je_saist

Because when I say QT most people think CELL PHONES.

Case in point, when Valve redid the Steam user-interface, their marketers explicitly stated that the client rendering engine, you know, the pretty pictures that you click on, the text overlays, and everything else that made up the actual USER INTERFACE, was built through Webkit. Why? It was the most visible of the tools used, and the one the players would ultimately interact with the most. Users, as a general rule of thumb, don't directly interact with the code components that run xdelta and patch the game code in.

So what?

Am I supposed to just sit there and take what's dished out to me and not say anything? Am I just supposed to take table scraps as they fall to the floor and be content with the scraps?

Or am I supposed to stand up and kick collective NCSoft's rear end over missed marketing opportunities to existing clients, missed opportunities to expand their market to future clients, or missed opportunities to grow new markets to potential existing clients?

I'm going to stand up and Shout.

I am not going to go away. I will not be bribed. I will not be bought off. I am not going to be content with scraps dropped my way.

I'm fed up with the collective "main" publishers kow-towing to Microsoft and keeping Linux support as a back-room deal, as an off-the-record transaction, as bleeding table scrap dropped to hungry pups. And I don't particularly care if I'm the only one shouting. Most of the main publishers, as a general rule of thumb, have been bamboozeled by Microsoft's marketing machine that there are no Linux gamers; that Linux users don't pay for software; that Linux users are pirates; and so on and so forth. For the most part, their clientele (us) isn't willing to stand up and correct those falsehoods.

Let me put it this way. You want to see a PR rep eyes go wide white? Stop asking if they intend to produce a Linux client.

Start asking when the street date is.

Then when they say there isn't one, get up and leave the room saying they aren't worth your time. That gets their attention in a heartbeat. When the shock hits that they just lost a sale, that's when things start to change.

I'm pretty sure the policy set by Castle / Synapse / Sunstorm was to balance sets against Single Origin performance... not against IO performance. I do not get the impression that Black Scorpion is the type to radically change things that are largely working as intended.

To be clear, I don't know for a fact that the cohupdater.exe program is doing an AoT-Compile.

As far as .NET goes... well. It's a Microsoft API. In and of itself this is neither good nor bad. There are coders who will laugh at it and deride anything created with it. There are coders who value it as a day to day utility and for a paycheck.

The real problem(s) are in what it does. Wikipedia actually has a fairly good run-down of the practical problems associated with .NET: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Criticism

Another problem, and one not addressed by Wikipedia, is that the CLI and C# are covered by various software patents. These patents basically form a minefield for developers trying to implement .NET compatibility. While Microsoft offers licensing of these patents under a Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND)arrangement, what comprises RAND has never been fully defined. It's a subject that gets brought up on a regular basis, like this post on the Debian Mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-l.../msg40136.html

If .NET was the only tool-kit available for what it does, licensing issues and patents wouldn't really be a big issue. However, it isn't. Toolkits like QT and Java will pretty much do everything that .NET does.

From my direct experience, Aion, Tabula Rasa, Lineage II, Dungeon Runners, and eXteel all required the launcher be installed. They also required to be updated through the launcher, and would run the launcher in the background even if the user hadn't directly started the launcher.

CoH has been relatively unique in the NCSoft games I've played in that it has a separate launcher from the native NCSoft launcher.

Doh, completely forgot to address this question.

.NET applications generally don't work on *nix type systems such as Apple OSX (darwin BSD) or Linux (linux kernel). .NET compatibility can be achieved through Attachmate Mono, but well, Mono lags behind .NET versions and may or may not be binary compatible.

CoH continu(ed) to use their own loader since it was compatible with the Transgaming Cedega / Cider Tech.

At the risk of driving a threadjack, I started a (semi)-new thread over in the Suggestions forum: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=249599

My experience with the NCSoft launcher has been primarily through the NCSoft games Aion, Tabula Rasa, eXteel, Dungeon Runners, and Lineage II. The launcher has earned a reputation as bloatware, largely due to the launchers reliance on .NET. Now, patching the games I listed was not as processor intensive as CoH's patching.

That being said, if I understand how the CoH patcher works, it essentially is both pre-compiling new data, and re-compiling existing data in the existing .pigg files. The conceptual idea, if I'm right, is that the game saves performance with an Ahead-of-time compiler.

Ergo, I'm not sure what a new patcher would eliminate the performance impact if the patcher is indeed performing ahead-of-time compiling. There are other techniques developers can take for system responsiveness though. Case in point, Cedega patching CoH is nowhere near as system laggy with either one of these kernel techniques in place: http://blog.christophersmart.com/201...lines-of-bash/

What I do know, is that although the patcher has been updated, it still leverages the Composite UI Application Block per the licensing agreements.

However, some of the more resource intensive components seem to have been replaced in the version I'm looking at, which is listed as 1.5.23.3

I think the best way to answer this is to point to this thread that I started in April 2010: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=216429

Mod05 would probably get a little upset if I bumped it though... and trust me... I seriously considered bumping it.

Then if you don't mind me asking.

Why are you two still subscribers?

If you agree with TheJazMan said, it sounds like you two would be better off finding a different game to go play.

Or to use the CoH approach and launch with lower than intended maximum level. Gives your content guys time and space to breath, and lets you seed the game with medium level players.

The problem with an intentional raising of the level cap for purposes of seeding the game world world is that it can signals to casual players that the level cap will continue to be raised in future updates.

Oh Hell No.

The last time I installed the NCSoft Launcher was with Tabula Rasa, and it was a pile of .NET excrement.

First: did anybody at Massively actually do anything with DCUO besides look at pretty screenshots?

Second: what's the third super-hero themed MMO that Massively is thinking of? Or is just poor wording on their part and City of Heroes is supposed to be the "third" game?

Third: why didn't Melissa call them on the gaffs and ask how she was supposed to take those questions seriously when Massively obviously didn't care.

So I sit corrected.

Some powers do include animations times in damage calc's.

Other's don't.

The PM'er also suggested that maybe this was something to clonk Black Scorpion and Synapse on.

Well, that's kinda of what I'm asking. I haven't seen anything to suggest that animation time is not a factor to the devs when they decide how much damage a power should do.

I have seen posts suggesting that animation, which is part of the attack time, which is used to balance how much damage a power should do.

I have seen the term baked in used to describe the powers animation and draw stat, in the context of being used as part of the damage calculation.

If I've missed a post from some dev somewhere sayin that yes, powers were balanced for damage without including attack time, animation, or anything else, fine... That just doesn't mesh with that I've heard and see posted before.

there still somethings you can do from that point.

Uninstall the entire CoH installation.

Then defrag the hard drive.

Reinstall the CoH installation.

If it's a corrupted CoH file, that "should" fix the problem.

Huh?

Text string baked in: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/digest/ind...y=1&european=1

Text string animation: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/digest/ind...y=1&european=1

Text string baked animation: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/digest/ind...y=1&european=1

Text string baked in animation time: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/digest/ind...y=1&european=1

According to Bab's in these sources here: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/digest/ind...1&post=8704019

I'm not aware of any particular post from Castle, Sunstorm, Synapse, or Black Scorpion that this has changed?

The subject has come up several times before.

The short answer is Not Soon(tm).

The long answer is that Pet classes, such as Phantom Army, utilize what is referred to as a costume overlay tech. During the Issue 16 release process the developers stated that power customization options for Pool Powers, Epic Pool Powers, Patron Pool Powers, and Costume Overlays required more Processing Engine and User-interface work that would not be available until after Going Rogue launched.

We know that the power customization system took over 2 years to put together, and was one of the first projects Paragon Studios started on after the buyout from NCSoft. While the work needed to be done to expose the other systems to the players should, on paper, not take as long, it still is going to be a lengthy development cycle. The earliest a development cycle to implement the customization options would have begun would have been August 18th, 2010.

Assuming that Paragon Studios did assign artwork resources, programming resources, and user-interface resources to finishing up power customization for those aforementioned areas, I don't think those upgrades are something that can be done in a 6 month development cycle. I would be more likely to believe a 10month or a 12month development cycle.

Assuming then that Paragon Studios has resources dedicated to expanding the costume options, I wouldn't expect to see any progress news until June or July of this year (2011).

other than normal conflicts and problems with the Nvidia drivers? I really don't know what to tell you.

So, let's start from the side of potential graphics problems then.

Go download the Heaven 2.1 benchmark: http://unigine.com/download/

Run the benchmark under both the OpenGL and the DirectX 9 modes.

If you get graphical errors, or if the OpenGL mode is drastically slower than the DX9 mode, then the problem is going to be your drivers / graphics card.