Paragon Chat > General
Paragon Chat FAAAQ
Codewalker:
Paragon Chat FAAAQ
(Frequently Asked and Anticipated Questions)
NOTE: This is a living document. As questions are asked, I will respond to them in the thread as well as update this post with the most pertinent ones. If a new 'anticipated' question is added, I'll also post below so people following the thread will see it without having to re-read the whole list.
What is Paragon Chat?
Paragon Chat is a software program that turns your City of Heroes client into an interactive chat and socialization platform. It allows you to design costumes, see and meet with other players in a shared virtual space, communicate through text chat as well as animated emotes, and manage a list of friends that you frequently interact with and wish to be able to see your online status.
What is Paragon Chat not?
It is not a game. It does not feature combat, power mechanics, accumulation of experience, leveling, inventory, auctions, etc.
Do I need to have City of Heroes already installed?
Yes. You'll need the Issue 24 Beta client. As the game was Free-to-Play before closure and beta access was not consistently a VIP perk, anyone who downloaded it in 2012 should have a legal copy.
What is this "XMPP" thing I keep hearing about?
eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. It's an Internet standard for instant messaging, presence notification, and other real-time communication. You may have also heard of Jabber, that's the IM platform that grew into XMPP.
I downloaded Paragon Chat! How do I log in?
Verify that your Titan Network username is acceptable for Paragon Chat by visiting the account management page. If it's acceptable, login with username@chat.cohtitan.com and your Titan Network password. If your Titan Network username has a space in it, replace with an underscore. Additionally, XMPP utilizes lowercase for usernames, even if you use case sensitivity while logging in. (Bob Dole becomes Bob_Dole to log in, and is listed as bob dole once in-game.)
Are characters that I create in Paragon Chat saved?
Yes, they are saved on your local computer in a SQLite database file that you can back up if you wish. They are not tied to the XMPP account you log into, so you can switch between servers and use your same characters.
I logged in to the server, now I'm getting the game's login screen. Why do I have to log in twice?
The second login is only to allow you to have more than one list of characters. As the game client is hardcoded to handle at most 48 characters per account, the username that you type at the login screen allows you to select between multiple lists of up to 48.
Simply put, at the COH login screen, type a name that is meaningful to you, and any password you want. The password on this screen is completely ignored other than having to type at least 1 letter for the login button to work. The list of characters you get will be the ones you have created with that same account name.
OMG, it takes forever to get anywhere!
Heh, welcome to launch day, Issue 0!
You can ease your pain with the /mapmove command to jump to a desired zone. There is a wiki page listing the numbers for each zone. We've tried to locate the exit coordinates at places in close proximity to where people want to go.
Travel powers (or rather, a close enough approximation to fake them) are on the radar for the 1.1 version and will be one of the first things we work on after release.
Until then, try to enjoy the little details that you might have been skipping over and missing all those years of superspeeding past. We'll get you flying, superspeeding, superjumping, and maybe even teleporting again soon.
Are you going to add combat, street sweeping, missions, AI?
In this project probably not. At most there might be some limited powers support, and minigame aspects.
However, it does share DNA with some other projects that are working along those lines. Improvements to Paragon Chat represent improvements to the overall state of things.
Are store-bought costume parts available? What about Icon's NPC mode?
Short version: Yes and no. All Paragon Point and VIP reward costumes should be available. Incarnate (astral/empyrean merit) unlocks and badge-restricted parts are not selectable, but it's something we're working on. NPC-only parts are not available.
Long version: Enterprising hackers will discover that the costume parts in the database closely resemble costume files and demorecords. No validation is done when loading from the database, so you can create "invalid" or NPC costumes directly in the database and they will be visible to other players. If we see a lot of abuse of this to grief people (creating monstrosities that block out the screen or crash clients), we will be forced to add validation of incoming costumes, so please don't make us do that.
Which zones are available at launch?
All Paragon City, Rogue Isles, and Praetorian city zones. All Paragon City and Rogue Isles hazard zones. All Praetorian underground zones.
Trial zones such as the Abandoned Sewer Network, The Hive, The Abyss, RWZ, and the Shadow Shard.
All PVP zones.
Miscellaneous zones: Pocket D, Paragon Dance Party, Breakout, Outbreak, Destroyed Galaxy City Tutorial, Precinct Five.
Bonus zones: Echo: Dark Astoria, Echo: Faultline (original Faultline), Echo: Rikti Crash Site.
What about mission maps and other places that are not traditional zones?
Short version: We plan to address this in a future version by allowing you to create a private custom "space" using a map of your choice and invite others to it.
Long version: It's technically possible to do this by modifying zone.cfg and adding new maps in. However, it will only work if everyone who wants to meet up there makes identical edits to the file.
How about Supergroup bases?
The good news is this is something we very much want to do, and should be possible. The bad news is it may take some time to get it all working.
Can I import my Sentinel+ XML files?
For the moment you can use the Senticon converter to create costume files from them to load in the character creator. An integrated importer is planned.
Why did you make this? Just standing around chatting is dumb.
*shrug* That's one opinion. Other people enjoy the opportunity for social interaction. Nobody is forcing anyone to use Paragon Chat or get excited about it, it's just there for those who want to. Some ideas of fun things to do:
* Costume contests!
* Supergroup reunion / meeting
* Roleplay sessions
* Pen and paper style gaming sessions
* Getting a refreshing bite at Old Fashioned Donuts or Loyal Tea & Coffee
Is this going to be an Open Source project?
Not yet. In the future potentially.
There are two main reasons, the first is that this requires your login information, and there is currently a lot of attention surrounding it. If source were available it would be that much easier to create a trojan version to take advantage of that.
The second is that there are parts of it under heavy development and are shared with other projects which are still in the early phases.
We do use several BSD or MIT-licensed open-source libraries. Namely zlib, Expat, SQLite, OpenSSL, and libstrophe. We have contributed several bugfixes and feature enhancements made for this project back to libstrophe.
What about extensibility?
A scripting interface is on the development roadmap as a medium-priority feature. This should allow community contributed enhancements to be added.
Can I run my own server?
Absolutely. We're launching with the Titan server as the default to make it easier for people to jump right in, but you can use any standards compliant XMPP server instead, public or private.
The extensions that we use are:
XEP-0045: Multi-User Chat. This is required for the ability to see other players in a zone to work, as well as global channels. Without it, all you can do is send tells.
XEP-0033: Extended Stanza Addressing (aka Multicast). Support for this feature is optional, but is recommended as it makes local chat much more efficient.
XEP-0016: Privacy Lists. This is needed for the /ignore functionality to work. It is strongly recommended to use a server that supports this feature unless it is a tightly-controlled private server.
We recommend Openfire as it has good MUC support, Multicast support, Privacy List support, and is what we did the majority of development and testing with. It is also quite easy to set up and configure.
Is this a Nemesis Plot?
No, absolutely not! *bzzzt-click*
Rotten Luck:
Well I was thinking about us Roleplayers and what the chat system can do. That got me wondering.
Can the chat system do dice rolls example. /roll 2 dice 6 sides. Or some other form of slash command for dice rolling.
Codewalker:
Not yet, but it's something that has been suggested and I'm going to try to slip in before release, as it's fairly easy to do.
Lightslinger:
Woohoo, answers pretty much all the questions I've had bouncing around since the announcement, thanks CW!
Auroxis:
How would identical character names be handled?
Will we have multiple costume slots per character?
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