Number Six
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Posts posted by Number Six
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14 minutes ago, TheZag said:
Now all we need is for Jimmy to arrive and complete the set by reacting with the knife.
We have television but no radiooooooooo.
Use them quick before Cipher notices and takes them away.
📺 🔪 📻 ⭐
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1 hour ago, TygerDarkstorm said:
I think others have touched on this, but I'm fairly certain the devs aren't creating new animations as I don't think they have someone able to do that in the spaghetti code. But they are able to hack and change existing animations. I think the current Direct Strike one is like the 3rdish iteration of an animation for that power (and the coolest of the ones we tried, imo). I can't recall though what @Player-1 used to create the final version of the animation. Player-1 did an awesome job animating Storm Blast, imo; it's even super pretty with no color effects on the powers.
We do -- the innertube emote for example features a completely new animation that was added.
However it's a lot of work and we don't have a ton of art resources who have been fully trained on all the tools necessary to do it, so it's done sparingly. Some of the other new emotes like the kneel variants and mug drinking have animations that I think are based on some existing ones, but have had the limb positions tweaked a bit to work better for different body types.
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Looks like everything is back up now.
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Looks like everything is back up now.
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Posted in the other thread but I'll pin it here too since people are replying. Login server is technically up, but there's network equipment failure at the host that they're working on fixing, so nobody can connect to it. You can monitor here for status:
https://bare-metal-servers.status-ovhcloud.com/incidents/nmwmn9wtctmv
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Here is all the information we have about it so far:
https://bare-metal-servers.status-ovhcloud.com/incidents/nmwmn9wtctmv
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54 minutes ago, UltraAlt said:
If it comes down to the player base not being able to pay for all 5 servers, then I could see that as a reason to think about giving people time to move characters to another server before it is taken down, but I would still be against a of server merger.
It's been asked and answered a few times, but combining servers would not affect costs*. Our dbservers are virtual and they share common backend SQL servers as well as a common mapserver pool that all of them run on. The NA shards are effectively "free" because of the way we built our infrastructure.
* The exception to this is Reunion, which runs on separate hardware in the Europe datacenter. That's the single biggest bang-for-buck reduction we could make and is something we've discussed contingency plans for if it looks like the costs are an undue burden on the community. However we wouldn't merge it, we'd simply move it as-is to the shared North America infrastructure and eliminate the Europe hardware costs. The downside of that is that eastern hemisphere players would suffer worse ping times, but if it stays at its current very low population levels, it is something that's on the table and may be done to reduce costs so we're not paying a premium for a very small segment of the population.
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That error usually is caused by a "data" folder somehow getting created in the bin/win64/live folder*, confusing the client about where to find the data files.
In the past we've seen that happen when old versions of third party mod installers put their files in the wrong place.
* That's the path used by the HC launcher. I don't remember where the exes go in the legacy manifest. hc-bin64 maybe?
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1 hour ago, UberGuy said:
Interesting! I don't think I have any way of getting that info (the overrides) client side, either. Is that correct?
That's right. Since the entity names get translated when they're spawned and sent by the server as-is, they might not even be in the clientside messages at all.
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6 hours ago, AboveTheChemist said:
I found an issue that, while minor, I thought it might be worth pointing out. There is an enemy NPC called 'RIP Official' (Rogue Island Police group) in Mercy Island that doesn't show up in an entity search on the site. I searched through all the entity JSON files (from the downloaded CoD archive) as well and can't find an enemy NPC with that name.
It's this guy
https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=rogueislandpolice_officer_official
Mercy Island has a few custom spawndefs for that entity that override the display name.
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On 5/1/2023 at 2:49 AM, Greycat said:
At what point do these get sent? Does COH itself have to send an error or... ?
It only gets sent if the game crashes or triggers an assert, at which point it'll prompt you about submitting a report, or preferably a memory dump.
It doesn't have any kind of extra telemetry or data reporting or anything like that, so it unfortunately won't help with hangs or network issues like losing connection to mapserver. That might be something I add to it later, but if so it'll be opt-in.
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1 minute ago, KaizenSoze said:
What is the correct way to remove the diagnostic client? Uninstall?
Yes, make sure it's not hidden, click the '...' on the "Homecoming (Diag)" tile in the launcher, and select Uninstall from the menu.
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I pushed out a fix that changes the dependency type in the diag package to 'newer' to break the cycle, but if you already have it installed you'll still need to remove it temporarily.
When the next update comes along it should work better. It may still show up as failed if the diag package tries to update first (going to have autoupdate default to false for new installs from now on), but once the main HC client is updated it'll succeed if you retry.
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Bah, bit of an issue. Sharing the data package seemed like a good idea to not have to duplicate all the data, but causes an issue when updating. If you have both Homecoming and Homecoming (Diag) installed, you won't be able to update either one of them. When you try to update one, the launcher (correctly) detects that the data version is different than the one required by the other profile and refuses to update because of the conflict.
I'll work on a solution but for now you'll need to uninstall the Diag profile in order to update the game, then reinstall it.
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Version 5439
Stability
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Fix a critical error introduced in the last update that can cause a crash when the 32-bit launcher version is run on a 32-bit OS.
This was caused by a Windows 7+ function that's resolved dynamically in order to maintain XP/wine compatibility being called with an incorrect calling convention on 32-bit.
Especially egregious because this is a problem that was already fixed in the underlying library, and also in the copy of it that's linked with the game client itself, but somehow the merge into the launcher ended up using the unfixed version. I am a dummy.
Since it's something that doesn't happen until after the UI starts, if you're running the 32-bit launcher and crashing on startup, the self-repair mechanism should kick in and self-update to the fixed version. If for some reason it doesn't and you're still stuck in a crash loop, the easiest fix is to delete settings\launcher\packages\launcher.json which will force a self repair cycle.
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Fix a critical error introduced in the last update that can cause a crash when the 32-bit launcher version is run on a 32-bit OS.
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Hello heroes, villains, and everything in between!
In the ever-ongoing pursuit of perfection, we're rolling out a new opt-in program to help track down some of the more elusive client-side bugs. The crash reporting system has helped to track down and fix a lot of nasty bugs, including quite a few that date back almost to the release of the game. With the low-hanging fruit gone, now it's time to focus more on the ones that aren't so simple to catch.
By running the diagnostic client, you can help us find and squash those really slippery bugs that are difficult to pin down.
What is the diagnostic client?
It's a special build of the game client that has some extra debugging features enabled. A few of the highlights:
- Extra-stringent memory allocator checks enabled, this will immediately crash if certain types of bugs are detected, such as double free or writing past the end of a buffer.
- Some previously dev-mode-only assertions enabled; they will cause an immediate crash if something that's supposed to be impossible happens, instead of a probable crash down the road somewhere.
- Most release mode optimizations are enabled, but a few that can cause headaches when analyzing crash dumps have been disabled.
- Has the ability to flag specific sections of code to retain extra data that would be normally optimized out, but on an as-needed basis based on other crash reports we're looking into.
That's great, it makes my game crash more often, why on earth would I want to do that?!
To help make the game better! The things that make it crash in diagnostic mode are things that would be very difficult to find the cause for in the regular release build. There are a few of these; every release we get a small number of crash reports that happen in consistent places, but the state in the memory dump makes no sense and should be impossible. The most likely cause is that corruption is being caused somewhere else in the code, but in rare enough cases that it doesn't happen in a way we can reproduce. This build will catch those earlier and help us narrow the root cause to eliminate them.
Also, crash reports sent in by the diagnostic client get a special flag in our bug tracker so we know they have richer data. That means they get priority and are looked at first since they're more likely to lead to a solution.
Is there any downside to running the diagnostic client?
It is slightly more likely to crash early when there's a problem. In most cases, these situations would result in a crash anyway, just later on. But there are some bugs that might never cause a crash in the release client because they corrupt something that's otherwise unused.
Because of the extra sanity checks and optimization differences, expect about a 5-8% performance loss on average compared to the normal release client.
How do I opt-in?
The diagnostic client is available in the Homecoming Launcher. It is not available in manifest-based launchers. Also, unlike the release client, it is 64-bit only and does not support legacy operating systems.
To run it, you just need to go into the launcher settings and unhide it so that it shows up in the list:
Then, simply "install" the diagnostic client. It uses the same data files as the standard Homecoming client, so it is a very fast install and only needs to download 2 additional files.
When you're ready to play, just run the diagnostic client instead of the regular one! It shares all settings with the live client, so your characters, graphics settings, bind files, and so on will all be there.
If you do encounter a crash when running the diagnostic client, please pick the memory dump option if possible!
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Version 5436
User Interface
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Add the ability for a launch profile to be hidden by default.
NOTE: This flag has been enabled on the Prerelease profile for quite some time, even though the code to support it hadn't been added yet. The reason is to try to prevent confusion between Beta and Prerelease, especially from players new to beta testing.
As a result, if you use the Prerelease server as a way to update your files in advance of a patch and find that it's disappeared from the list, you may need to go into the settings menu and unhide it.
Backend
- Updated many third-party libraries to the most recent version, including zlib, xzutils, jansson, libpng, sqlite, libjpeg, nanosvg, mbedtld, libcurl, and mimalloc.
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Add the ability for a launch profile to be hidden by default.
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5 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:
Windows XP????? ARE YOU OKAY?
Believe it or not our 32-bit launcher* and game builds go to great lengths so that they can still run on that old clunker that's been running XP since when the game released, the one that's somehow still alive and kicking in defiance of all the odds.
What makes me sad is our brave, lonesome Windows Vista player seems to have either left or upgraded finally.
* Edit: The Homecoming launcher uses a third-party library for TLS 1.2 support to work around XP's schannel.dll only supporting TLS 1.0, effectively cutting it off from most of the modern Internet.
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3 hours ago, macskull said:
It isn’t possible to count unique players without IP address data, and I’m not certain even the devs have that level of fidelity.
It might be doable but it would be a lot of work to disambiguate it for concurrent users.
What I do have handy is my log analysis of the launcher files. Since almost everybody generally has to run the launcher to make sure they're up to date, I'm able to gather stats on unique IPs. This is more analogous of active players rather than concurrent, since not everybody plays at the same time and not everybody plays every day of the week.
Between April 15 and April 27, there were 28,613 unique IP addresses that were used to launch the game.
Report Range: 2023-04-15 through 2023-04-27 Total unique users : 28613 Manifest-based : 6522 HC Launcher : 22091 New HC Launcher installs : 1317 Launcher OS breakdown: windows-11-x86-32 : 510 windows-11-x86-64 : 6867 windows-10-server-x86-64 : 1 windows-10-x86-32 : 1453 windows-10-x86-64 : 11562 windows-7-x86-32 : 46 windows-7-x86-64 : 416 windows-8-x86-64 : 2 windows-8_1-x86-32 : 13 windows-8_1-x86-64 : 88 windows-xp-x86-32 : 2 wine : 1131 Manifest-based launcher breakdown: Island Rum : 210 Other : 310 PenguinRocks : 2 Tequila : 6000Interesting trivia: between the same time period exactly 1 year ago (April 15 - April 27, 2022), there were only 24,390 unique IPs.
Since people sometimes change IPs or play from multiple places that measure probably overcounts somewhat. But it's not too far off from our weekly account stats which sees about 16k unique accounts active in a week, or 22k unique accounts active in a month.
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That looks accurate and matches up with our internal stats (it should since they're both pulling from the same API). The weird looking gap in December is because either the API endpoint or the stats database was down for a few days over Christmas, but was low priority enough that nobody took time away to go fix it.
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44 minutes ago, Puma said:
I mean, what are your thoughts on these two posts by Devs, then, and how they played out?
If you're going to ask that, don't leave out my "favorite" example of trying to solicit community input on design direction, even more relevant since it relates to powers:
(And the 27 pages that follow)
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There's one other thing that HC devs do that provides invaluable feedback -- as good as the data analysis (which they also do) or polling or whatever else -- something that a few Cryptic/Paragon devs did but most did not -- and that's play the game. Every single volunteer dev was a long-time player first and continues to be to this day on their regular non-dev account. While they do that, they group with and engage with various parts of the community and hear all about what they're thinking.
That includes people who don't visit the forums, who don't hang out on discord, who would never participate in an online poll*. Their feedback matters too, and it affects planning and project priorities the same as any other channel for feedback does.
* I still am of the opinion that any such poll would only further increase inter-group resentment because it would be perceived as being better advertised to forumgoers, or on Discord, or whichever is the opposite of whoever feels like they weren't included in it.
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20 minutes ago, Puma said:
These do NOT need to show ANY results of the polling to the people taking them, so no one would have any idea what the results were, how close they were, etc., and the Devs could, with a web browser scan across an easy to read page, examine the results from several different angles.
Let's be honest for a second, if we took a poll, did not release the results of that poll, and then made changes based on the supposed results of that poll that no one can verify, would it change anything at all?
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5 minutes ago, srmalloy said:
you get enormously less hate and discontent from boosting the effectiveness of a powerset than from reducing it
Truth.
Just look at how absolutely insane people got over Aim not being added to Assault Rifle, and that's something that was never even live for a second, just considered.
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Homecoming Launcher Patch Notes for June 22, 2023
in Homecoming Launcher
Posted
Version 5538
Accessibility