Leandro

I can't call this a "favorite" glitch, but it's certainly something I found infurating: the broken map at the end of the LGTF. At one point, someone at QA told me that it had "always" been broken, which prompted me to make a video to prove that it worked fine at launch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOPInTuOJ2I

Never got a reply after that, unfortunately.

Thanks! That's perfect.

Request for someone who's better at making costumes than me: remake the CuppaJo costume as seen here: http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/1942/frontyp5.jpg http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/2719/backaw2.jpg and email it to me, please. leandrotlz@gmail.com.

Post if you're going to do it so other people don't. Thanks!

Figures: I threw that picture together in 2 minutes to show that you could use any bitmap, rendered it in low quality just to get it out there, and THAT is the picture everybody likes.

Something that goes without saying, but that I figured a picture would express better.

You are not limited to filling in shapes found in the game. You can draw anything.

For example...

That's from an actual gathering organized by a community manager. The white fairy in the front is Niviene, I think. I am the blue dude flying with rocket boots in the middle right. It was most likely released as part of a press kit.

This post used to contain the scripts, but I made a new thread with a video tutorial, so go here for the new and improved script, now a lot more user friendly:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=297268

If you use this thing to populate your demo, some attribution in the credits would be nice. "Freaking huge mobs generated by some crazy scripts by Leandro" would work.

After I posted that last video with the 3000 heroes, two things became apparent to me. One, placing characters in a straight line looks unnatural and cruddy. Two, it's freaking hard and I never want to do it again.

Thus, I made tools to make it easier and better looking.

My first script takes a demo, locates the player ID, and creates an image out of everywhere he moves. This means I can take my hero to the top of City Hall, start a demo recording, walk around the perimeter, and then I start my script and it draws this:



That's the roof of City Hall. After cleaning up for a few seconds in a graphics editor, I have this:



My second script takes an image like that one, and spawns random entities wherever red is above 64. The density (how close characters will be together) is customizable. After running it, it creates the demo and also this log image:



Each black dot is a spawned player, and the white space around them is the buffer. Here's what the demo looks like, straight out of this second script:



Placing a crowd in such an irregularly-shaped place would be a pain in the neck to do via math-based placement, and it would be horrifically tedious to do manually. But this script did it in seconds. Also, notice the way the characters are facing: each shade of red corresponds to a different facing. This allows you to "paint" areas to spawn characters in, and they'll face towards a place that makes sense.

Now, what happens if you want to spawn them in a place that is not flat, like stairs? This is what my first script generated after walking all over Atlas Park:



The different shades of green are elevation. The brighter the green, the higher the place is. To add the spawning information, just add red to the existing green. So if green = 160, and you want to add red = 111, the final color is r=111,g=160,b=0. Easy! Even easier if you have a graphics program that supports layers: create a new layer, and just paint the red parts in it. Then set the blend mode to Screen.

This is what it looks like after I painted the stairs heading up to City Wall:



The central area I filled in, but since there's no red, nothing will spawn there. After the second script:



And the demo output:



That looks a lot more natural than the crowd I animated on Saturday! But still, it looks off. People usually gather in groups, with some buffer space between them. They are facing all over the place. Some of them are flying. What to do?

Well, noise is the answer:



I added two layers. In one, I added pockets of red noise, and that's the only place where characters will spawn. The noise went from r=64 to r=255, so people would spawn facing different directions.

In the second layer, I added a flat high level of blue=138. The blue channel can be used to make the script do something special to the mobs tagged with it; in this case, they'll be playing the Flight animation. All the pixels that have this level of blue ALSO have a higher level of green; this will make them float slightly higher than the grounded characters.

After the script runs:



And the demo output:



Now that's a nice and natural-looking crowd!

"Hey, Doctor Leo."

"What's up? Why the long face?"

"Well, you see, I have some rather bad news. You know how Rularuu devours entire dimensions? Something like that is going to happen to Paragon City in November 30th."

"Crap! Okay, I've punched aspects of Rularuu in the face before, just let me get a team ready and we'll get right on it. TURG!"

"No, Doc, sit down. This is worse than Rularuu. It's not a villain or a god doing it. The universe itself will... run out of energy, to put it some way."

"Energy? What are you talking about?"

"Well, imagine the whole universe is a program, okay, running on a computer. Then, on November 30th, they shut off the computer. What can a program inside the computer do about it?"

"Punch whoever is shutting down the computer in the face!"

"Yeah, a program inside the computer can't do that. They don't have physical form where the computer is. Their entire world is inside that computer."

"So... the thing that is going to suck the energy out of our universe... it exists in a higher dimension, and we can't reach it?"

"Basically, yes. They live in a dimension above Paragon City, above the Origin Point that created all the realities that Portal Corp has catalogued. All our realities are feed by energy that emanates from their dimension, and on November 30th, that energy will dissipate. All our realities will... well, not cease to exist. But time will freeze."

"Okay, so how do we kick time back into starting again?"

"We don't know yet. We have broadcasted a message to the entities in the higher dimension, but it's unlikely they acknowledge it. After all, we don't exist in their reality. It'd be like noticing that a bunch of ants, inside their ant colony underground, are waving protest signs. "

"Well this bites. Is there anything I can do?"

"I'm afraid not. We have a backup plan, though..."

"Oh?"

"There's some Omega level incarnates that have the power to shape new worlds. Codewalker, Guy Perfect, and others."

"Never heard of 'em."

"They don't operate at full power in Paragon City, and in fact they use multiple alter egos. Their level of power is so immense that they can't exercise it fully. But since they learned about this, they've been working on shaping a new Origin Point, with its own set of realities."

"That is... dang. That's more power than Rularuu ever had. They'll just recreate our entire multiverse?"

"Not quite... they can create the new Origin Point, with its set of realities, with all its worlds and cities... but they can't create life. Those worlds would be empty of people."

"Well, that... would totally suck. I assume the plan is to move us to that new reality, and populate it?"

"Right. They have created a giant quantum scanner, the Sentinel Extractor. It's already scanned many heroes, including you. Their essence has been stored in a higher plane, safe from the energy drain. When the new reality is ready, you'll reappear in it. You might not even notice anything changed."

"Except for a whole lot of people missing."

"Yes. They'll place us in the new reality as soon as its ready, and they'll deal with the details later."

"The details of creating a new Origin Point for a Multiverse with all its realities and worlds. Promise me I won't wake up with my eyes on my butt."

"Don't worry; the people themselves will be fine. There'll be a lot less of them, but you'll be fine. The supergroup bases, though... most of them are located in secret places, and so they will not be recreated."

"All that damn rent paid for nothing. But I guess Power of Illusion can rebuild."

"You might find there's no crime on the streets at all and the city is only populated with heroes talking to each other."

"Okay, now you're yanking my chain. Does Ms. Liberty serve margaritas in that Utopia world you're thinking about?"

"Maybe! I'll ask Codewalker about it. But no, I'm serious. Recreating an entire multiverse of realities takes time. They won't bother populating it with all the villain groups until they know it can take it."

"So, I'm getting a vacation from crimefighting starting November 30th, then?"

"Pretty much. November 30th will come, and then... well, I don't know when. But at some point, you'll be in a new reality, and I'll let you know how much time it passed since ours ceased to exist."

"Okay. Well, November 30th is still a ways away, and I promised Medi-Kat to help her with a Task Force tonight. So, I better go get ready."

"Sounds good. Keep fighting the good fight, Doc!"

"Will do!"

Just to clarify (because some people have assumed it), the characters from this thread were NOT used by the 3000-hero flyby. Those characters were captured from the Rally only. I have been a bit swamped with other #SaveCOH related projects and I haven't gotten around to doing what I planned with your characters, but rest assured, I'll get to it after I finish a few other things that are more important for the #SaveCOH campaign right now.

One of my many projects during the years was a blog where I could put all City of Heroes videos together: http://cohtube.blogspot.com/

I stopped updating it a long time ago because it was such a chore to hunt down videos, but you might find a few more you'll like in there.

A few years ago, when you could still fail Hamidon raids via yellow bloom, a friend of mine was leaving the game because he was being deployed to Iraq, and commented he'd never seen a yellow bloom.

So, that night, I was the griefer who pulled a dozen giant monsters to the goo during hold phase until the whole thing failed.

He loved it, but I felt bad afterwards because some people saw me and accused me on broadcast, and a lot of other people came to my defense saying "Leandro would never do something like that!"...

Edit: also, before we were able to save character costumes from the costume creator, I made a program that claimed to do that -- but instead played a certain Rick Astley video. Justified in that it was released on April 1st

Thor, I noticed the slow framerate you have in several scenes. In order to make the shot play at full 30 frames per second, what you have to do is make a demo, then run:

cityofheroes.exe -demoplay (filename) -demofps 30 -demodump -disable2d

That will create a folder called "screens" under your demo folder where every frame rendered (at full 30fps) is a JPG file. Then, you grab VirtualDub and open the first image file with it; it will automatically grab the following ones and make a video out of it.

By default, VirtualDub plays back at 10fps; to fix that, go to Video/Frame Rate and select the second ratio button: "Change frame rate to:" and enter 30 fps (or 29.97 if your encoder is NTSC based).

Then File/Save As Avi, and you'll have a pretty large (because it saves uncompressed) video running at smooth 30fps (you can make it compress the video by going to Video/Compression, but since you're going to be putting it in a video editor afterwards, there's not much point).

Also, looks like that shot of 3000 heroes is becoming stock footage really fast...