City of Data v2.0

[UberGuy]

On 2/10/2021 at 11:33 AM, Bionic_Flea said:

I remember Lil Pips' Hero Builder.  I think that was the original. 

Yeah, I figured it had to be. The backup image I got the install date from had its file creation date April of 2004, and that's the release month of the game. I remember using it to mess with builds at work on the laptop that backup is from. 😄

[Bionic_Flea]

49 minutes ago, UberGuy said:

Yeah, I figured it had to be. The backup image I got the install date from had its file creation date April of 2004, and that's the release month of the game. I remember using it to mess with builds at work on the laptop that backup is from. 😄

You know what that means, don't you?

[UberGuy]

Uhh, I can think of lots of things that it means. Which one were you thinking of? 😄

[Bionic_Flea]

It means we're old, Uber.  We're old.

[UberGuy]

2 minutes ago, Bionic_Flea said:

It means we're old, Uber.  We're old.

That was one of the things, yes. That and I'm a slacker for working on builds in the office. (Yes, that was then, but now I'm posting on a CoH forum during my work day. 😄)

[Number Six]

3 hours ago, roleki said:

also interesting to see the Rube Goldberg stuff related to newer sets like Electrical Affinity.

Nothing compared to how insane it would be to try to implement something like that using pseudopets. 😄

 

The chain expressions may look complicated but are doing a lot of heavy lifting that used to be impossible.

[roleki]

18 hours ago, Number Six said:

Nothing compared to how insane it would be to try to implement something like that using pseudopets. 😄

 

The chain expressions may look complicated but are doing a lot of heavy lifting that used to be impossible.

Completely off-topic, but one of the first things I did when my /EA was of age was hop into an MSR... I can only imagine how janky that would have been with four or five of us generating 50 pseudopets every 30s or so.

[BillyMailman]

So, I've been looking at things, and hopefully someone in here can clarify stuff. I'm looking at the six separate powers strung together to make Domination work for Dominators, and they all make sense. One builds domination at a rate of three points per attack you make. Another decays it at a rate of one point per 7.5s. A third appears to be syncing it to the visible brown meter in the UI. I think. The fourth enables the click power when you're at 90/100 or higher (or 91/100?). And the fifth is the click power itself, which gives all the bonuses, including locking the meter to 100/100, which I suspect was just intended to be a visual thing, but is the whole reason permadom works; while any stack's up, the meter's locked full, so the bar gets emptied when your first one decays, but the second copy keeps it full. No decay ever really happens, thus permadom. Neat!

 

My actual issue is with the sixth power. Per the wiki's bit about Domination itself:

Quote

It rises faster if the Dominator has more teammates. This is a mild effect with one or two teammates, but on a large team Domination can be brought from 0 to over 90% with fewer than ten attacks.

Per that last CoD link, this is just a power with 300ft range, no Line of Sight, and only targetting teammate players (not leaguemates, not pets, just players). It increases the strength of your +Rage powers (Domination is just using Rage, per all those other links) by 16.67% per target in range. At six teammates, that's double, and at seven, that's about 116.69% rage gain, or 6.5 points per attack. Notably, that would mean 'fewer than ten attacks' is impossible (takes 14 to get to exactly 91 points, so very fast attacks could get to 90 with just one decay tick in there, maybe), but whatever.

 

The thing that gets me is, unless I'm misunderstanding, this is all contingent on raising a Dominator's strRage, making all their +Rage powers stronger. But the Attribute Tables page lists a Dominator has having a Rage strMax of 1.0, so it seems like it shouldn't be possible for that boost effect to do anything, and Doms should be limited to 3 points per power. But I've tested in-game, and it's absolutely working.

 

The Rage row also seems to be pulling in correctly; Brutes have a strMax of 3.0, and Blasters have weird caps, presumably as a holdover from the old version of Defiance that used the rage bar mechanics. So, what gives? Am I misunderstanding Rage strMax? Is it pulling into CoD wrong? Is it getting ignored? Is there some deep magic in the power that adds the rage, that I'm not quite parsing out of the Magnitude Expression correctly?

 

 

Also, apologies in advance for the crazy obtuse question. As someone whose main has always been Munitions Mastery just for the Surveillance power, CoD is a tremendous resource to have back up and running - especially since the Internet Archive copy of the old one is missing things and getting steadily more out of date. Thanks so much to everyone who helped bring this thing to us. It's a fantastic thing to be available, precisely for things like this. Or, well, would have been if the 'bug' I thought I'd spotted was real, but still, thanks so much for this. For what little my voice might be worth, I do think there's value in the suggestions about listing power categories, indexing the entities to be searchable, etc., since it leads to people understanding the game more, and finding more bugs and problems like this one. Even old CoD technically made the entities and NPC powers available, you just had to know the names to find them, which often just meant being friends with someone who knew.

[UberGuy]

On 2/12/2021 at 8:08 PM, BillyMailman said:

Even old CoD technically made the entities and NPC powers available, you just had to know the names to find them, which often just meant being friends with someone who knew.

So does this one. But a search is coming.

[BillyMailman]

Found a minor issue. In the help page for the Attributes page, the Max and StrMax explanations are both doubled. Max is twice in a row, StrMax is on either side of StrMin.

[UberGuy]

I've made some 

On 3/4/2021 at 8:23 PM, BillyMailman said:

Found a minor issue. In the help page for the Attributes page, the Max and StrMax explanations are both doubled. Max is twice in a row, StrMax is on either side of StrMin.

Thanks! Both should be fixed.

Some other small fixes are also up.

• More help was added (including the section with the duplicates above. 😨
• I fixed a styling bug that meant the column of help links on the help page was much wider than it needed to be.
• Powers with "Target Requires" expressions display this above the main power info tables, where other requirements are displayed. For an example, see Inner Will.
• I also tweaked the formatting slightly to help with display of multiple, very long requirements expressions on a power. (The title line is "dedented").
• Indicators showing inner and outer radii were added to effects which have them. They show up as concentric circle icons on the effect header, and hovering over them shows the attribute. For an example, check Thunder Strike.  (The help was updated to mention this.)
• The "Recharge Power" attribmod with the "SetTimer" flag is now displayed. Previously it was not understood by the code and not displayed. (This is not yet in use on powers live on Homecoming.)
• I originally suppressed displaying allowed boosts on boosts (enhancements), because regular enhancements always have their own enhancement type(s) as the allowed boost(s), so it seemed redundant. However, it's possible to have special purpose boosts that aren't so obvious about where they can be slotted. A fine example is Global Boosts - think things like Assault or Control Hybrid. The "allowed boosts" field controls what powers they work in. So I decided to display this info both for Boosts and Global Boosts. While it does usually seem like redundant info, it's not always. Just remember that, when looking at something that is a Boost, the enhancement icons mean it works in powers that accept that boost type. (The help now mentions this.)
• The names of special damage types (things like the damage emitted by Hamidon, for example) weren't displayed quite correctly. It was minor and anyone who looked at it probably knew what it meant, but I've cleaned this up. All damage types now display their name as "<named> damage".

I have started work on displaying information on Boostsets and a search interface for critters.

 

The Boostsets information is something old CoD never displayed, and is the missing link that defines what powers are granted as set bonuses by slotting what pieces of a set. CoD currently gives you no information, for example, about how it is that slotting an LotG:+Recharge grants you that piece's bonus. We know this information from the game interface and experience, but soon it will be possible to look it up on CoD. (This will probably be handy to the Mid's folks too.)

 

[UberGuy]

More fixes.

• Effect stacking by key is now displayed. Previously, there was no visual indication this was happening in a power unless you looked at the raw data. The new icon tells you the stacking key string on hover, and indicates when the stacking is both per-key and per-attribute. (The default is per-key only - a flag on the effect has to be set to cause it to also be per-attribute.)
• Effect target modifier indicators have been added. These are similar to the inner/outer radius indicators, but look like archery targets. Black rings around a red dot mean the effect is restricted to the main target of the power only. Red rings around a black dot mean the effect excludes the main target. The hover text says these things.
• Some effects are explicitly flagged to not appear in the in-game power info. There is now an effect icon for this (an eye inside a red circle).
• Previously, effect targeting of "Self and Own Pets" was not displayed correctly - it simply appeared as "(unknown)" in the effect line where effect targeting normally appears. This has been fixed.
• Icons were missing for inspirations, because I wasn't extracting them from the pigg files. I noticed this and fixed it.

Help is not yet updated for the new icons. At this point there are now so many supported icons on the effect line I really need to revamp the powers help page. (I also need a page that describes all the attribmod icons the site can display, and what they mean.)

[Arbegla]

I have an odd question, and the attributes from City of Data didn't really clarify it much.

 

For /traps Poison Trap, what is the duration of the cloud? According to the information posted,  when the power triggers, it creates two effects, one initial, and one after, that both have a hold aspect, but only the 'after' has the -regen/-rech, which lasts for 10 seconds. Is that 10 seconds from the time of the trap exploding, or 10 seconds from someone entering the 'cloud' that is created? I might've just been missing something. I also didn't see a trigger for the 'vomit' animation that happens, just a 2% chance for an extra mag 3 hold, though the vomit doesn't seem to be an actual hold, just an animation.

 

Any clarity would be appreciated from someone smart than me.

[jojogladco]

I was noticing that for Scrapper power pools only Project Will and Wall of Force have the MLCrit tag that lets the power have it's crit rate boosted by the Critical Strikes proc. @UberGuy Do you have to add those tags on your own or do they populate based on what's in the game data? If it populates from the games data then I'd guess it's a bug that PW and WoF have the tag when nothing else does. 

[UberGuy]

All of what I show is based on the actual game files. Barring bugs (or something I haven't implemented a display for) If it's not on CoD, it's not there in the game either. (If I haven't implemented a display, it's still almost always visible in the raw JSON display.)

 

I see the same thing with these powers, including looking at the latest Beta build. Probably worth a post in the bug report forum.

 

One thing I'll note is that some of the effects have other tags. For example, the Scrapper critical on Boxing is tagged "Scrapper". I don't think tags like this do anything functional, and seem to me to be more like code comments, but I have never seen a power with multiple tags, despite the fact that the tag structure is an array. So I don't know if having these current tags preclude adding the MLCrit one.

Edited March 19, 2021 by UberGuy

[Aberrant]

@UberGuy Speaking of Tags, when Entity searching is implemented would it be possible to apply a similar tag link system that powers with Defiance have, for IF Target.HasTag Power Tags like Undead, Ghost, Demon, Electronic, Human, Human Skeleton, Humanoid, Raid, Beast, etc. with "powers affecting"/"entities bearing" pages? This is relevant for certain powers that have special effects against certain enemies. I've worked on wiki pages listing the enemies and player powers (mostly temp ones) that use these tags and this would also help make sure these can be brought up to date with any Homecoming changes (currently just Undead, Ghost and Fey completed using I24 info. Still intend to do Demon and Electronic in the future but probably no more than that since they're far too general for a wiki page after that. I think Beast isn't used for anything on the powers side that I can see).

Edited March 19, 2021 by Aberrant
Split Undead and Ghost into separate pages

[UberGuy]

Listing entities that have given tags should be super easy, and I can make a page for that. Figuring out that a power cares about critters with a certain tag is less obviously simple. If it can be reduced to "if power condition contains tag lookup" then it should be no problem. If it gets weirder to detect ... maybe. 🙂

[naganrhys]

@UberGuy,

 

What is/are the full path(s) to the "*.bin" files for a Windows (10) install of Homecoming's Launcher?

 

I've searched the files in "C:\Games", and I've looked through "%APPDATA%" but I've had no luck.

 

Appreciate any assistance...

[UberGuy]

2 hours ago, naganrhys said:

@UberGuy,

 

What is/are the full path(s) to the "*.bin" files for a Windows (10) install of Homecoming's Launcher?

 

I've searched the files in "C:\Games", and I've looked through "%APPDATA%" but I've had no luck.

 

You won't find the bin files anywhere unless you unpack the *.pigg files that are in the game install folder. There are various pigg extraction tools around, but I'm afraid I can't recommend one, as I basically wrote my own. (I needed to extract from *.pigg files programmatically, and all the existing ones I had access to were UI-driven). There's a thread about them here (and it links to another thread too).

[UberGuy]

On 3/19/2021 at 11:06 AM, UberGuy said:

One thing I'll note is that some of the effects have other tags. For example, the Scrapper critical on Boxing is tagged "Scrapper". I don't think tags like this do anything functional, and seem to me to be more like code comments, but I have never seen a power with multiple tags, despite the fact that the tag structure is an array. So I don't know if having these current tags preclude adding the MLCrit one.

 

Actually, basically every Scrapper epic/patron pool power has multiple tags. So technically, this is possible. CPH said in the testing Discord today that he's not planning on changing it right now, because the design of the power pools with AT inherents is weird and messy.

[Carnifax]

Can I ask what framework or library you used to display the data JSON as HTML.

 

Also great work. Now one of my go-tos when trying to figure a power out.

[UberGuy]

On 4/10/2021 at 8:07 AM, Carnifax said:

Can I ask what framework or library you used to display the data JSON as HTML.

 

Also great work. Now one of my go-tos when trying to figure a power out.

 

None. That's native browser functionality. I simply display the JSON string inside <pre><code>...</code></pre> tags.

[UberGuy]

It's not quite ready for prime time yet, but here's a little preview of something I've been working on.

 

 

 

 

 

Before people ask ... , no, you won't be able to search for sets based on the bonuses they grant. Not for a while anyway. To offer that, I need to build a searchable index of bonuses on the back-end, and to create that, I need to parse the attribmods in the enhancements. But there's currently no attribmod parsing code in the back-end that creates the data files. It just dumps out raw data and the parsing is currently all done in browser code. I plan to support bonus searching eventually, but it will be some time before I do so. For now, Mids is your go-to for that kind of functionality.

 

Initially you'll only be able to search for sets by name, just like with powers.

 

This will be released alongside the critter/entity search interface. I'm working on building a search index for that too. It's not hard, but it's not as easy as it probably seems, as critters can have many names. (A name is defined at each level for which they exist!) I'm building a many-to-one mapping of display names you can search against to find the internal entity name.

[Bionic_Flea]

Nice.

[UberGuy]

Today I learned that every SG base NPC in the base editor is a critter, and all the decorative ones (so not things like trainers or stores) have a few dozen completely mundane names.

 

 "base_soccertalk_female_npc": [
    "Laura", "Linda", "Cynthia", "Amy", "Janet", "Angela", "Mary", "Patricia", "Melissa",
    "Carol", "Rebecca", "Betty", "Ruth", "Brenda", "Barbara", "Nancy","Carolyn", "Martha",
    "Joyce", "Shirley", "Anna", "Christine", "Kimberly", "Jessica", "Lisa", "Amanda",
    "Sarah", "Catherine", "Sharon", "Helen", "Sandra", "Virginia", "Diane", "Dorothy",
    "Frances", "Elizabeth", "Karen", "Debra", "Maria", "Susan", "Deborah", "Kathleen",
    "Margaret", "Ann", "Marie", "Jennifer", "Pamela", "Donna", "Stephanie","Michelle"
],

 

I am filtering them out of the display_name search index, heh.

I will probably add a way to search by internal name that would find them.

Edited April 14, 2021 by UberGuy