Author Topic: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist  (Read 219363 times)

MaidMercury

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #280 on: March 05, 2016, 05:03:08 PM »
Not sure if this has been submitted. Is it possible to install new Advertisement signs in Paragon Chat?
Like the Major Flanders, Up. Up and Away signs? ???
During the CoH game, I once saw a Tony Hawk ad....so I know it has been done before.

I'm not suggesting serious ads- like for Allergy medicines or Acne, just something Fun to liven things up in 
Paragon Chat.... :roll:

Floride

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #281 on: March 05, 2016, 05:29:41 PM »
Not sure if this has been submitted. Is it possible to install new Advertisement signs in Paragon Chat?
Like the Major Flanders, Up. Up and Away signs? ???
During the CoH game, I once saw a Tony Hawk ad....so I know it has been done before.

I'm not suggesting serious ads- like for Allergy medicines or Acne, just something Fun to liven things up in 
Paragon Chat.... :roll:
I know it would depend on how hard it is to implement, but I just wanted to chime in and 'second' this idea.

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Nyx Nought Nothing

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #282 on: March 05, 2016, 10:08:43 PM »
Any ETA on adding Beast Run? While it's not a high priority for me i do know some people have been asking about it. And hey, at least it's not Teleport.  8)
So far so good. Onward and upward!

MaidMercury

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #283 on: March 06, 2016, 06:19:12 PM »
I know it would depend on how hard it is to implement, but I just wanted to chime in and 'second' this idea.


I remember that advert you drew...Yezz, that would be nice to post.  ;)

chuckv3

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #284 on: March 06, 2016, 07:14:05 PM »
I'm sure these are just texture files in the PIGGs. Someone who has done a lot of poking around in there should be able to tell you where they are. The it's just a matter of putting files into the right directory to supercede those in the PIGGs. Maybe if I continue to be bored sh*tless at work this week (we're about 5 weeks ahead on our current project) than I'll poke around myself.

MaidMercury

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #285 on: March 07, 2016, 01:04:42 AM »
yezz, anything to liven up Paragon Chat is useful. :P

If it's doable perhaps 'powers that be' can hold Ad contests and we submit designs for judging.
...then maybe winners get their work inserted  as update patches.?
maybe change out every quarter or something?

just my random thoughts.... ;D
« Last Edit: March 07, 2016, 05:46:48 AM by MaidMercury »

Linuial

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #286 on: March 23, 2016, 06:14:18 AM »
I have a couple of suggestions....I don't know if anyone has already suggested these, so please don't throw anything harder than marshmallows...

What about resurrecting Teleport Other?  I suspect it would be a lot easier than Teleport, and we could use it to set up the Taxi Tours again, which could be a lot of fun. 

I'd like to place my vote for any of the Claws animations. 

I am *dying* to see the Cavern of Transcendence map!  Holy Hero One!  We finally got a way to "bust" the mission every time, but it was so boring, that as soon as we finished and stopped the timer, everyone left.  There was no way to "kill all" before the timer ran out, so it was stealth and tp all the way to the end.  I always wanted to get a team to finish, stop the timer, and THEN kill all, so we could finally see the entire map, but was never able to persuade an entire team to do so, and anything less than an entire team couldn't defeat the mobs.  I'm willing to bet there are very few people who *have* ever seen the entire map!  (I found Karsis in Paragon Chat, but couldn't locate the entrance to the cavern...) 

I went to Terra Volta and was disappointed that it was the outside map, not inside the reactor. 

Is there any chance to see the final inside map for the Hess TF?  The one with the giant robot? 

There are no words to express my thanks and admiration for what you have accomplished here.  Character Creation was always my favorite part of CoX, and I spent many a happy (if sleepless) night just making another toon. 
Liberty and a plethora of others.  Altaholic.  SG Starfire.
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Jeff Anderson

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #287 on: April 01, 2016, 02:03:18 AM »
Any ETA on adding Beast Run? While it's not a high priority for me i do know some people have been asking about it. And hey, at least it's not Teleport.  8)

Assume you checked out the notes on release 1.0?

Jeff Anderson

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #288 on: April 01, 2016, 02:06:31 AM »
Lua scripting environment, I would kill for that. I'd hire a couple of devs just to code a virtual tabletop on top of PCHat and share the results with the community if I could get that and the GM environments.

GammaPaladin

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #289 on: April 06, 2016, 12:13:16 AM »
I'd agree with that.  Contemplating the naval while Rome burns comes to mind.  But Cryptic/Paragon did some very good work.  The basics of the game.  The Archetypes.  The 1-50 levelling.  Combat.  Interface.  ITF was a great piece of post - Cryptic work.

Less successful for me?

CoV.  Sideways move.  'Pressing' limited resources over twice the area.  Rather than filling the 'empty' zones with MORE content. :D
Rogue.  Compounding this error.  More great zones.  Beta tested mission content.  (So my Duo partner thought...)
Incarnates.  A fracture rather than a progression.  (Not like the game I'd come to recognise at all...like a pre-op for CoH 2.)
Lack of moving to a modern gaming engine.  Some say the graphics were starting to look dated.  (Me?  I just loved how it played.)
Mission types.  All seemed to familiar after doing 1-50 a few times.
NOT going back to original archeyptes sooner and making them 'more so.'
Perhaps not creating individual archetype mission arcs for 1-50 for each type.  (A lot of work?  Better than closing down.  The 1-50 journey was too samey for some.)
Game was too slow.  (Too fast for me.  But why not allow one server to switch on perma Hasten for all as inherent.  SB buff as inherent for all who want to play that fast.  Me?  I'd just slip around maps with that...)

Hmm.  Key expansions?  Sideways moves that didn't build on the core game in the right way.  Splintered the player base...while not really addressing.  Not adequately building on what made the core game so great.

...and for the money invested...did these 'key expansions' give a return of investment for NC Soft in terms of revenue and play base expansion?

Worse.  Did(?) some things alienate key parts of the player base that didn't come back. 

Subjective opinions.  But they can cause erosion of a player base.

Some may disagree.  But how come CoH is dead while some dreadful mediocre MMOs still survive.

Was it a lack of advertising by NC Soft only?  Cultural?  Politics.  Egos.  Fickle MMO fans?  Lessons learned too little too late?

*wrong thread.  I know.  But it just came out... ;)

Azrael.
Sort of a massively lagged reply, considering how long ago this was posted, but I thought it was interesting that I disagree with you on most of this ;)

CoV was great, the game needed more ATs. I wasn't a fan of them strictly dividing the hero and villain games, but I think that was a Statesman/Cryptic decision, which would explain why I hated it ;)
Going Rogue was even better, and absolutely needed. Getting rid of the silly and arbitrary distinction between hero and villain ATs was something that had been needed for a long long time.  In fact, Paragon Studios kept continually knocking down the walls separating CoH and CoV, which was a very good decision to me.

Incarnates I can't comment on much, I had some level 50s but I had MASSIVE altitis... I only played on Virtue but I had purchased the maximum number of character slots, and had every last one of them filled, so I got a second account just so that I could keep creating new characters when the whim took me. So I spent a lot of time at low levels and not a lot at high levels. Plus I had gone one one of my many vacations from the game just before it went F2P, and when I got around to wanting to jump back in again, the game had just gone offline :/

Separate mission sets for ATs would have just made me angry. I was vehemently opposed to any content being restricted to a specific AT or origin. The type of character I want to play should NOT dictate what my story will be. Too samey? A huge part of the appeal to me was that it didn't matter what missions you did, the game was so different for every powerset, let alone each AT. The gameplay was so diverse.

In the end... I liked the game when it first released. I liked it less and less with every change Cryptic made to it. And then found myself liking it more and more after they thankfully left to build Crapions Online and Positron got put in charge of it. Pretty much everything they did after that was massive win to me. It just seemed like Jack/Cryptic wanted CoH to be like EQ or DAoC and were peeved that it got played totally differently when the players got a hold of it. Constant nerfs and changes that all seemed aimed at slowing you down and forcing you to fight fewer enemies at once when the joy of the game was that you were a SUPERHERO who could stand in the midst of 10 mobs and smash them all, not like EQ/DAoC where you were forced to cower and carefully pull one enemy at a time lest you die horribly.

Positron's team continually buffed the players, and offered conveniences and things that made the game faster, easier and less frustrating to level and gear up, and just generally brought back the feeling of being "super" for me.

GammaPaladin

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #290 on: April 06, 2016, 07:49:08 PM »
Oh uh... I had intended to post this with my last post, but forgot. A feature suggestion, which I think would be the biggest benefit for people who might want to code bots or server-side plugins for this with the smallest possible amount of code investment for you, Codewalker, would be to have a debug console mode that would display (And optionally log) every network message that PC intercepts from the CoH client, and every message it sends back to the client, and a config file allowing a simple CoH protocol to xml stanza mapping...

That way people interested in trying to implement advanced features could do things like create a bot and tell PC (Using the config file) to send X stanza with Y data when it receives Z message from the client, and vice-versa. So we could watch the debug console to figure out messages we want to handle, and have them sent to a bot, or a server plugin, and have the bot/plugin do processing and reply, and PC would again use the mappings in the config file to translate that back to send to the client.

The config file would be the most complicated part, and ultimately the Lua scripting system would be needed for really complex things (Pretty much anything beyond simple variable replacement you wouldn't want to be implementing yourself), but templates with variable replacement should be simple enough and the debug console should be trivial enough, and it would let people get started on relatively complex things at least.

Codewalker

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #291 on: April 06, 2016, 09:06:11 PM »
Oh uh... I had intended to post this with my last post, but forgot. A feature suggestion, which I think would be the biggest benefit for people who might want to code bots or server-side plugins for this with the smallest possible amount of code investment for you, Codewalker, would be to have a debug console mode that would display (And optionally log) every network message that PC intercepts from the CoH client, and every message it sends back to the client, and a config file allowing a simple CoH protocol to xml stanza mapping...

That woudn't be nearly as simple or as useful as it might sound. The CoH network protocol is not a network protocol as you'd think in terms of a list of commands and 'move here, do X'. It does have some commands, but those commands work on a level more like a state synchronization engine. All of the messages are custom, and tightly packed on a bitwise level, so in order to successfully read a command out of the stream you have to already know what it does and how to handle it, and must have the proper context to be able to decode it as well. There's no framing information (length indicator or similar), either, so if multiple messages are packed into a packet and you don't know how to decode the first one, you're not getting any of them.

Imagine if you had a single player game, took the code and duplicated it, then deleted 1/3 of of it from one copy and called it "client", 1/3 of it from the other and called it "server", and made them talk to each other by dumping the raw memory contents of internal data structures over the network. It's not quite that extreme, but it's not far off.

Because of that, it's not something that can be cleanly separated from the implementation. You can't pick and choose what you want to handle. Your bot would need many of the COH data files loaded in memory, as well as have a pretty complete picture of the state of all the entities on the map to even understand what the messages from the client were saying. In order to build that map it would have to process the majority of the client messages itself.

Adding the ability for Paragon Chat to translate that into something human-readable is about as much work as just implementing the functionality to respond to it.

There are plans to implement more programmer friendly hooks and expose them through a lua interface, but the local engine instance will do most of the heavy lifting to get the state of the world into something that can be manipulated by people who don't know every little detail, and who wish to keep their sanity.

GammaPaladin

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #292 on: April 06, 2016, 10:56:12 PM »
Hmm... Well, I guess I'm just the crazy type, I like trying to decode complicated puzzles like binary file formats and such, so it seemed like something that would be fun to have access to ;)

I suppose I could always poke at the code in the Woofers github if I wanted to learn a bit of the protocol though. Assuming they actually got anywhere with that project anyway.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2016, 11:07:03 PM by GammaPaladin »

Codewalker

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #293 on: April 07, 2016, 02:33:23 AM »
I guess I could put in a hex dump of the raw bytes without too much trouble. Actual detail on it wouldn't be very doable since the code isn't set up that way. Can't exactly use plain old structs for it when most of the protocol is conditional and branches all over the place. Things like if bit#7 is set, it's followed by a string, a 5-bit value, and a packed value, otherwise a 2-bit value.

I suppose I could always poke at the code in the Woofers github if I wanted to learn a bit of the protocol though. Assuming they actually got anywhere with that project anyway.

You'd be better off looking at the SEGS code if it's still up somewhere. Last I looked at it, it looked like somebody tossed a half-working authserver implementation on github, called it Woofers, then abandoned it. It hadn't been touched in over a year.

The auth protocol isn't very interesting because it's already well known and uses a completely different protocol over TCP that isn't used for anything else. It isn't even necessary to have. Paragon Chat doesn't use the auth protocol; the client can connect to a dbserver without authentication for testing.

SEGS at least implements most of the underlying UDP transport, which really hasn't changed that much since Issue 3 or whatever they're using. It's missing the key exchange, so it requires a hacked client to disable encryption, but I think most of the bit stream operations are the same.

Solitaire

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #294 on: April 08, 2016, 01:58:07 PM »
Codewalker do you think there is a chance that the explore badges will ever be active again for collecting? And if when exploring the zones you clear the black covering on the map it stays clear even when zoning back and forth? Great work with PC already love being able to explore the zones again  :)

Azrael

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #295 on: April 08, 2016, 02:13:03 PM »
Quote
and things that made the game faster, easier

That was part of their undoing.

Castrating the Hollows one of many examples.

Azrael.

Quote
you were a SUPERHERO who could stand in the midst of 10 mobs and smash them all

I liked pre-4 for that.  Even after issue 4 you could still aggro a decent amount.  Great feeling 'tanking' the 'eye of the storm.'

Solitaire

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #296 on: April 14, 2016, 07:43:13 AM »
Codewalker do you think there is a chance that the explore badges will ever be active again for collecting? And if when exploring the zones you clear the black covering on the map it stays clear even when zoning back and forth? Great work with PC already love being able to explore the zones again  :)

Codewalker not sure if you've seen this post ^ Was wondering if either of these would be possible in the future?

saipaman

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #297 on: April 14, 2016, 08:24:28 PM »
I'm sure we would see a lot more people on-line if exploration badges could be re-implemented.

nicoliy

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #298 on: April 15, 2016, 04:03:11 PM »
If I had a realistic wish list (no combat) it would be:

Explorer badges, base building, and to tie some mission maps to doors (not sure where). I know I can get to the mission maps, but it'd be fun if clicking on a door brought you in a building for one.

Azrael

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Re: Paragon Chat Development Roadmap and Wishlist
« Reply #299 on: April 16, 2016, 03:54:41 PM »
If I had a realistic wish list (no combat) it would be:

Explorer badges, base building, and to tie some mission maps to doors (not sure where). I know I can get to the mission maps, but it'd be fun if clicking on a door brought you in a building for one.

I think that's a good idea.  Being to click on a door to go to random mission maps.

I think that's one that could go on the wish list or timeline?  Only Codewalker would know if that was doable.

Re super bases.  They're on the timeline at some point.

Azrael.