as well as the idea of combining all of the prestige sprints together into a single power that you can select from the different effects (to reduce power list bloat). That causes some controversy due to the loss of the "free" enhancement slots so it's been tabled for now.

My opinion is that code should never be used as an excuse. Not to pick on this instance in particular, but there are a lot of people who quote the standard code rant in various threads and it's a bit of a pet peeve. I see a lot of assertions about things being "impossible" that are clearly not, like fixing the Pet AI without having to use hacky workarounds. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that we technically can do, but it doesn't necessarily follow that we should do. Per-AT aggro caps are technically possible with a small amount of work, but I'm not convinced that they're a good idea. The cap exists for a reason -- if you are fighting very large groups then everybody has to think about aggro management and survivability a little, and you can't completely ignore the mechanic by bringing a tanker. IMO any discussion over such a thing should be focused solely on whether or not it makes for better gameplay and is likely to produce a better result than keeping the cap uniform, considering all aspects of what makes a good game.

Oh, I meant even if it's just a link to the PDF, something that would be at the top of the thread instead of partway through that people have to dig for. i.e. just create a new topic here (https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/12-help-amp-support/) with the PDF in it, something like Mac OS X Guide for upgrading from Safe Mode, and I'll pin it there so that it's more visible. 😀

Do you have a standalone thread for this somewhere? It might worth putting in the tech support section so we can sticky it as a guide for people who can only run safe mode to try.

Can you try the beta client (https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/13159-how-to-access-the-beta-testing-server/) and submit a crash report when it pops up? That ntdll.dll reference doesn't provide any useful information, so we'll need a full stacktrace or even a dump if possible to see what the issue is.

You probably used the driver shim workaround for older Intel integrated chips on the safe mode exe. You just need to run through the same procedure except for the correct “cityofheroes.exe” in either hc-bin64 or hc-bin32, depending on which version you’re trying to run.

Same issue a lot of people are seeing of the launcher (Island Rum?) apparently passing in a -patchdir parameter to a directory that doesn't exist. After trying and failing to launch it, do you have an islandrum.sh file somewhere in your COH directory that you can paste the contents of?

Ironically, it was apparently dev signing that caused the hang (the only thing that was changed in the fixed version was removing the signature).

Please try redownloading it again. Manga had updated it with a version that has a certificate so that it doesn't break at the end of the month when Apple starts enforcing app signing, but it seems to be hanging on random machines. A version without the cert removed was just re-uploaded and seems to work... (but will break on Feb 2).

Are you able to find any log files in ~/Library/Logs/Time Sync/Island Rum? Manga says that should have a detailed activity log and may provide some clues about how it's being launched.

That one is an easy fix: Download and install the "x64" package from Microsoft. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads

Not in keymapping, what happens when you click on the controller device option to select it under "Controls"?

I'm not sure if that will solve it. The message you're seeing is just a warning, not a fatal error, and the game is switching to Windowed mode. So if you can't start it even in windowed mode, I doubt any of the fullscreen options will work. Try adding -console to your startup parameters in the launcher and see if you can screenshot the top of that console window where it shows specs and video card information.

Oh, okay, the black screen. We're going to need to get console output (from running the game with -console) somehow to see how far it gets before that screen appears. I've tried a few things with one other person I'm working with on a different issue, but so far have not had any luck getting the console window to appear on Macs. You'll probably need to engage one of our resident mac experts to try and figure out how to do that (@GM AmonRa) if possible.

There were a couple bad versions of wine that had input issues on all clients, but it was corrected in future updates, and it shouldn't just spontaneously revert to that version. @Mangawould know more about which versions of wine Island Rum is currently installing.

I don't think that's accurate, @Tahquitz. The 32-bit version of wine is broken, but wine64 does work on Catalina, and there are several players who successfully run the 64-bit game client using it. That was a big part of the push to modernize the code and make it 64-bit clean.

Can you elaborate on "don't recognize"? It doesn't show up in the list when you go to controller options to enable it? Or shows up but doesn't work? I'm really surprised your friend is having problems... the 64-bit and 32-bit clients have native support for xbox controllers using Microsoft's preferred API for them, and as a result have extra features like vibration support exclusively for xbox controllers that the legacy client (safe mode) lacks.

Have you tried borderless mode? That lets you select the monitor up front and runs full screen (but technically as a window) at your desktop resolution.

Controller/Dominator pets are on the board to be looked in phase 2, after the MM changes go live.

It will be going away at some point, but the reason for moving it to a separate manifest was to get a feel for how many people are using it and get them to report what issues they're having, so that we can work on fixing them before it goes away. The specific one you're running into seems to be related to the way it's being launched on older versions of MacOS (10.12 and earlier). I'm in contact with one other person who's experiencing the same issue and is working with me to try and pin down whether it's a problem with the game client that we can fix, or if it's a launcher issue we'll need to get the Island Rum author to address.

It's very similar in Island Rum. There should be a place to put a manifest URL somewhere in the options -- paste "http://patch.savecoh.com/safemode.xml" there.

Use the safe mode manifest from the first post in this thread. What version of MacOS?

Once we have a firm cutoff date, the safe mode client will be getting annoying pop-ups that have to be acknowledged every time it's run. So there will be ample warning.