Quinch

Squiddies?

This isn't about intentional abuse, although I don't really see many people having enough personal clout to rally others to rate an arc on demand - supergroups might be exceptions to that rule, but there are already alert flags for so-called "One star bandits". It might be relatively easy to set up a flag that lights if lots of members of a single supergroup have voted identically and very differently than non-members of that same supergroup on any given arc.

[Prelude:Ranty]
As far as I can tell, and from what I gather from other players mentioning the topic, the current rating system for Mission Architect arcs is inherently flawed - not only is there no open comment space, but an anonymous rough star-based rating system is the only means of suggesting said arc to others.
[/Prelude]

The inherent problem with a unified rating system is that different players place varying degrees of importance to different aspects of an arc - some look for difficulty, others for creative enemies, others yet for story and characterization, and unless the degree of quality on each aspect of an arc is equal, each player who rates an arc will do so on the basis of their most important aspect.

Thus, what I propose is keeping the star system, but splitting it into parts - story, creativity, compatibility with canon, characters, humor and so forth each get rated separately, thus creating a much more detailed recommendation system than the current one. A player looking for an arc with a good story can search for arcs rated highly for that aspect, while a player looking for a challenge can search for arcs rated high for difficulty.

Any opinions?

So, how are they supposed to get qualified? Gotta start somewhere.

Sure, why the <bunnies!> not?

/signed

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Trapped in a donut shop with NO DONUTS.

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If there is a hell, this is it.

It might be a good idea, actually. A lot of players seem to be inherently intimidated by the prospect of leading a team, and while providing good leadership can be its own reward, I see little harm in providing incentive to put themselves into the position where they can reach the same conclusion by themselves.

CoH 2?

I thought we were already up to CoH 14.

One way to deal with difficult-to-find mobs might be to cause the player with the hunt mission to spawn them. If memory serves, outdoor mobs are spawned by the presence of a player in the general vicinity. If there is a spawn point where groups X, Y and Z can spawn, and the spawn is triggered by a player with an active "Defeat # Y" mission, the spawn will invariably consist of/contain mobs of group Y.

Is the daystar your character's mortal enemy? Is he secretly a vampire? Deathly allergic to pollen? There's an orbital deathray trained on his door?

I wouldn't mind some extra base amenities, like Wereworths' access or AE node, but having *everything* accessible from the base is a bit silly to ask.

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That said, I had to have some in-game/RPish explanation for why a hero would start helping villains beat up Sea Witch.

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Because she still hasn't fixed the ITF Zone-o-Lag?

{dives for cover}

I think we're way past CoH2, on CoH13, and with the CoH14 being released relatively soon.

...what?

Animation generator? Innnteresting - how's the interface going to look?

My complaints, off the hip;

The background colors are too muted. Too bright would detract from the content, I understand, but dark-dark-blue doesn't really work for me either.

The constantly cycling trial window is annoying - it might need to be noticeable, but it has all the appeal of a flashing banner ad.

The side menu is nice, in terms of functionality, but again, I don't care for the color choice.

Okay, a quick pictorial...

1} Make a shortcut to the executable. To do so, right-click on the executable and drag it a little bit, release, then select "create shortcuts here."

Picture 1

2} Left-click and drag a demofile onto the newly-created shortcut.

Picture 2

3} This will go through the demofile for costume data and extract the costume worn by every player into a separate file.

Picture 3

For drag-and-drop handling of the costume replacer, you need to tweak the shortcut a little.

1} See #1 above

2} Right-click on the shortcut and select "properties"

Picture 4


3} In the "target" field type in the file name of the costume file you want to replace everyone in the demofile with.

Picture 5

4} Drag and drop the demo file into the shortcut like with the extractor.

Vorac, that message shows up when you run the file without any parameters - you need to tell the program which demofile to process. You can streamline the process by making a shortcut to the executable and simply drag-and-dropping demo files onto the shortcut.

Oh, and for a quickie demonstration...

Soloing Hami... sort of.

I knocked together a couple of quick scripts for costume replacing - you can download them both at http://www.fileden.com/files/2006/11...6/costumes.rar

Costume extractor searches the demofile for costume data and extracts the first costume worn by every player character recorded into a file named $charactername-costume.txt. Just run it with the demo filename in the parameter and it'll run. I.e. "costume_extractor.exe MyDemo.cohdemo" will dump all the costumes worn by players in that demo into their respective files.

Costume replacer replaces the costumes worn by all players in the demo with the one specified and saves it to a separate file, named as the original file with "-uniform" suffix. That one is ran with two parameters, the costume file {from the extractor} and the demo file. So the usage would be "costume_replacer.exe MyHero-costume.txt MyDemo.cohdemo". That would save a demofile with everyone's costumes changed to that of MyHero.

So if you want to watch that Rikti Muthaship Raid demo with everyone replaced with you, give it a spin and lemme know how the thing works under a live-fire test.

Not necessarily - the decimal values in my demos seem to vary between six and nine digits. Here's a file with all the EntRagdoll values from all the recorded demos I have, in case you need reference data.

I'm not sure if it is timing... haven't had time to play around lately. All I do know at the moment is that the second HAS to be greater than the first. If they're equal or lower, nothing happens.

That's because the values are shown in the hexadecimal number system, rather than the decimal one. Hexadecimal uses sixteen digits {0 through 9 followed by A through F}, rather than just ten we use in everyday life, so the numbers Leandro showed are simply decimal values translated into hexadecimal.

Hey, good catch. I was futzing around trying to figure out why the ragdoll looks *almost* straight at 500 and looking up trigonometry values. Shoulda occurred to me it was a binary value. Anyway, good catch... now all we need to figure out exactly is how the first two numbers tie in.

By the way, from what I can tell, the "range" is infinite... you can input any number and the joint will bend. The bigger question is which values represent the angles which human joints can conceivably bend at, and more importantly, how do those values translate into angles, and relative to what? In any case, I'll do a bit more testing with Ms. Liberty, try to get some reference data... maybe I'll get lucky.

Well, if there's a video camera model somewhere in the game, you could theoretically do the motions of the ragdoll and move the model around... though that's a very big "if" and "theoretically", not to mention it would take ridiculous amounts of positional fine-tuning.

Well, the screenies wouldn't show much to look at, but here's a demofile demonstrating the movement of all limbs along each axis.