RikOz

Any idea why these clues are still bunging up my Clues list, past level 40? These seem to come from the Shining Stars arcs, specifically Part 2. This character has completed parts 1 & 2 (confirmed by the fact she has the Fort Trident teleport), but has not done Part 3. It would seem these clues weren't cleared once this character completed the arc. I have numerous other alts that have completed Parts 1 & 2 but not 3, but they don't have these clues hanging around. Not sure why this particular character does.

Looks like this is fixed! Thanks for the help!

Okay, after uninstalling Smog Free CoH, Peregrine Island's sky looked nice and bright. I did an indoor mission, and when I came back out the sky was still nice and sunny. Same sky in Talos Island, and it appears to be the same sky in the "Jamison Office Park" outdoor mission map. So yeah, it looks like the Smog Free CoH mod interferes with Never Dark Skies.

All other mods are working correctly. However, it occurred to me to look at other environment-altering mods, and I had the "Smog Free CoH" mod installed. I've uninstalled that, perhaps there is a conflict between the two mods. I'll check once I'm out of my current mission.

Support Bundle uploaded. Corrupted Mod installed, game crashed.

I've successfully used the Never Dark Skies mod in the past, but now it doesn't seem to work. Well, it works in Dark Astoria (very nice zone, when you can actually see it). I added the mod again to override the constant nighttime during the Halloween event (I absolutely can't stand constant nighttime, especially for an entire month). That had worked in the past, but did not work this year. Thinking that this year's changes to the Halloween night cycles were interfering with how the mod works, I uninstalled it and waited until the event was over before reinstalling it. Alas, it still doesn't work. Except, as noted, in DA.

Ms. Mars' latest costume:

Finally got around to making this guy. Raserei Grammatiker! (aka "Grammar Nazi") Psychic Blast/Time Manipulation corruptor EDIT: Kinda annoyed that there's a Council emblem in the chest symbols list, but not a 5th Column emblem. Also really wanted to name him "Raserei Ubermenschen Grammatiker", but the first two words by themselves hit the length limit. Darned NPCs can have longer names than we can.

Heh.

This one took a bit of fiddling with Gemini. Here's the original image: Prompt: First ask me to upload an image and then create a comic book cover action pose based on the figure in the image. Title the comic book, "Erdmädchen", and depict her smashing Jaegers from videogame "City of Heroes" Which got me this: Cool, but wrong jaegers. So I had it repeat with a guide image for the jaegers, and got this one: Much better!

My first attempt at a comic book cover. It got the book dimensions wrong, though. Source image: Result:

Clever!

Well, it's working now after I did a hard reset to my browser's default security/privacy settings.

Oops, I did it again! Yet another new 50 (#52). As you can see from her bio, this only took six years. Venus Lass (Fiery Blast/Electricity Manipulation blaster) Her colors were originally blue & red, but at some point after level 40 I decided to change the red to orange.

Another experiment! Got that map for the "Recover the Bands of Shu" mission from Harvey Maylor, a mission with only one objective. Entered the 1st elevator, cleared the floor. Nothing. Ran down to the 3rd elevator, cleared the floor. Nothing. Bands of Shu were found behind the 2nd elevator. So that's still the "winner".

So: I've been using the same VPN (Windscribe) forever, and never had any trouble with the Wiki until yesterday. I tried turning off the VPN, but still couldn't get in. I did recently install a new browser extension created by the makers of my VPN, which adds additional privacy features. I tried whitelisting the Wiki, to no avail, so I disabled the extension. Still couldn't get in. I use the Brave web browser. I've disabled Brave's security/privacy features and turned off my VPN and the aforementioned extension. Still can't get in. So I tried it with Chrome. The page threw up the Cloudflare page, which proceeded to "verify" me without even asking me to click a box. It would appear that the Cloudflare thing doesn't like something about Brave. EDIT: I found a security setting in Brave to "Use secure DNS", which was enabled. There is a popup menu to select a DNS, which was set by default to "OS default (when available)" (I'm on Windows 10, latest updates installed). I discovered, at the bottom of the menu, "Cloudflare (1.1.1.1)". I selected that option, and suddenly I could get into the Wiki. I tried again, and failed again with both the GoogleDNS and OpenDNS, so I switched back to the Cloudflare DNS and now that one doesn't work either. This is really puzzling.

So the Homecoming Wiki has started challenging me to prove I'm not a robot and ... it will not accept my answer. It just keeps throwing up the click box over and over. Turned off my VPN, still won't let me in. What's up with that?

Interesting--She's from Denmark, and her name is "Frossen", which is Danish for "Frozen"; her name and native country was not in the filename and I didn't type them in, but the AI still "randomly" put her in a snowy, European-looking scene. It must have guessed based on her color scheme.

A little fun with my wedding photo:

A few more using the same prompt as the previous post. I like the way the AI uses the costumes to guess at an appropriate background. This one almost looks like she's in First Ward: This one is extrapolated from an image that doesn't show her legs, hence the actual fingers, and the non-CoH boots. When I first tried this character with a full-body screenshot, Gemini seemed to think it was porn and wouldn't give me anything. I need to explain this guy a bit. His name is "Epic Gear". His bio indicates that he was a "elite raider" warrior from Azeroth (World of Warcraft) who, due to a botched portal summoned by some noob mage, ended up in Paragon City. "Epic" gear in WoW is identified by purple item name text, so I went with that for his costume color. The actual gears on his costume are there as a joke/pun. When he reached level 50, he got his "Legendary" weapon, which I colored orange to reflect the item name text color of legendary items in WoW. Another one that gave me "censorship" issues. This is "Triple-N", which stands for "Nearly Naked Ninja"; the game of course wouldn't let me use the word "naked" in a character name. So the first problem was that most of her costumes are, naturally, as minimal as possible, lots of bare skin. Gemini again thought it was porn, so wouldn't render them. So I tried with this costume, and on the first attempt it apparently decided that this was a "real person" (by which I assumed it meant a celebrity/person known to the general public), so refused to work with it. But I tried it a second time and now it worked.

Sounds kind of like the same thing as, when you exit an elevator, your character's power ground effects are waiting there for you to step into them.

A few more made with Google Gemini, using my own prompt: First ask me to upload an image and then create a photorealistic rendering of the characters in the picture, in a realistic style, in a real environment. It's not always exactly getting "photorealistic" on the faces, but I'll experiment some more.

With Everlasting down last night, I rolled a new character on Excelsior just so I could get some play time in. His costume is simple, but I like the result. I came up with the color scheme while fooling with various color combos to see what interesting effects I could get with the Spectrum face. I didn't intend to use that face, I just got distracted. Anyway, I just went with the last color combo I tried there. So here's ROFL Stomper (Energy/Psi Armor brute).

Way cool!