Wanted: Screenshot of In-game Praetorian Hamidon

[Glacier Peak]

Simple request... for a friend 😅

 

The three instances I am aware of are during the... 

Spoiler

• Provost Marchand (Primal Earth) story arc A New Dimension, A New Team mission, "Rescue Praetor White," where the player can see the Praetorian Hamidon from a distance behind blue zone walls, along with many Seeds of Hamidon and Avatars of Hamidon.
• Inside Information Villain Tip mission, "Investigate the Dying Praetoria,' where the map is the same as the above mission.
• Third mission 'The New Champion,' from Number Six during the Praetoria's Last Gasp story arc (though this is likely another avatar of the Hamidon, perhaps his pre-incarnate form) 

 

... and this dramatized (likely) version on one of the billboards in Praetoria.

 

Short of booting up my own server running Ourodev, then noclipping through the map, I dunno how I can get a good picture of the creature.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Glacier Peak

[ZemX]

Maybe I just never took a good look around, but all I remember seeing in that mission was the Avatars and Seeds in the distance and then individual tentacles rising up over the tree-tops way out beyond the sonic fences.  Not sure there's a Hamidon "body" to see there even if you could noclip around.

[Glacier Peak]

1 minute ago, ZemX said:

Maybe I just never took a good look around, but all I remember seeing in that mission was the Avatars and Seeds in the distance and then individual tentacles rising up over the tree-tops way out beyond the sonic fences.  Not sure there's a Hamidon "body" to see there even if you could noclip around.

Yeah, my assumption is that it's back there and that somebody has managed to snag a screenie of it.

[TheZag]

Id have to go in the mission again but last time it looked like the seed and avatar were 3d models moving around but the tentacles appeared to be 2d animated on the background.

 

But i doubt anyone will be getting up close without GM commands.  Ive gone all over that map and while the terrain is optional,  the water and force field are solid.  Without the discovery of some new clipping bug it wont be happening.

[Glacier Peak]

1 hour ago, TheZag said:

Id have to go in the mission again but last time it looked like the seed and avatar were 3d models moving around but the tentacles appeared to be 2d animated on the background.

 

But i doubt anyone will be getting up close without GM commands.  Ive gone all over that map and while the terrain is optional,  the water and force field are solid.  Without the discovery of some new clipping bug it wont be happening.

Agreed. I was able to get under both islands on the map, but due to the water like you said, it was all for naught. My assumption is that there is more than just a 2D render of the tentacles, perhaps even a base with a head. Then again, I could just be hoping for something that doesn't exist in the game files.

[ZemX]

Okay, I took a look.  The tentacles are 3D.  I am pretty sure of that.  They are a ways out past the blue mission barriers but flying from one end to the other it's possible to look at them from slightly different angles and tell they are not 2D sprites against the background.  

 

But that's about it.  You can rise above the treetops but the haze prevents you from seeing any body, if there is one.  All you can see against the sky is the outline of the tentacles.  Not even any texture or shading on them.

 

I doubt there is a head or a body.  If there is, the devs decided it didn't look good enough to show because they were careful not to allow it to be visible from within the mission bounds.   Most likely it is five separate animated 3D tentacles only.

 

[Glacier Peak]

I appreciate the attempt! I'll keep my fingers crossed for a sighting in the future. 

[Marshal_General]

I thought Hamidon was a bunch of jello pods. Are we sure the tentacle thing isn't Lusca in a Hamidon cosplay?

[TheZag]

3 hours ago, Marshal_General said:

I thought Hamidon was a bunch of jello pods. Are we sure the tentacle thing isn't Lusca in a Hamidon cosplay?

 

Lusca bought all the hamidon halloween costumes off the auction house.

[Glacier Peak]

I FOUND HIM!!!

 

 

Spoiler

[TerroirNoir]

Ha ha ha!

[Glacier Peak]

Beware the terror of Dexters Lab... er I mean Praetorian Hamidon!! 😅

[Veracor]

Praetorian Hamidon does not have a body ingame and I don't think he has one in the files either.  A year ago I did some shenanigans to go out of bounds on the "Rescue Marauder" mission to explore the map because I was curious how its horizon was made:

 

 

Basically, the main takeaways I found were:

• The tentacles are very large 3d models that rise up beyond the treeline, then fall back down under the map and disappear until their next wave cycle.  They connect to nothing.
• The Avatars of Hamidon are supersized versions of the regular Avatar (From the Underground itrial) and appear to be implemented as cars that drive around the streets.
• There's actually about 20 or so Seeds of Hamidon in the mission even though only about 4 or 5 render from the playable area.  Some are even flying above the zone's ceiling.  Hax!
• All three city zones (Nova Praetoria, Imperial City, Neutropolis) were mashed together with lots of randomly-missing geometry, such as streets and hills.  Similar to Grandville's missing geometries if you go out of bounds on MLTF mission 1 to explore the horizon.
• All of the entities out of bounds were untargettable and had no collision, and did nothing but make noise while moving around the map.

 

The tentacles you see in this mission can also be seen in regular Nova Praetoria as part of a hidden zone-wide event that resets every 30 minutes.  I had actually forgotten about this reclusive find entirely until writing this post.  I guess I'll put it into a new thread to avoid going off-topic.

[Glacier Peak]

8 hours ago, Veracor said:

Praetorian Hamidon does not have a body ingame and I don't think he has one in the files either.  A year ago I did some shenanigans to go out of bounds on the "Rescue Marauder" mission to explore the map because I was curious how its horizon was made:

 

 

Basically, the main takeaways I found were:

• The tentacles are very large 3d models that rise up beyond the treeline, then fall back down under the map and disappear until their next wave cycle.  They connect to nothing.
• The Avatars of Hamidon are supersized versions of the regular Avatar (From the Underground itrial) and appear to be implemented as cars that drive around the streets.
• There's actually about 20 or so Seeds of Hamidon in the mission even though only about 4 or 5 render from the playable area.  Some are even flying above the zone's ceiling.  Hax!
• All three city zones (Nova Praetoria, Imperial City, Neutropolis) were mashed together with lots of randomly-missing geometry, such as streets and hills.  Similar to Grandville's missing geometries if you go out of bounds on MLTF mission 1 to explore the horizon.
• All of the entities out of bounds were untargettable and had no collision, and did nothing but make noise while moving around the map.

 

The tentacles you see in this mission can also be seen in regular Nova Praetoria as part of a hidden zone-wide event that resets every 30 minutes.  I had actually forgotten about this reclusive find entirely until writing this post.  I guess I'll put it into a new thread to avoid going off-topic.

Excellent! Thanks for the assist!

[TheZag]

Could have sworn there was no way out on that mission.  Maybe i was in a different one.

[Glacier Peak]

48 minutes ago, TheZag said:

Could have sworn there was no way out on that mission.  Maybe i was in a different one.

I know that feeling! After reading Veracor's post, I made another effort to look under both islands for more geometry holes and didn't find any. In fact, I've looked under both islands in both mission maps cited in my original post, even though they are identical. Now I could've reproduced Veracor's results a year ago, but the exploit has since been patched.