Kitsune Knight

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(By The Way There's Nothing Wrong With The Way I Write,I Was Raised Writing Like This, And Myself And Views Should Not Be Discriminated Against Because Of It)

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1.) Where were you raised? If you're in the US... either your parents don't know how to write or you don't. I don't buy your explination.
2.) It's not discrimination to say it's hard to read.

For some reason I expected spinning and rolling...


They just need to add that as a temporary power... would be hilarious to use that as some sort of ultra taunt/hold power

That looks... painful.

For a lot of these you could just roll a new alt on some random server, go off to the side somewhere (into the water in mercy is good, somewhere in Galaxy should work on a low pop server), and type in the console '/demorecord WEAPONNAME$$demostop' and it should be much easier to find what you need.

That should work fine for all the weapons that don't need to be unlocked, at least.

Actually, you'd both be right. Multiple pronunciations ftt! (for the tie )

Now to actually watch the video!

It'd require more than just walking animations. What'd happen if you were 'walking' and you got hit with Speed Boost? Siphon Speed? Were standing on Caltrops? Had Granite+Rooted activated? Super Jump? Intertial Reduction?

BaBs doesn't want to have you running at super speeds while using the walking animation, nor walking while slowed to the point where you're practically just standing in place. There's a lot of issues that made BaB say it's not so simple as just making new animations.

Being able to toggle 'walking' is unfortunately not as easy as one would think, per BackAlleyBrawler.

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The engine excludes stacking more than 5 of a kind based on the name of the bonus, not its value.

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Well that's gonna change a few builds I was working on.

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Just so no one misunderstands, this is a LOOSER rule than the classic Rule of Five. Any build that'd be valid using the old Rule of Five is still valid, it's just that this adds more options.

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Yup... means I need to add more +recharge sets.

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Ah, wasn't sure which you thought you had to do

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The engine excludes stacking more than 5 of a kind based on the name of the bonus, not its value.

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Well that's gonna change a few builds I was working on.

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Just so no one misunderstands, this is a LOOSER rule than the classic Rule of Five. Any build that'd be valid using the old Rule of Five is still valid, it's just that this adds more options.

Well, generally a dying game doesn't expand to more platforms, so I'd imagine this is yet another sign of confidence from NCSoft about CoX's future.





Now that people can't blame all their problems on PvP, we can blame the Mac users!

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This falls under the principle: If you make it difficult to read, than it's not good for design. It's annoying and more difficult to read text that's superimposed over a city background. Text should be on a solid background for readability. Currently, I'm trying to read text superimposed over building rooftops

[/ QUOTE ]There is far more than enough contrast that the background should be a non-issue.

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The center bar over which the text is superimposed is a darkish blue that blends into a bright-whitish blue on the sides of the bar. This dramatic change in the brightness background makes reading the text over it difficult and annoying. Text should be on a solid background for readability.

[/ QUOTE ]The text isn't over the lighter area so that should be a non-issue as well.

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The sidebar graphics square for a trial account has rapidly changing graphic images. I found it so annoying that after hitting Escape to stop it several times, I just used AdBlock to remove it... which then removed the link for trial account altogether. Just make it a different and random non-changing graphic on each reload of the page.

[/ QUOTE ]Yeah, that's definitely changing too fast, seems to be a bit less than 2 seconds.

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Also, something weird: in Firefox, shrinking the text shrinks the background graphics, but not in IE. <shrug>

[/ QUOTE ]Are you shrinking the text or using Firefox's zoom functionality?

I definitely like the new site, it looks FAR better than the old one. When I just popped open the updater and saw the new look I immediately went to check the site (definitely love the teaser on the front page... more please? maybe have occasional contests for fan-made videos to appear there?)... Although I think y'all need to do the same things to the forums... except burn all backups immediately!


@DadZilla & Kheldarn, and any others
If you wanna blame someone, blame Microsoft for making a complete mockery out of both security and standards on the web (that they helped draft!) causing any web developer to have to make multiple versions of their website. You should really try to move to a different browser, virtually any would be far better (security-wise and standards-wise). Don't like IE7/Firefox/Chrome? Then try Opera (it's what I use on Windows, it's fast, it's lean, it supports blocking ads/popups (I haven't seen a pop up in YEARS). If you don't like that, try Mozilla, or Safari, or any of the other dozen or so semi-major browsers out there. Really, if you're still using IE6 your system is likely crawling with malware because of it (it's really sad how many people think all the pop ups and ads crawling all over the web is normal, even when NOT running a browser...)

All threads die.

YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!

Install fraps and run it, click the 'Movies' tab and see what the 'Video Capture Hotkey' is set to (normally F9 unless you change it) as well as the 'Folder to save movies in', once thats done start the playback of the demo you want to record, once it begins press F9 and it'll begin recording it to the folder you saw before. Remember that the free version of FRAPs will only record 30 seconds at a time.

Also, I have a good feeling your computer will explode while trying to record and playback the demo at the same time

Part of being the worst is not intending to be the worst.

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It looked like there was another animation overlayed on top of the about-to-explode animation, was it a DA power?


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Nope. The only things running were Self Destruct and the costume auras. Fo Shizzle (the demon) is a Elec/Dev blaster.

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Hm... I never noticed the black glowieness before >.<

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**ROTFLMAO**

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^^ This

It looked like there was another animation overlayed on top of the about-to-explode animation, was it a DA power?

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Even just showing a character against a flat green background doing emotes would be massive.

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Actually, they already have/had a program that could do that, it was distributed with (or for) City of Hero (the Korean version), but AFAIK they can't do that in the US due to their agreement with Marvel (at least that was the prevailing theory, doubt it was actually confirmed).

Without access to the PIGG's data (which I doubt they'd change their policy on) you can still still have a graphical demo of the demo, using placeholders for NPCs/Characters/etc and having a monitor that'd show the state of all the NPCs/Characters (i.e. to show what emotes they have active, etc). Instead of being a complete replacement for the whole demo system it'd be a way to greatly simplify the system while still working within the limitations.

Yeah I decided to test it out and no dice

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This sounds almost like it'd have to be a utility that would load the demofile but would also add the extra cameras for greater control.

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It pretty much would, although without breaking the EULA (i.e. extracting the actual data from the PIGG files) I wouldn't be able to use the in-game models/maps but could still show the relative position/orientation of everything, including where the camera would be positioned and, with if I delved into OpenGL, a view from the Camera's point of view.

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Hopefully it would also add a Pause feature to pause the demo, as well as Reverse and Forward features to move back and forth thru the demo timeline.

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Well remember that I wouldn't be using the in-game engine so it wouldn't be something you'd want to be recording, but it would be theoretically possible to construct a timeline and sort of act out what should appear in the game (although without having access to information I can't access I can't guarantee you won't be in a wall... but it'd be trivial for a program to go through the file and shift everything over a few feet if you're just slightly off of where you intended to be) and include a pause/rewind/fast forward. Mind you, at the moment the stage I'm working on is designing a lexer/parser to read both the cohdemo format (primarily to extract characters/npcs/maps/and animations with as much contextual information as possible), as well as another format which'll be the true essence of my application.


@Relentless,
Shame, that would have opened up all sorts of possibilities. Another posibility, when it loops does it re-read the file or does it just keep using the same information again? If it re-reads the file then you could do some interesting things with that, such as making it easier to position your scene (like I mentioned higher up in the post, simply shift everything a bit, you could even bind a global shortcut to try moving everything north/south/east/west/higher/lower for the next loop).

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1) I wish I could get better camera control.

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I have a few ideas about this. The two mains ones I'm thowing around are being able to pin/attach the camera to an NPC/Character then set the camera's location relative to that, defaulting to facing the character (like it works in-game). The other idea, which might be more powerful but harder to create, would be to use a setup a-kin to CAD programs, giving the user a top/side/back view of the scene (if I'm feeling daring, 3D view as well) which'd paint the locations of all the characters/NPCs and allow you to position the Camera location/orientation.

If more information was available about the in-game maps it'd also be possible to give a wire-frame view of the world allowing you to ensure you're not placing your characters in the floor/etc, but thats not something practical to do without information only the devs have access to, at least without getting mod slapped.

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2) I wish I could load up CO* characters in a program like this that would let me do closeups and such using emotes within the game.

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Well here's a question for people: Does CoX load up the entire demo file at load time and read from an in-memory copy, or does CoX only read the current line + a small buffer ahead? If the latter, and Widow's explicit file-locking doesn't get in the way, it might be possible to sort of control CoX in real-time (well, with a large enough delay to always give CoX enough data so it never thinks it finished the file). This is kind of a far fetched idea that isn't likely to work, though.

Theres probably many ways to simplify just viewing emotes with a character, but I'm not sure if my program will go close to as far as you want in this case.

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3) I wish I could take a scene, place characters within it and then move the camera around to record emotes so I could add dialogue later.

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Unless my far-fetched idea from before works, you'd need to say what you wanted to happen before you started the demo at the very least.

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The size of demos doesn't bother me a bit. Heck, they are tiny compared to AVI files! Though huge ones can sure bog my demo edit program down badly.

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I wasn't meaning the actual size on disk, I was more so meaning that they're incredibly verbose and hard to deal with without using a special program.

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what I can't stand is getting positions right in my demos because there is really no other way to check to see if you are correct then loading the demo which takes forever

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By this do you mean getting two characters/objects the correct distance away + orientation for, say, an animation (like an attack) to look correct? Having the camera looking at the correct location? Having the scene take place in the corrent spot (say, having the scene taking place in the fight club circle in Siren's Call without having to do a massive amount of work manually positioning everything)? Pretty much all of these are things I should be easily solvable with the right tools and the right information available in a way that the tools can easily access and manipulate.

The program I'm writing I believe will eventually be able to alleviate these problems as well as lots of others (like the overwhelming size of demo files) while still using the currently existing system as a foundation.

So, recently I've gained a renewed interest in demo editing and have done a decent amount of researching. A few days ago I started a little project (totally sekret until it gets slightly useful ) that I think might solve (or at least help with) some of the largest challenges/annoyances about the Demo System, namely that the files get massive very quickly and require a massive amount of tedious work.

But since I'm not an expert at working with Demo files, I'm wondering if I might be creating a solution in search of a problem... so what does the demo editing community, those that find demos far too daunting of a task to attempt to attempt, etc think are the problems with the Demo system? Are my vague points on the right track? Or am I just an crazy loon that shouldn't talk about things I know little about? (oh wait, this is the internet, I'm required to talk about things I know nothing about as if I was an expert )