je_saist

I don't know. give me a moment to copy my grav to test and I'll see what changes when I put intangibilities in the power.

I took a screen-shot of it back then. I'm still digging around for that screen-shot since it was so far out of range. The lack of any patch notes on it probably indicates it was a text error though.

Could go with this. The Singularity would also need to be modified with the new lift.

This... I wouldn't do. Propel is too valuable as the primary single target damage for gravity. I'd be in favor of swapping Wormhole and Dimension shift though, putting dimension shift out at 26 and Wormhole at 12.

I do have another idea though, though that's in subsection D.

Animation time is fine... I think if gravity worked like I expected it to work, the KB wouldn't be an issue.

I went in and started to write down all of the soft-control effects of other power sets. The confuse durations, the slow durations, the defense debuffs, the flat stun rates... And well... As I make out, Gravity is the only set without any real secondary debuffs.

For direct status effects Gravity gets Dimension Shift and Wormhole... Dimension Shift turns mobs off... Wormhole throws them away with a stun. I also know why Gravity is so poor on the secondary fronts. Way back when the game started many powers had unique damage types. If I remember correctly Gravity's was Crushing Damage and very few, if any, enemies in the game had resistance to Crushing Damage. However, when these special damage types were done away with, nobody looked at Gravity to re-balance the set to be in line with other control types. Somewhat like Fire Aura, the subject just never seems to come up internally.

So, I'm in favor of a real soft-control effect to replace Dimension Shift. My proposal is a gravity ball... a cross between Singularity, Phantom Army, and Omega Maneuver.

The power works somewhat like Omega Maneuver. The Gravity Controller summons a little ball of gravitic energy that uses Taunt to lure foes in. Like Phantom Army, the gravitic ball can't be hurt... It also does a minor amount of damage. Unlike Omega Maneuver, it doesn't blow up on despawn. It just flickers out.

To, to make the Gravity Ball really stand out... lets pick a debuff. Something that isn't in any of the other primary contol sets. Debuff Resistance. Okay, so what's our logical story point for this? Well, hows this sound: You summon forth a gravitic well, a vortex of energy. Enemies are drawn towards the well, and those that get too close feel their powers being stripped away.

I'm honestly not sure how to respond. I think if I understand what you're asking... it's like this:

Will there be an overhaul of how powers and chat are presented?

or

Wiill there be continuing incremental upgrades of the UI system in place?

I think we are seeing Paragon Studio's responding to long-time playerbase requests, and refinements to the UI itself. I expect that trend will continue.

I'm edging into territory where I may or may not be technically correct.

There's.. .well... several assumptions being made in the thread so far.

One of the assumptions being made in this thread by me is that the engine depends heavily on texture rendering rather than shader rendering. I don't know if this is actually true or not. I don't actually know how much of the game engine's graphics code is based against OpenGL 1.4. I presume based on the timing and the patch notes that a large quantity of the underlying graphics engine is built against a graphics standard that's well over 5 years old. If the engine works as I think it does, I think there is performance headroom to be gained out of re-writing the graphics engine to leverage shaders where textures are being used.

***

Another assumption being made is that an upgrade to the graphics engine automatically means lower performance across the board to handle higher-resolution textures, higher resolution particle affects, additional particle affects, better lighting and so on. Well, if there is shader headroom to be had in the engine, some of these effects could be enabled without any sacrifice of frames per second performance.

In other words, you could actually gain a performance advantage on Shader-enabled hardware.

You would only loose performance... or support... if you're using a graphics card that's reliant on texture rendering and has poor to no real shader support. Well, lets be honest, if you're using a Radeon 8500 or one of it's spin-offs, or your using an Nvidia Geforce FX card or one of it's predecessors... you need to bite the bullet and upgrade. Not just because your hardware is ancient, but because neither AMD nor Nvidia are supporting these cards anymore.

The big question here is the Intel Graphics. The Intel Extreme Graphics are most certainly out of the question. That's actually where I got that cute de-texturized picture from. As of Larrabee, Intel chips are going to be a non-factor for graphics support. The question is the stuff they've shipped between Extreme Graphics and Larrabee. Most of the Intel graphics hardware does advanced shader functions on the processor anyways.

***

This raises another assumption that the current graphics client has to be discontinued. The empirical case in point here is Eve Online. They recently dropped their Shader Model 1 graphics client completely, and only support Shader Model 2 and onwards.

However, if we go back a few years, we'll find games like Half Life and Unreal Tournament that shipped game clients with two different GPU rendering paths... DirectX and OpenGL. Technically, it is possible to select two different rendering engines for a single binary game. Nobody does it anymore for one good reason: development time and cost.

NCSoft might be in the position where they can afford to finance Paragon Studios having a small team to bug-fix and maintain the current graphics engine for those that refuse to upgrade, while having a majority of the development team focus on building a better and more interactive interface.

***

That of course leads to the assumption that at some point NCSoft will have to tell Paragon Studios to drop the older engine and just focus on the main development branch.

***

As I see it, Paragon Studios does have an issue on their hands. A lot of the stuff players want... animated hair, animated tails, rag-doll based figures and clothing... is going to require a significant amount of rework to the underside of the engine. It'd make BaB's and Jay's lives a heck of a lot easier if clothing would naturally overlap on a physics basis rather than on a hardcoded geometry animation tied to skeletal frames.

In order to deliver what the player base wants, at some point users are going to have to upgrade... whether or not they like it.

Dark Days... Dark Days indeed.

don't forget the animated tails!

I had to go dig this one up: http://developer.download.nvidia.com...n_GDC_2009.pdf

Reportedly, OpenGL is structured in such a way that graphics code written against 2.x / 3.x is largely interchangeable. Theoretically, anything written against the OpenGL 2.x instruction set should work under an OpenGL 3.x driver... and code written against the 3.x instruction set should have fallbacks to 2.x instruction set paths.

It's my opinion that under the current game engine, some of the available shader power isn't being utilized, and that a re-write or upgrade of the engine against the OpenGL 2.x or 3.x branches could net performance gains across the typical hardware in use. I really can't imagine that many players still using GeforceFX's to play the game... much less Radeon 8500's or Intel Integrated graphics. I could be wrong though.

However, these are just rumors until a developers responds confirming or denying them.

***

heh. On a tangential note, anybody else noticed just how quickly a competitor to CoH dropped off the sales charts... while a Competitor to World of Warcraft has steadily remained in the sales columns for both retail and digital downloads? ( http://kotaku.com/5370618/pc-sales-charts-aion-aion )

I can tell you that they do detect drivers.

For a long time users of Cedega would get errors on both nvidia-glx and fglrx that they were using an unsupported driver set. Shortly after NCSoft gave Transgaming access to the source code of the game, the driver errors went away for fglrx, although they still remain for nvidia-glx.

So yes, the game does report some system information, and it probably is possible for Paragon Studios to have an idea what hardware platforms players are using.

better change that to know your cool before he logs in and puts all of your avatars in pink-tutu's.

does this mean that there will be efforts to add pump 4 and pump 5 resist buffs to upcoming IO sets? Or will that just get a Shut up Sai?

I've got a couple of old logitech headsets you're welcome to have.

Items of Power are gone. They aren't coming back. They've been replaced in function by Invention Origin enhancements.

Also, even at it's heyday, most SG's weren't doing base-raids. Very few supergroups could afford the prestige cost of having to completely rebuild a trashed out base, and most super-groups viewed it as a pointless exercise. One of the big problems with redeveloping base-raids is making it into a meaningful experience that all sg's can... well.. I don't want to say enjoy... tolerate? Since Items of Power supposedly won't be making a comeback outside of decorative objects, that means having to come up with a new mcguffin for players to chase after or for.

One of the devs, Positron, murmured a bit on the older forums about bringing back de-activated task forces through Ourobous. Since there are only two de-activated task forces in the entire game, A Mind in Danger and Cathedral of Pain, that's not a lot to chose from.

All insult intended, PvP in CoH is like the Titanic. It already sailed and sunk. While I'm sure several players appreciate the work Castle and others are putting into PvP play now... there's an equal or larger number of players that think all PvP zones short of Recluse's Victory should just be converted to Co-Op.

The problem is also complicated because many CoH players come to CoH because it does not have open battlegrounds like WarHammer or WoW and does put an emphasis on skill and teamwork. From a development point, copying something players are leaving other games to get away from... doesn't sound like a smart design move.

Of course, there's also the viewpoint that having exactly equivalent features might pull in more players from other games. There's probably a large number of WoW and WarHammer players that won't give CoH a shot because it doesn't have epic scale objective based PvP goals.

So let me get this straight. On one hand you insult the devs because they don't have more multi-team content, then promptly complement them because the multi-time content they do have is better than the competition?

Really. So the whole introduction of SSK, which allows teams to keep mission tracking where-ever they are in the game, and the dropping of hazard zones on hero side... are making the game more solo-friendly.

low... amount... of players? Um. Deary. Player pop varies per server and per time on server. If you think your server has a low population, you probably need to either adjust the times that you play, or you need to move to another server where there are people on at the time you play.

Also, most players miss the I8 Hamidon raid because the I9 Hamidon raid was a complete crock of ... well. I can't say that in a public place. Yes, some servers still do Hamidon raids... but let's be realistic. You get the same enhancement reward, a Hamidon Enhancement from doing Lord Recluse's Strike Force or Statesmans Task Force, a lot more inf and prestige, with only 8 players instead of zone pop-cap... and it generally takes less time to do the TF/SF's.

I think this line is what grates me the most. The way you phrase it, you seem to completely discard every single task force, strike force, and giant monster event just out of hand because they don't require hundreds of players. Teaming goes on constantly in the game.

Sounds like you need to just cancel your subscription and stop trolling.

I'm having to bite my tongue to keep from making a really smart-rear-ended remark on this. I take it you are taking the time to make the system consistent now?

I noticed this as well on the final mission. In I-15 each ambush during the fight against Romi was generally triggered when the previous ambush was defeated. The last couple of times I ran with ITF though, at least two ambush mobs spawned at once one the fight against Romi began, as evidenced by multiple surgeons spawning. Typically there is only one surgeon per mob, so when two or three surgeons are visible at the door aura'ing away, you know there are multiple mobs out.

Most of the teams I run with do not activate the ambush on the first mission, preferring to go up the backside of the mountain, and aside from a few occasional goof-ups, we don't see anything from the first ambush set.

Sooo agreed. I thought the change to Numina's last mish was random, but the last 4 times I've run it, it's been that nice BIG cave that makes more sense for a Giant Monster to be in. All it needs now is a big Door in the back so it's obviously Jurrasik's little den that you busted in the back door on.

Also: I thought I was the only one that called that 5 level disaster "layer-cake" ... Glad I'm not the only one. It's the most annoying Blue-Cave room, followed by one I just call "the toilet bowl" ... you know, where you go up a hill that's atop a large cave, over and around above the large cave, then down and across under hill top.

what's the problem with telling the team: I'm in an alternate build right now, I have x amount of minutes to go before I can switch back. Unless you're running Eden or KTF for speed the 15 minute charger ain't a deal breaker when you start a Task Force, Trial, or Strike Force. I've been on plenty of TF's where we started, then after the first mish players went and changed into their team play builds.