New efforts!

[Darkwave]

I agree completely, but if they added this level of character creator capability, I would find a way to live with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TP4L1vHfpk

Wow. That is something else! That crossed with CoX's CC would be mind blowing.

[Power Gamer]

Wow. That is something else! That crossed with CoX's CC would be mind blowing.

OH NOO! MY GRAPHICS CARD!
OH NOO! MY WALLET!

*gumble* *grumble*

Ok, let's get this over with. Here's my entire bank account. 

[Kaos Arcanna]

The only thing about directly porting COH into Unreal I can think of is there are certain things you can do in Unreal you can't do in COH's engine. Pick up objects for instance.

I'd hope that COH2 would have that as a feature of some kind with super strong characters not being just limited to picking up a non existent rock but being able to throw a truck or car at a baddie too.


I'd think in COH that would either not work or the thrown objects would very small amounts of damage assigned to them.

[Felderburg]

We had 2 distinct "paths" in the original game (Paragon City/Rogue Isles) and could do a chunk of the game starting in Praetoria, which might have eventually had a full 1-50 path.

There were many more people in one of those paths than the other two.  It was more difficult to find groups for CoV than CoH side, and I remember the Praet zones being kind of ghost-towns after the initial rush wore off.

That's what I'm concerned about.  There will be more popular "paths" for one reason or another, and people who wind up on the less popular paths will end up with poor impressions of the game.

I was thinking of that as I typed, but I wasn't sure where to go with it. This makes sense. Perhaps if the new tutorial, that allows you to go hero or villain, had been in place from the beginning, things would have been different.

I wouldn't make anything based on breaking bad .  If something was to take place in Albuquerque, make it an original plot.  Honestly, I'd rather more than one city for a game to take place in.  Paragon city got old after a while sometimes.  On the other hand, I hate it when I have no water in an environment, to.  I kind of do, it gets old.  I actually live in Albuquerque so if anything, please at least also include the Rio Grande if you do have Albuquerque as a game setting.  It's a beautiful river and there is a lot of life around it here.  I actually live close enough and I can tell you it's like a small oasis/jungle here.  Surrounded by desert, yes, but there is more to deserts than just rock, sand and sagebrush.

I live in Albuquerque as well, I just wanted a way to work it in to my post in a way the general public would recognize.



Also, setting the entire game in the past would be a terrible idea, for a CoH2, in my opinion. Let us have that for certain missions or for other types of games, but I don't know that I would want to have the whole game set in the past.

[DarkCurrent]

when people talk about porting from cryptic's engine to unreal 4, is it as 'simple' as file conversion for say .rtf to .doc?  That sounds way to easy.

I'm envisioning that nothing would direct port from the old to a new engine or is that too extreme the other way?

What would be directly portable vs. needing to be recoded?

[Mistress Urd]

In tabletop rpgs I've rarely found prequels set in recent or well-established time periods to be as fun, and honestly I'm not to fond of it in movies either. There is to strong a sense that the events are irrelevant in the marching scheme of history unless you are talking about a separate timeline. Wars will go the same way, the same organizations will rise and fall, no npc established as in the future can be harmed (at least not long term, or outside the wounds they have in the future), and even if you save the world a dozen times nobody will remember your name.

Yeah, I see your point, I wasn't very excited about the young Indiana Jones TV show because they can't put him in a dangerous situation without generating a *yawn* (oh come on, we know he won't die)

[Wyrm]

People bring in more people. So, since teaming is attractive to many players people went where it was easier to team. CoV side wasn't nearly as popular after the 1st year but I really welcomed Going Rogue as it allowed me to get teams with my um "Rogues" which was the most common status of my Villains.

Precisely my worry - that there will be a path of least resistance and people will go where people have gone.  All of which Felderburg just quoted (that "new reply" notification saved me from redundancy!) so I won't reiterate.

My initial read of what I was responding to was probably more narrow than what was intended, since I was thinking, "Wait, (x) number of cities, each with its own linear 1-50 progression?"  I don't think that was the intent, but to have the kind of multi-branching set of options we had in Paragon City for multiple different cities would take a ton of development work.  It's hard for me at least to appreciate in hindsight how much difference all those years of content additions made, but when I play through other games that are earlier in their lifespan, then start to play through them again (I'm looking at you, Tera...) and go, "Man, I did all this exact same stuff..." I really appreciate how many options City had for leveling.

It might be possible to just have "open" side swapping so you can go where the teams are without the side swapping quests. Generally, I just leveled my Villains to 20 then go rogue, then do the patron arc at 40 then go full hero or stay rogue.

Having the city-arcs be ones that you could easily move between would be a huge boon.  Again, I was reacting to a much narrower interpretation of the idea of a "path" than what I think Felderburg intended.

That all being said, Paragon City is "home".  If they move it elsewhere, my reaction changes from "auto-subscribe" to, "Well, let me see if it still feels right." 

[Super Firebug]

The only thing about directly porting COH into Unreal I can think of is there are certain things you can do in Unreal you can't do in COH's engine. Pick up objects for instance.

I'd hope that COH2 would have that as a feature of some kind with super strong characters not being just limited to picking up a non existent rock but being able to throw a truck or car at a baddie too.


I'd think in COH that would either not work or the thrown objects would very small amounts of damage assigned to them.

There was a period of a couple of months when I stopped playing CoX because I was tired of "go to point A; beat people up; go to point B; beat people up; etc." I wanted something different, more like helping citizens. Being able to pick up objects would enable missions such as digging survivors out of a collapsed building, which would be great.

[The Fifth Horseman]

when people talk about porting from cryptic's engine to unreal 4, is it as 'simple' as file conversion for say .rtf to .doc?  That sounds way to easy.

No, completely different engines.

I'm envisioning that nothing would direct port from the old to a new engine or is that too extreme the other way?

Next to nothing.

What would be directly portable vs. needing to be recoded?

Depends on whether or not the new owners even get the source code from NCSoft. And even then, the old engine has been commented on by Paragon developers as being cruel and unusual to the extreme, not to mention filled with black boxes.

[sindyr]

when people talk about porting from cryptic's engine to unreal 4, is it as 'simple' as file conversion for say .rtf to .doc?  That sounds way to easy.

I'm envisioning that nothing would direct port from the old to a new engine or is that too extreme the other way?

What would be directly portable vs. needing to be recoded?

Sounds like almost everything would have to be recoded, however, we *would* have two sets of assets that would be an anchor to the process:

Firstly, I would imagine we would have the animations, art assets and other graphic stuff. We'd want to create new ones, but at least we would have that to start with.

But most importantly, no matter how much recoding is needed, the one thing we have with pretty high certainty is a precisely quantified understanding of each mechanic's rules - exemplified by (though not limited to) Redtomax's amazing City of Data:

http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/

With that, precisely recreating the CoX mechanics should be VERY doable. So long as we don't alter or mess with them in the process.

[Serpine]

What would be directly portable vs. needing to be recoded?

My theory is that with some effort things that amount to pure data could probably be extractable, but not the code of how that data is interpreted. And even if the code could be extracted it would likely be totally useless in a new engine so there is no worth to extracting it. As to what can likely be and worthwhile to dredge out:

 * You could probably identify where the dialogue in quests is stored and dump that out, and maybe even figure what flags determine quest behavior (i.e. if hex 142 is in the 15th position after the quest record starts, it is a "kill all"). This however would be useless without a  means to load the selected map, populate it with npcs, check quest conditions, etc. A lot of this info is also available on more up to date wikis, so gathering it up might be quicker to simply cut and paste from those.

 * You may be able to locate the places that show the accuracy/damage/etc of particular powers, but all that information would not actually *be* the powers. It would then have to be fed into the equivalent powers built in the new engine. More so then even the quests, thanks to offline character planners there are already decent external sources of that data so the effort might be wasted compared to just farming the planner data.

 * Likewise mesh coordinates and textures... Maybe you can extract the raw numbers, but you'd have to figure out how to get them converted to a form the new engine recognizes. I seem to recall that textures anyway could be extracted pretty readily, and there are many people that seem adept at yanking / swapping meshes from games, so this may be less of a task then gathering quest/power data, and as there is no external data source like wikis or character creators, might be where the "reverse engineering" resources actually would have the greatest benefit. Having all the baseline graphical objects to use as the initial structures when building higher resolution versions would seem a worthwhile haul...

Just my thoughts on the matter. The notion that the entire thing is a black box with nothing that can be gained from it just doesn't track with my experience with other software.

[gypsyav]

Let's please back slowly away from any content that would require you to be part of a large SG.  Huge end-game raid guilds are one of the things that I specifically appreciated CoH NOT requiring. 

Yes, there were big SGs that would go and do Hamidon raids on their own schedule.

But being able to do any of the content, incarnate included, in PUGs, was part of what made CoH so welcoming and friendly from my perspective. I'd guess I'm not the only one.

SG missions would be cool, but let's not recommend paths that will specifically exclude people who prefer smaller SGs.

As to different/multiple cities, I suppose I'd have to wait and see.  I go back to what someone (GG?) said up-thread, though.

Without the city, it's not "City of Heroes."  Going to all these different real-world cities makes it more a "Country of Heroes," and if you make that country the US, well, that decision probably has its own consequences.

I agree with Serpine, too - having multiple full 1-50 paths seems excessive.  To me, it fragments the player base in a non-desirable way, and could make finding teams even on higher-pop servers a challenge if you pick one of the "unpopular" cities.

I couldn't have put it better how I feel.

[DarkCurrent]

I'd like to see some recoding regardless of what's portable or not.  IIRC things like dmg debuff enhancements and toxic damage resistance (?) enhancement weren't possible with the original engine.  Stuff like that could be done 'right' the second time and provide additional slotting and crafting options.

[Serpine]

IIRC things like dmg debuff enhancements and toxic damage resistance (?) enhancement weren't possible with the original engine.  Stuff like that could be done 'right' the second time and provide additional slotting and crafting options.

I want a ricochet enhancement. Slotted into any single target blast it adds a chance that a small version of your attack (complete with appropriate blast animation) chains to another nearby foe, or even an ally if you are very unlucky. Of course there could have been one, I kind of loss track of the later options.

In any case the major advantage of a new engine is that if coded cleanly adding things after the fact wouldn't be as much of a dangerous chore as it apparently was as time went on. CoH often reminded me of Neocron in how changes would seem to impact seemingly unrelated things: In the latter game one time they patched their equivalent of the auction house and somehow that resulted in people's hair floating several feet above their heads. It was a running joke in my household for a while when any game had big patch "Is the hair still attached?"

[gypsyav]

Maybe it's foolish , but I consider issue 25/coh2 just one helluvan update with a new engine and character model. Maybe some content retired, some added and other parts remodeled.

 I am not ready to part with COH again when we still do not have it back.

A city can be a zone.  A zone could be a city.  I still want our moon base.

I love checking this thread over lunch and after work.

Agreed. It wouldn't be City of Heroes to me with a lot of grand changes. If it was changed too much I'd just skip CoH2 entirely and just play CoH one even if I never got any new content.

[Mistress Urd]

I think there NEEDS to be multiple 1-50 paths. One of the things that turned me away from CoV at the beginning was the lack of starting contacts - 1, then 2, eventually. The move from 10 to 1 in CoH was a BIG mistake, in my opinion.

Because playing alts is a HUGE component of CoH, it is important that the gameplay doesn't become stale. Yes, even when CoH was launched you had several initial contacts with a few common story arcs, and that got funneled in to just a few, maybe up to 2, in the 40-50 level range, but it was still enough that you didn't get bored making alts. Plus, by the time the game had matured a bit, there was enough content that if you wanted to level 1-50 multiple times, you could do it in mostly different ways.

Sorry for the out of sync posts. I have to agree with this, going from 10 to 1 contacts was not a good idea and leads to faster burnout and less incentive to "alting". It encourages PLing instead of doing the same old missions *again* There should be more goodies to running low level arcs because I think it keeps people coming back to try more stuff. Alting is good.

[Serpine]

Sorry for the out of sync posts. I have to agree with this, going from 10 to 1 contacts was not a good idea and leads to faster burnout and less incentive to "alting".

Of the original 10 contacts, I would have liked to see them provide an alternate side-storyline *strongly* tied to each origin they were supposed to be representing, split into a more dashing heroic path (for the Atlas contacts) and a more gritty style (for the Galaxy contacts). So if you were a mutant in Atlas you'd be doing quests to show how mutants can be trusted, rescuing mutants in trouble, helping some scientists working on ways to lower dangerous mutation side-effects, etc. But a mutant in Galaxy would get quests involving disrupting anti-mutant rallies using questionable means, destroying the mutant cure (which turns out to just be a poison), and capturing or even putting down a dangerous mutant for "the greater good". Meanwhile the general hero path they added near the end would be the "Yeah I'm a mutant, whatever, I just want to join Freedom Phalanx" path.

[silvers1]

I agree completely, but if they added this level of character creator capability, I would find a way to live with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TP4L1vHfpk

This level of realism, coupled with super hero costume parts... oh wow.  CoH2 would blow away all competition.  It might even
take a sizable chunk of WoW's user base.

[MWRuger]

when people talk about porting from cryptic's engine to unreal 4, is it as 'simple' as file conversion for say .rtf to .doc?  That sounds way to easy.

I'm envisioning that nothing would direct port from the old to a new engine or is that too extreme the other way?

What would be directly portable vs. needing to be recoded?

No, it isn't as easy as that. Unreal 4 would provide the base graphics and some manipulation mechanics. There are others who know more than me but my impression is that the game engine tells unreal 4 what to render, Unreal does that, but the game engine resolves all the mechanics, like powers, combat and so forth telling Unreal engine what to display.

[Mistress Urd]

Of the original 10 contacts, I would have liked to see them provide an alternate side-storyline *strongly* tied to each origin they were supposed to be representing, split into a more dashing heroic path (for the Atlas contacts) and a more gritty style (for the Galaxy contacts). So if you were a mutant in Atlas you'd be doing quests to show how mutants can be trusted, rescuing mutants in trouble, helping some scientists working on ways to lower dangerous mutation side-effects, etc. But a mutant in Galaxy would get quests involving disrupting anti-mutant rallies using questionable means, destroying the mutant cure (which turns out to just be a poison), and capturing or even putting down a dangerous mutant for "the greater good". Meanwhile the general hero path they added near the end would be the "Yeah I'm a mutant, whatever, I just want to join Freedom Phalanx" path.

Well, we had something like that with praetorian side but not origin based. I liked having some choices and seeing contacts even vanish. Having more choices and paths make things more interesting.