Suggestion: Clarify the i24/i25 situation and plan to set expectations

[Halcyon]

[uPDATED BASED ON ADDITIONAL RESEARCH]

 

Hi Homecoming team! Thanks so much for everything!

 

I've seen a few points of discussion around the i24/i25 plans. I believe, however, that the implications to the player base may not be clear WRT creating characters based on i25 content.

 

The foundation:

- One thing came out to certain individuals as NCSoft was shutting CoH down: Source code circa i24

- i25 was entirely developed by SCORE (patchnotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11cLJiSYlfueJheOumRywG8Evip2Mjmu_30Y6ePaetqY/edit#heading=h.3dy6vkm)

 

To implement any non-trivial fixes/future improvements, we obviously need the source code

- As a result, many of the plans for the long term involve builds off of i24, as SCORE's i25 has not been released

- It is possible (?) to take the character/account db from the i25 servers currently running and "roll them back" to a future i24 build to facilitate this transition*

- However, this means any characters created based on i25 content would effectively be wiped when the long-term servers come up

 

If this is true, it seems like we would lose the following (noted in the i25 patch notes) if the servers do indeed use i24 as the base for moving forward:

- New archetype: Sentinels

- New power sets: Atomic Manipulation, Ninja Training, Radiation Armor, Radiation Melee, Radioactive Assault, Tactical Arrow, Temporal Manipulation

 

Can someone comment/clarify?

 

 

* If this is not possible, it means your characters created on the current servers will effectively be marooned if you want to join the servers that will grow from i24 - even if they leave the i25 servers up.

 

 

 

 

[The Fifth Horseman]

- Two things came out to certain individuals as NCSoft was shutting CoH down:

  1. Source code circa i24

  2. Binaries - probably from an internal test server - representing the latest i25 build

- Some people claim the i25 binaries are a "Leandro build", however, that would imply we have i25 source available, which AFAIK we do not

AFAIK:

i25 consists of Leandro's modifications to the i24 source he received. Said i24 source may have had items that were not part of the i24 beta, but at this time it is impossible to tell.

Leandro does have the source for his "i25" but has chosen not to distribute it.

 

- It is possible (?) to take the character/account db from the i25 servers currently running and "roll them back" to a future i24 build to facilitate this transition*

- However, this means any characters created based on i25 content would effectively be wiped when the long-term servers come up

More or less, unless Leandro's changes are recreated in some manner.

[Halcyon]

AFAIK:

i25 consists of Leandro's modifications to the i24 source he received. Said i24 source may have had items that were not part of the i24 beta, but at this time it is impossible to tell.

Leandro does have the source for his "i25" but has chosen not to distribute it.

 

Hmm. This seems unlikely, given the content that was announced for I25 by the original team exists in the I25 binaries but not in the I24 source (as far as I can tell anyway, have just started sorting through it this weekend, so totally possible I am just not seeing it yet). I'm...doubtful...that Leandro went through and implemented all those planned features by himself?

 

 

[Halcyon]

I continue to notice differing expectations on this front. Would really recommend there be an official statement to avoid drama about whether or not the future i24-based servers will or will not drop i25 content. Has anyone seen anything official here that I've missed?

 

I found this on reddit which seems to clarify:

 

Is this correct? tl;dr:

- i23 was in production at time of CoH closure; we don't have this

- i24 was on the live test server at closure; we have source

- i25 was entirely developed by SCORE (patchnotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11cLJiSYlfueJheOumRywG8Evip2Mjmu_30Y6ePaetqY/edit#heading=h.3dy6vkm)

 

If this is true, it seems like we would lose the following (noted in the i25 patch notes) if the servers do indeed use i24 as the base for moving forward:

- New archetype: Sentinels

- New power sets: Atomic Manipulation, Ninja Training, Radiation Armor, Radiation Melee, Radioactive Assault, Tactical Arrow, Temporal Manipulation

 

 

 

[Vanden]

I'd also appreciate official word from the Homecoming team what the plans are going forward with regards to i24 and i25. My understanding coming in to this setup was that i24 was the ultimate goal, while running the i25 servers was a stopgap solution so we could play immediately.

[Dr. Sinister]

This really sounds like an expectations vs reality thing.

 

People are expecting a full blown working game with updates and changes again

 

The reality is that the group doing this does not own the IP therefore making patches and changes to the game could result in very legal complications

[Halcyon]

This really sounds like an expectations vs reality thing.

 

People are expecting a full blown working game with updates and changes again

 

The reality is that the group doing this does not own the IP therefore making patches and changes to the game could result in very legal complications

 

I agree in the sense that we don't know what NCSoft is going to do. It could all go away tomorrow, or it could be open sourced and live forever on GitHub.

 

That said - your statement is not immediately useful to the core question this thread raises, given SCORE team has already made changes and updates and we're playing on a server with those updates (see the patch notes I linked). We're just trying to clarify what direction the future will take, which I think is important if the game does live on - if the main path forward will not incorporate the SCORE updates and people don't know that, there will be some drama.

 

[Dr. Sinister]

This really sounds like an expectations vs reality thing.

 

People are expecting a full blown working game with updates and changes again

 

The reality is that the group doing this does not own the IP therefore making patches and changes to the game could result in very legal complications

 

I agree in the sense that we don't know what NCSoft is going to do. It could all go away tomorrow, or it could be open sourced and live forever on GitHub.

 

That said - your statement is not immediately useful to the core question this thread raises, given SCORE team has already made changes and updates and we're playing on a server with those updates (see the patch notes I linked). We're just trying to clarify what direction the future will take, which I think is important if the game does live on - if the main path forward will not incorporate the SCORE updates and people don't know that, there will be some drama.

The changes/updates they have done are already present within the game.  I'm talking about further expansions to the game itself. 

[i_Slinky]

This really sounds like an expectations vs reality thing.

 

People are expecting a full blown working game with updates and changes again

 

The reality is that the group doing this does not own the IP therefore making patches and changes to the game could result in very legal complications

 

I agree in the sense that we don't know what NCSoft is going to do. It could all go away tomorrow, or it could be open sourced and live forever on GitHub.

 

That said - your statement is not immediately useful to the core question this thread raises, given SCORE team has already made changes and updates and we're playing on a server with those updates (see the patch notes I linked). We're just trying to clarify what direction the future will take, which I think is important if the game does live on - if the main path forward will not incorporate the SCORE updates and people don't know that, there will be some drama.

The changes/updates they have done are already present within the game.  I'm talking about further expansions to the game itself.

 

 

"Issue 25" is Issue 24 with custom content added. This is what the Homecoming Servers are running on, thus a lot of imbalanced power combinations and custom archetypes. These 'updates' were not present on the LIVE game or the TEST SERVER version of the LIVE game, they are custom modifications to Issue 24. Issue 25 to my knowledge isn't even 64-bit, so cannot utilise the power of modern hardware/software so well. Issue 24 is being worked on so that it does.

 

Issue 24 which was on the Test Server hosted by the official source, this is what is being worked on by the OuroDev team for the future of City of Heroes emulation.

Issue 23 was the last source on the LIVE game and cannot be worked on because the code is not available.

[Halcyon]

Updated based on finding and reading the SCORE i25 patch notes.

[Kelador]

The goal according to the coders is to take the i24 code which was the last official release from NCSoft (test server build) which would be the cleanest code they have and to well work out how it all ticks clean it up some more and then optimize the code/re-write the code to run as a self contained server so that it can take full advantage of modern server hardware instead of simply eating up more and more ram the more users that connect to the server which ends up in requiring more servers to spread the maps across.

 

Now this is a grossly simplified way of putting it and if done would require an current server to basically start fresh as none of the tweaks SCORE made would be part of that build and from that point on it would be down to the individual server teams what they want to add to the server.

[Halcyon]

The goal according to the coders is to take the i24 code which was the last official release from NCSoft (test server build) which would be the cleanest code they have and to well work out how it all ticks clean it up some more and then optimize the code/re-write the code to run as a self contained server so that it can take full advantage of modern server hardware instead of simply eating up more and more ram the more users that connect to the server which ends up in requiring more servers to spread the maps across.

 

Now this is a grossly simplified way of putting it and if done would require an current server to basically start fresh as none of the tweaks SCORE made would be part of that build and from that point on it would be down to the individual server teams what they want to add to the server.

 

I have no objection to this, in fact I agree with it.

 

My point is that there seems to be a lot of confusion from folks about what that means, and I am suggesting there be an official statement so that folks playing with the i25-based powersets on these specific servers don't get surprised, resulting in drama.

[TerraSecundus]

Is it that this particular server is meant to remain in perpetuity as i25, while there are ongoing efforts by coders and other groups not maintaining this server to compile from the source that's going around and make i24 servers? that is, are you conflating Cipher and the Homecoming crew with the coding groups, when they're actually separate projects in the same overall community?

 

I could be wrong, but that's my understanding.

[Halcyon]

Is it that this particular server is meant to remain in perpetuity as i25, while there are ongoing efforts by coders and other groups not maintaining this server to compile from the source that's going around and make i24 servers? that is, are you conflating Cipher and the Homecoming crew with the coding groups, when they're actually separate projects in the same overall community?

 

I could be wrong, but that's my understanding.

 

I know there are multiple groups working to compile i24 and stand up servers. But in those cases it is clear what the situation will be.

 

I am asking specifically about the 4 "test" servers currently maintained by the (awesome!) homecoming team. There are thousands of players on these. If, at some point, the homecoming team will respin these some or all of these servers to base them off of i24, it would be useful for people to know that. Conversely, if they have the SCORE i25 source and intent to move forward from there, that's good to confirm, too.