_NOPE_

I used to be up there somewhere... then I got busy with real life. Maybe someday I'll be up there again. It would make my ePeen feel bigger. 🙂

❤️ Mazzy Star so much, ever since I first heard this song in the movie Angus. I went back and bought their entire back catalogue. They are AMAZING, and Hope Sandoval is pretty awesome on her own too, though slightly less so.

So then don't play with those "power-gamers" if they are making you feel inadequate.

Great updates. As a primarily /Electric user, I'm excited for the new IO sets, EndMod needed some love. Also, I've been begging for a "General" chat channel for a LONG time. I actually added it to my own test server back in June. Anyone that's running their own server that wants the logic, you can either PM me, or find it on Discord in the OuroDev i25-i25-deployment channel, where I dumped a word doc of my code changes along with a zip file of the graphics I made for the chat selector bar. **DISCLAIMER:** Not affiliated with the HC team in any way. So, needless to say, I'm VERY happy to see this finally added.

@Rathulfr Yeah, they just seem so similar, I mean it's all really just a listing of build elements, the only difference really is that one would be read-only and the other wouldn't. That's really the only difference, so you could see maybe how when I saw what Cipher did, I was concerned that I was working to a goal that'd already been met.

Good point. I guess I was operating under the assumption that the playerbase and the server hosts all wanted the same thing, and had the same goals - but perhaps that's not the case. I hadn't considered that.

To make a long story short (too late!), IMO there needs to be a White Paper (or white papers) for the CoH codebase if the community is at all serious about active and open source development. Until that happens, it's not really an active and open source development community - it's a bunch of highly skilled programmers doing their wizardly magic and keeping the secrets of how they do it to themselves. I thought that OuroDev was supposed to BE that repository of white papers, but that hasn't been happening. And I suppose the HC haven't been contributing what they might know due to the NDA and The Negotiations™, which makes sense, but is... frustrating.

There's the ultimate question. Apparently, CodeWalker from the Titan Network has done this, but while CW has shared SOME code with how they've converted the information into an XML Schema, CW hasn't fully released all of this code, nor explained the logic on how they created their bin dump application. Right now, it's a mystery to us "lesser programmers", and is intimate knowledge to the "greater programmers". And those greater programmers haven't divulged this knowledge in any way that's easy for laymen to understand. I'm not sure what the reason is for this - perhaps a lack of time, more important things to do with their lives, or not having the patience to handhold those that don't have advanced degrees in Computer Science and/or decades of coding experience. Either way, it's frustrating to "newbies" like me that can see the code, but don't quite fully grasp how all of the pieces are working together. For my part, what little I *think* I understand or learn, I'm *TRYING* to share in a way that should be plain and obvious to most people that have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of computer programming, like I've done here with at least a basic description of the powers.def files and how I *think* they work. Of course, even that might be complete humbug, and I might be totally talking out of my ass. This is just the work of one .NET programmer trying to come in from the outside of having no C/C++ knowledge and trying to understand that code in the best way that I can without formal training in the language. When I feel I'm finally able to release my first alpha build of my Build Planner (when it's capable of doing just the BARE basics of what I think a build planner should be able to do), I'll most likely also release along with it a document or web page explaining my logic, knowledge, and how I got to where I got in a narrative form, because "stories" is how I understand and learn things (if you couldn't tell already from the way that I tend to write in whole paragraphs). If those "stories" don't already exist - I try to create them for myself, so that I can better make sense of the world.

Yes. Really, "data" in this game is stored in two primary ways - a SQL database, and a bunch of differently formatted flat files. Both sources can be accessed in a standardized way. SQL is already proven, and although there's some exceptions here and there, my project should show that the flat files can also be mined for data in a similar way. Once that data is collected in a relatable way, it can be accessed via an API. Frankly, all an API is is an interface via which programmers can grab and send data in a way that's approved by the people that made that specific API. An API can literally take on just about any form that the creator wishes.

*cough*PubliclyAccessibleAPI*cough*

Except that I'm not a part of the HC team, and as far as I'm aware, as long as The Negotiations™ are ongoing, that team makeup won't change. I don't think HC is taking any type of code work, and I don't know that they're releasing any code work to the public, due to the whole NDA thing. So, from what I can see, that's not a possibility.

Since I was name dropped a few times: I have nothing to do with this, this is the first I'm hearing of it. This makes my thing seem like junk, almost like I'm wasting my time. It also already looks a thousand times better. @Cipher's would of course be inherently better for the simple fact that he HAS the actual data to work with, (and is probably already inherently more familiar with the data since who knows how long he's been working with it) while I'm parsing and scraping stuff from a leak drop from over a year ago, and trying to understand it from the outside looking in. That all being said... I'm of a torn mind about this. On the one hand this looks awesome and I hope it gives people what they need, on the other... I feel like I just wasted a shit ton of my time on nothing. Ugh. I think I'll stop working on mine now.

There's nothing wrong with free speech as long as it doesn't cause harm to others, and all those involved realize that they are responsible for the results of that speech and the repercussions.

I actually already did this exact thing over on Ourodev: https://ourowiki.ouro-comdev.com/index.php?title=.def_Files

Forum Pro Tip from a veteran - If the content of your post is going to be primarily consisted of negative commentary on another forumite's personal attributes, rather than the primary topic of the thread - reconsider posting that message.

I was a Genesis kid. I loved the Sonic games. This movie is.... "fine". It's not REALLY a Sonic movie, any more than the two live action Smurfs films are actually Smurfs films. Someone took this character and said "hey, this character made us lots of money over the years. How about we play up the nostalgia of the adult gamers and bring him back into a movie, and see if we can get some dumb kids by playing up the cutesy angle. Hey, if we bring it into the 'real world' and get Cyclops from the X-Men, maybe we can get some of the wives to come too because in the real world it'll be 'more relatable'". So, after the fix of the horrible CGI on Sonic, they ended up with just an "okay" movie. It wasn't a total trainwreck, but it's NEVER a good thing when they take an established property and take it out of its own world. Jim Carrey was the highlight of the film as the megalomaniac Robotnik. I assume he's just playing a version of himself here. A better Sonic movie would have been all-animated (CGI or hand drawn) and actually take place on Planet Mobius with Robotnik as the only human. You know, like in the actual GAMES. Also just saw the Harley Quinn movie the other day. It was better than Sonic. The actors all did a GREAT job, the writing and direction was GREAT. But man, that EDITING was ATROCIOUS. The whole thing felt very disjointed. The editors (who were men, when the writers and director and actors were mostly women) could have made it a better movie if they didn't go with the "back and forth" story structure and went with a regular straight narrative path. Those editors did a disservice to the rest of the crew by editing the way that they did it.

Dead Alive/Braindead. On the sole condition that they include this moment somehow in the remake:

Great work! I love how the thread title sounds like a clickbait listicle title.

It looks like I might be using AWS going forward. If it's about $35 a month, that seems a reasonable middle path between the $8 a month for the cheapo sucky HostGator option, and $120 for the RIDICULOUSLY overpriced HostGator dedicated server. I think I could swing that on my own: Now, it's a matter of figuring out how to get ALL of my stuff working on that platform consistently, switching over, and cancelling my old service.

@SwitchFade

I'm in their club too, and already alpha tested a trial zone. They are making way more progress than CoT.

.... riiiiiiight. 😄

And don't even get me STARTED on my search results when I include "ED" in them...