| 01:43.26 | Baanano | see you tomorrow |
| 03:05.46 | *** join/#riftuidev seebs (~seebs@home.seebs.net) |
| 03:05.48 | *** mode/#riftuidev [+o seebs] by ChanServ |
| 04:02.49 | *** join/#riftuidev Imhothar (Miranda@ppp-93-104-177-169.dynamic.mnet-online.de) |
| 04:28.03 | *** join/#riftuidev Imhothar_ (Miranda@ppp-188-174-127-91.dynamic.mnet-online.de) |
| 07:59.09 | ZorbaTHut | people may feel some schadenfreude to learn that I am currently tweaking one of my personal customized addons in order to avoid the watchdog :V |
| 08:02.05 | seebs | Hah |
| 08:02.18 | seebs | Just file a bug report on it and have the addon dev fix it. |
| 08:03.35 | ZorbaTHut | I did, but then I got a bug report from some jerk telling me that my addon kept triggering the watchdog |
| 08:12.46 | seebs | heh |
| 08:13.41 | Imhothar | Karma! |
| 08:16.46 | Imhothar | hmm wonder how you people pronounce Schadenfreude |
| 08:17.26 | Imhothar | I'm sure it's funny |
| 08:18.46 | ZorbaTHut | http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/En-us-schadenfreude.ogg - I usually hear it pronounced like this, minus the last syllable. Scha-den-froyd. |
| 08:20.01 | Imhothar | hm that's actually pretty accurate |
| 08:20.09 | Imhothar | I was expecting sch like in school |
| 08:20.35 | ZorbaTHut | it's funny, I'm thinking about it now and I think Americans really don't like trailing vowels. Contrast that to Japan, which, as I recall, has exactly one syllable *without* a trailing vowel |
| 08:21.00 | Imhothar | lots of trailing vowels in french |
| 08:21.12 | seebs | Woah, nice thread, Imhothar. Hadn't seen that before. |
| 08:21.46 | Imhothar | I think a trailing short "e" is very uncommon in english |
| 08:21.47 | ZorbaTHut | The "sh" sound is pretty common in English. Shatter, for example. I have no doubt *someone* pronounces it like "school", though :V |
| 08:22.03 | seebs | So, back in the WoW days, I once tried to use a tablet with the game. |
| 08:22.16 | Imhothar | I know, the question is always which one comes first: the talking or the writing |
| 08:22.37 | seebs | Turns out you basically couldn't, at the time. Because the game interpreted an unmoving pen touch as being a move from the center to its location every frame. |
| 08:22.46 | seebs | Rift doesn't do that, TSW does. Annoying. |
| 08:22.59 | Imhothar | its if people see it written first and apply rules of their native language which resulsts in the funniest variations |
| 08:23.10 | ZorbaTHut | imhothar, yeah, I can't think of any instances of that at all. If we have a trailing vowel sound at all, it's almost always coupled with a consonant phoneme, like "be" or "make". |
| 08:23.55 | ZorbaTHut | seebs, one of our lead developers actually uses a tablet for most of his coding. Wouldn't surprise me if it works thanks to him. |
| 08:24.18 | Imhothar | I think it also depends on the type of messages the tablet hardware generates |
| 08:25.22 | Imhothar | no idea whether there is some consistency at al |
| 08:26.49 | ZorbaTHut | in general, the way they work is that they artificially set the cursor position to the intended location |
| 08:27.18 | ZorbaTHut | the problem is that games, when doing camera movements or other similar first-person movements, are watching for deltas, not explicit positioning |
| 08:27.43 | ZorbaTHut | a lot of them set the cursor to the middle of the screen every frame to make the calculations easier, and obviously this interferes pretty badly with a tablet driver that's *also* setting the cursor to a specific position every time it moves. |
| 08:27.52 | Imhothar | yeah, the question is whether the corsor movenent command is periodical or just a one-time think if the pen doesn't move |
| 08:28.07 | Imhothar | fun fun |
| 08:29.06 | ZorbaTHut | I *think* it's usually a one-time thing, but you still end up with a system where both programs are forcibly moving the cursor and expecting the other program to behave like a conventional UI, which it isn't |
| 08:29.59 | seebs | Yeah. |
| 08:32.13 | seebs | Well, I filed a bug report. We'll see. :) |
| 10:30.59 | Imhothar | Why do people never read addon descriptions... |
| 10:48.35 | Baanano | hi |
| 10:52.44 | seebs | Okay, Funcom is TOTALLY imitating Trion. |
| 10:52.54 | seebs | Servers back up 1:45 into a 4 hour maintenance. |
| 10:53.13 | seebs | I still remember being so totally confused the first time I saw Trion do that. |
| 11:10.29 | Wildtide | they're back up Seebs, but i can't get past "Connecting to Character Server..." |
| 11:10.42 | Wildtide | (yes, i caved and bought it last night. haven't actually played it yet) |
| 11:10.56 | *** join/#riftuidev Mere (~Mere@buzzbee.plus.com) |
| 11:10.57 | seebs | That happens a lot. Solution appears to be to retry, then retry, then retry, then sob quietly, then retry. |
| 11:11.11 | Wildtide | oh, ok :) |
| 11:11.38 | Wildtide | i figured the whole population was logging back in after the maintenance |
| 11:12.09 | seebs | They have some weird stuff going on with how they view servers. They claim the capacity of their servers is much higher than that of traditional MMOs. I have no idea whether this is true. |
| 11:12.27 | seebs | But in general, zones appear to auto-instance, and you can hop to the instance a friend is in if you group. |
| 11:12.34 | Wildtide | aye. they don't have regional locations either, everything is in Canada |
| 11:13.12 | Mere | grrr, stupid performance watchdog |
| 11:13.14 | seebs | And wow, do some people *hate* funcom. I don't even know what they did. |
| 11:13.46 | seebs | But it seems that they are personally responsible for all human suffering during 2003 or so. |
| 11:14.59 | Mere | just been looking at the functions it's flagged, they're mostly when creating bits of UI, which I knew were slow but nothing I can really fix... |
| 11:15.47 | Baanano | if you're using many textures you could try imhotar's libasynctextures |
| 11:16.05 | Mere | no textures |
| 11:16.08 | Mere | well not many |
| 11:16.30 | Mere | the config ui has textures, the unit frames don't |
| 11:16.38 | Baanano | do you create the ui in a single pass or as needed? |
| 11:16.55 | Mere | the config ui is a mix, I probably can make more of it on-demand |
| 11:17.10 | Mere | the main unit frames would be tricky to build on-demand |
| 11:17.44 | Mere | particularly getting the secure frame up after logon, as you may have dc'd, and on logon I create the secure frames before getting locked down |
| 11:18.07 | Baanano | if you create them during addon initialization the watchdog shouldn't bark |
| 11:18.33 | Mere | well it also complains when I create 20 fake frames |
| 11:19.29 | Baanano | can you paste a link to your addon? |
| 11:20.23 | Mere | http://www.riftui.com/downloads/info218-MereHealingFrames.html |
| 11:20.45 | Mere | I guess I could pre-create the secure frames, and fill in the frames behind |
| 11:21.09 | Mere | the problem there is that everything else is event driven so if health changes, I expect to be able to change the health frames |
| 11:21.41 | Mere | the proper way to do it, is split the player info data, from the UI pieces, so that once the UI frame is up, then update it I guess |
| 11:22.06 | Mere | it probably doesn't help that the text is shadowed so that it looks contrasty enough |
| 11:22.14 | Baanano | riftui says your latest version is waiting approval, do you have it hosted elsewhere? |
| 11:22.26 | seebs | I can fix that. |
| 11:22.28 | Mere | so the shadow adds another 4 text objects to each text |
| 11:22.39 | Mere | should be on curse as well |
| 11:22.47 | seebs | Done. |
| 11:22.52 | Baanano | ty seebs :) |
| 11:23.46 | Mere | I do plan to go back over the code to look for any stupid looping issues, but I actually thought the addon wasn't that bad (till this morning's email of warnings) |
| 11:24.06 | Mere | life's just been a bit busy so I've not had time to even look at rift, let alone 1.9 |
| 11:25.41 | Mere | hmm, are the new ability id's fixed? |
| 11:25.55 | Mere | eg if I store the idNew will it be the same for everyone? |
| 11:26.54 | Mere | as the format being the old ID, then another 8 hex numbers seems a bit random? |
| 11:27.41 | ZorbaTHut | yep, it's the same for everyone |
| 11:28.35 | Mere | anyway, my personal theory is that it's all the UI's fault for being slow to create new objects ;) |
| 11:29.26 | seebs | Player error, they are mistakenly playing with too many people. |
| 11:31.47 | Mere | hmm, error in the live change log: "This can be done by calling Inspect.Ability.New.Detail() for each item in your database and replacing the old-style key with the idNew member of Inspect.Ability.Detail()." shouldn't the last one be Ability.New as well? |
| 11:32.27 | Baanano | is it normal health and energy bars extend beyond the border? |
| 11:33.17 | Mere | hmm, nope, idnew is also there in the ability.detail, ignore me, just looked inconsistent |
| 11:33.20 | Mere | they shouldn't |
| 11:33.26 | Mere | unless something is broken |
| 11:36.40 | Mere | so the availability changes, what does partial actually mean? |
| 11:36.51 | Mere | IE which things are still valid and which aren't? |
| 11:44.11 | Baanano | Mere, I've tried reloading the UI both in combat and out of combat in a warfront (codex) and I don't get any performance warning nor error, the only weird thing was the bars overextending past the border after joining the warfront and that was fixed after the first reloadui |
| 11:44.27 | Mere | try /mhf config |
| 11:44.52 | Mere | then click sample units, "set as 20 man" |
| 11:45.38 | Baanano | the config ui fires a performance warning |
| 11:45.51 | Mere | hmm, on the warfronts thing, does that cap the health? I've no idea what the property HealthCap was for, so ignored it |
| 11:46.13 | Mere | yeah, the config ui builds quite a lot of stuff up |
| 11:46.28 | Mere | there's a couple of bits that are dynamic, Ie only when you click on the tab do they get built |
| 11:46.33 | Mere | but the rest are all done on the first load |
| 11:47.21 | Mere | infact more ammusingly, if I do set as 20man it triggers the first time, but then clear units triggers every time |
| 11:47.36 | Mere | that one I'll have to dig into, I suspect I'm not efficietnly removing the fake units |
| 11:48.17 | Mere | oh, yep not efficient, I'm hitting relaypanels (which relays the panel containing the units) on every remove |
| 11:49.22 | Mere | I guess I'll have to think some more about this one, eg can I detach the player handling code from the UI, and build the UI as later events arrive |
| 11:49.27 | Mere | but get the secure frame up early |
| 11:50.27 | Mere | at them moment I think the addon still works with 1.9 though, just has some annoying performance warnings (which I bet will vary based on the PC it's running on) |
| 11:51.51 | Baanano | are frames created out of combat? |
| 11:54.30 | Mere | yes |
| 11:54.48 | Mere | you can't do the secure frame incombat (which you need to do spell casting) |
| 11:55.16 | Baanano | have you tried the quiet command before creating/removing the frames? |
| 11:55.26 | Mere | quiet command? |
| 11:55.56 | Mere | ah missed that hiding tin the changelog wall of text |
| 11:56.10 | Mere | might be worth a try I guess |
| 11:57.46 | Mere | hmm, wonder if there's anyway to get the full list of errors from tirion. looking at the reported errors, I've only 20% of the listed errors shown.. |
| 12:18.21 | ZorbaTHut | if you're seeing five reported errors, then the official response is "fix some errors and you'll probably see more" |
| 12:18.49 | Mere | lol, all 5 are performance warnings, and 4/5 are the same stack at the bottom end, just a different root event/function |
| 12:19.39 | Mere | I guess I'm just wondering if there are any real bugs/errors other than the performance ones (and hopefully the next version will remove 4/5) |
| 12:20.03 | ZorbaTHut | I may need to increase the error cutoff to 10 or so |
| 12:20.32 | Mere | I guess it's just odd to have 5 with 4% of the errors each, would we get real errors over performance ones first? |
| 12:21.15 | ZorbaTHut | nope, you'd get the most popular errors that passed the error threshold first. though now that I think about it, a lot of performance errors aren't gonna pass that threshold, due to the actual line they trigger on being somewhat chaotic. hmm. |
| 12:22.45 | Mere | yes, as the performance error line will vary on the player's cpu etc |
| 12:22.57 | Mere | eg faster ones have more cycles in the same timeout... |
| 12:24.48 | Mere | bbl, need to go get lunch |
| 12:30.45 | Wildtide | Mere, if it's any consolation, i'm in exactly the same boat. my plan is to release one final version of Gadgets in the 0.3.xx line with a note to expect warnings, and then spend a while tearing the whole thing apart to create a watchdog aware 0.4.xx line |
| 13:01.10 | Baanano | Zorba, in each event the watchdog time is shared by all addons subscribed to it, but if after depleting the watchdog time of an event, a different one is fired, would the watchdog time still be depleted or would be have another 0.1 seconds slice? |
| 13:22.32 | Baanano | nvm, checked it, you get another 0.1 seconds (as expected) |
| 13:27.39 | Baanano | interesting, events created through Utility.Event.Create also get another 0.1 seconds |
| 13:38.14 | Baanano | no, they don't, damn :_ |
| 14:14.30 | Mere | hmm, 100ms sounds quite generous |
| 14:14.37 | Mere | for some things |
| 14:19.46 | Mere | *sigh* see they didn't fix the macro problems for not wanting to cast a spell... |
| 14:29.02 | Mere | don't suppose anyone's come up with a good way to profile where in an addon cpu is being burnt? |
| 14:33.40 | Mere | oh nice, "Copy to Clipboard" doesn't use windows line endings for the debug detail dialog |
| 14:33.53 | Mere | so paste into notepad ends up without line returns... |
| 14:35.41 | Wildtide | Notepad++, you'll never look back :) |
| 14:37.15 | Mere | but for just copying an error notepad is faster as it opens with an empty text window, notepad++ I've got to add another empty text thing |
| 14:41.48 | Wildtide | yep, good point |
| 14:41.50 | Mere | interesting the stack trace doesn't understand the tail call/return ability |
| 14:42.17 | Mere | eg if reports the function as func a, when it's actually func b, eg: local function a() return b() end |
| 14:42.35 | Mere | it reports the line and file for func b, but the name as func a :) |
| 14:54.47 | Mere | hmm, I wonder if the async texture loader can be made more generic, where you could callback any function later on |
| 14:55.12 | Mere | eg loading text, it's important to have the text there, but the shadow could be done a little later |
| 15:17.03 | Mere | hmm, there's an interesting thought, I wonder if it's possible to combine libasynctextures with the framerecyle library... |
| 15:17.15 | Mere | so that you can ask for frames, and then get them either from the pool, or new ones... |
| 15:20.34 | Mere | hmm, be an interesting idea, an api that you ask for a set of frames, and how many, on completion if fires a callback, with a few tables containing the handles to those objects... |
| 16:16.33 | Mere | hmm, why on earth is this shard dead... |
| 16:18.52 | Mere | even wierder the shard's forums are near empty for any posts in the last 12 months, some mixed post wondering if the shard is now a trial one... |
| 16:38.06 | Mere | hmm, well transfered to the server the guild I was in went to, think I prefered the empty shard, far less laggy (no-one in meridian) |
| 17:00.46 | Wildtide | hehe, i know that feeling. we all x-ferred to Icewatch (EU), but i do all my development back on Blightweald which is a ghost town |
| 17:04.03 | Mere | indeed, that's where my chars are now moved to (icewatch) |
| 17:04.16 | Mere | was on stormpike, and some time before that on another shard that became a trial one |
| 17:04.46 | Mere | more annoying my low levels can't transfer (I used them with a rift lite account to mess around with raid ordering to fix some bugs in safe's raid manager) |
| 17:32.05 | Wildtide | yep, i've got the same - a Rift Lite account with a level 2 character back on Blightweald. luckily i've got a few characters still on there. IW is a bit too full, and the 50 chat just annoys me. a bit too close to WoW chat last time i was on there |
| 17:54.26 | *** join/#riftuidev arton (~arton@tx-184-6-176-223.dhcp.embarqhsd.net) |
| 19:51.37 | *** join/#riftuidev seebs (~seebs@home.seebs.net) |
| 19:51.38 | *** mode/#riftuidev [+o seebs] by ChanServ |
| 20:35.54 | Wildtide | i'm starting to feel sorry for Pooky the Watchdog, Safe and Naifu are both being mean to him now on the forums |
| 21:08.09 | seebs | Okay, TSW has given me convincing evidence that Rift has a problem somewhere in its rendering. |
| 21:08.22 | seebs | I have a desktop with an AMD 6950, and a laptop with a GeForce 560M. |
| 21:08.29 | seebs | In Rift, they get very close to the same performance. |
| 21:08.41 | seebs | In TSW, the laptop gets about 1/3 the framerate of the desktop. |
| 21:09.08 | seebs | In basically any game I have where rendering settings CAN cause a slowdown, the laptop is slower. Except Rift, where it's about the same even with comparable or higher settings. |
| 21:10.46 | Wildtide | my machine is the same, gfx settings have very little effect on FPS. it's all down to CPU for me, but i am on an old Core 2 Duo |
| 21:11.32 | seebs | Turning on FSAA on Rift costs me 10-15 FPS on either system. |
| 21:11.53 | seebs | Thing is, TSW, I'm getting 40-50 FPS with all settings maxed on the desktop; if I do that on the laptop, I get maybe 12fps. |
| 21:12.08 | seebs | So Rift's got some sort of serious conflict going with the AMD GPU. |
| 21:13.58 | Wildtide | on a related not, i'm quite enjoying TSW so far, though barely had time to play it |
| 21:14.29 | Wildtide | just got to Kingsmouth, with a quest to find survivors, which i'm completely failing to do :) |
| 21:14.38 | Wildtide | *related note |
| 21:15.37 | seebs | Yeah. And they get full credit for imitating Trion, what with their downtime. |
| 21:15.53 | Wildtide | i never quite understand the AMD/nVidia thing. you'd think DX + device drivers would abstract away the differences and the game shouldn't need to care |
| 21:15.55 | seebs | While they were down I went fishing and did quests. Having two MMOs? Definitely fun. |
| 21:16.01 | Wildtide | lol |
| 21:16.09 | seebs | I think in principle it does, but there are going to be things that are an optimization for one and not the other. |
| 21:16.15 | Wildtide | true |
| 21:16.19 | seebs | Or maybe it's a side effect of the "designed for nvidia" branding. |
| 21:18.02 | Wildtide | i have to say, the UI in TSW is very pretty, and *very* obviously Flash |
| 21:18.08 | seebs | Yeah. |
| 21:18.17 | seebs | Rumor is it is intended to be user moddable to some degree. |
| 21:18.31 | Wildtide | i do like the built in browser, saves a lot of Alt-Tabbing |
| 21:18.35 | seebs | Big question, I guess, is whether Funcom is still a really crappy company who are just playing nice to get initial sales, or whether they've genuinely converted. |
| 21:19.15 | Wildtide | tbh, i've not experienced them being bad myself. i played a bit of AO, a bit more of AoC, but never had any problems and never needed to talk to support |
| 21:20.06 | Wildtide | i contacted them this morning, and got a very fast and helpful online agent, which i was impressed by |
| 21:20.28 | seebs | Apparently they did some lame stuff like not awarding prizes for a contest and saying "oh, that was a different PR group" or something. |
| 21:20.35 | Wildtide | because when i first tried to log in, it told me my password was wrong. it wasn't, it was down to the maintenance, so just a really bad message |
| 21:20.43 | seebs | Me... I think they're legit, and they're really trying to fix stuff. |
| 21:20.46 | Wildtide | lol, that does massively suck |
| 21:21.15 | seebs | Looking at the changes in CoH and Funcom, I think companies which aren't run by Robby Kotick have realized that Trion is right about the benefits of quality service. |
| 21:21.34 | seebs | I mean, ncsoft is still stunningly inept, but I really think that's honest incompetence, not lack of good intent. |
| 21:21.43 | Wildtide | hehe |
| 21:21.46 | seebs | That said. If you ever want to laugh yourself sick, research the in-game store in CoH. |
| 21:21.56 | seebs | They PAID for it. |
| 21:22.03 | seebs | Seriously. ncsoft *hired* someone to write it. |
| 21:22.08 | Wildtide | i've never played CoH, but i'm more and more tempted |
| 21:22.09 | seebs | And someone *accepted money* for it. |
| 21:22.14 | seebs | CoH is an awesome game. |
| 21:22.20 | seebs | But their store? It transcends awful. |
| 21:22.28 | Wildtide | now i need to see it :) |
| 21:22.45 | seebs | Seriously. If you gave me a 4-hour period without much for interruptions and a running Rails environment, I could do better. FOUR. HOURS. |
| 21:23.07 | seebs | The store always shows you everything, including unique things you have already bought. |
| 21:23.41 | seebs | The sole way to find out from the store interface that you have bought something is to try to buy it. If you have a shopping cart in which anything you want to buy is a unique you already have, you get a message saying the amount to be purchased exceeds the allowable amount. |
| 21:23.55 | seebs | Note that it does not indicate WHICH item that was. But it's okay, it cleared the whole shopping cart anyway. |
| 21:24.03 | Wildtide | rofl, sounds awesome |
| 21:24.09 | seebs | You cannot browse through a category and buy more than one thing except by starting at the beginning of the category again every time. |
| 21:24.18 | seebs | You can actually query your purchases, with the /mypurchases command. |
| 21:24.40 | seebs | It dumps a single line of text to your chat window containing an HTML table full of magic cookie IDs with imprecise descriptions. |
| 21:24.50 | seebs | We're talking a 40KB table for a long-term customer. |
| 21:25.11 | seebs | It's done as some kind of embedded HTML, and it took them a month and a half to get it to display any text at all on the Mac client. |
| 21:25.13 | Wildtide | ok, i'm sold. i need to see this masterpiece |
| 21:25.38 | seebs | It's... Seriously. I am barely scratching the surface of how utterly and totally incompetent this thing is. |
| 21:26.01 | seebs | ncsoft's site in general is like a badly done parody of a store. |
| 21:26.22 | seebs | Back when they didn't have the "paragon points" store, but you could buy addons like a set of additional costume parts, there were 8-10 such addons available. |
| 21:27.12 | seebs | 1. You could buy exactly one per transaction. 2. You could only perform about 3 transactions per month. 3. If you tried a transaction above the limit, there was a good chance that your account got permanently marked "can't do online transactions" until you contacted support. 4. Support would explain that they couldn't do anything. 5. So you had to wait another week and then ask for an escalation. |
| 21:27.58 | seebs | Paragon Studios has some great devs, and what may be the best MMO community rep I've ever seen. ncsoft, by comparison, makes scooby-doo villains look competent. |
| 21:28.19 | Wildtide | who are paragon? |
| 21:28.24 | seebs | The actual devs. |
| 21:28.27 | Wildtide | ah |
| 21:28.36 | seebs | ncsoft owns Paragon. |
| 21:28.41 | seebs | Paragon develops the game, but *does not run it*. |
| 21:28.41 | Wildtide | installing now :) |
| 21:28.54 | seebs | ncsoft runs the game, and brings to it a level of fanatical ineptitude that is hard to put into words. |
| 21:29.07 | seebs | Last summer, they had some scheduled downtime for upgrades or something to that effect. |
| 21:29.07 | Wildtide | you've had a good go ;) |
| 21:29.11 | seebs | So. |
| 21:29.36 | seebs | Day #1: 8 hour down time because they are moving to a new facility. No, they can't set up the new stuff in advance, or anything like that. |
| 21:29.51 | seebs | Day #2: Everything is unusable because the new stuff is badly under-spec. 8 hour downtime for upgrades. |
| 21:30.01 | seebs | Wait, no. Wrong order. |
| 21:30.08 | seebs | Day #1: We need to upgrade. 8 hour downtime. |
| 21:30.14 | seebs | Day #2: Move to new data center. 8 hour downtime. |
| 21:30.23 | seebs | Day #3: The new hardware sucks, it needs upgrades. 8 hour downtime. |
| 21:30.54 | seebs | You know how sometimes Rift has a 2 hour downtime because they want to do server backend updates? For City, three calendar days and over 24 hours of downtime. |
| 21:31.54 | seebs | And my personal favorite, right before the launch of Issue 19, someone found an exploit that could generate insane amounts of XP and in-game money. |
| 21:32.14 | seebs | Think "level to 50 and have several thousand plat in 5-6 hours". |
| 21:32.30 | seebs | ncsoft declared that the devs MUST NOT do anything that was not part of the I19 release path. |
| 21:32.43 | seebs | So, basically. The exploit stayed active for... oh, six weeks or so. |
| 21:33.03 | seebs | Three or four months later the economy still had wildly misaligned prices because the exploit made it way easier to generate certain items than others. |
| 21:34.11 | Wildtide | you're doing a really good job of making me wonder why i'm downloading this right now... |
| 21:34.19 | Wildtide | but 786Mb, it's tiny! |
| 21:34.21 | seebs | Well, see. |
| 21:34.26 | seebs | The game itself is actually really fun. |
| 21:34.34 | seebs | Costume designer is BY FAR the best in the industry. |
| 21:34.54 | Wildtide | i guess for a superhero game, it kinda has to be |
| 21:34.57 | seebs | Some bits are pretty primitive -- you have a fixed supply of face textures, for instance, although there's scale adjustments for the shape of the head. |
| 21:35.08 | seebs | But the costume design is amazing. |
| 21:35.24 | seebs | Power sets are good, and customizable -- for nearly all power sets, you can control the appearance of your powers. |
| 21:35.33 | seebs | So if you want a fire blaster to use bright green fire, you can. |
| 21:36.08 | seebs | The pick-two-sets model provides a nice variety of character options, while keeping characters with a nice iconic "feel". |
| 21:36.25 | seebs | And it is a really nice change to play a game in which people *laugh* if you say you want, or are, a "healer". |
| 21:36.50 | seebs | The single biggest thing that screwed me up playing CoH at first, coming from WoW, is that in CoH combat does not stop regeneration. |
| 21:37.13 | seebs | So where in WoW or Rift, you *must* have a source of health to keep fighting, in CoH, if you can reduce incoming damage "enough", you don't ever need green numbers. |
| 21:37.50 | Wildtide | sounds pretty cool... and it just finished downloading, gonna have a play in a bit |
| 21:37.52 | seebs | So buff/debuff characters are force multipliers, moreso than in Rift. |
| 21:38.11 | seebs | Also, if you are a paid user and have access to IOs, it has by FAR the most complicated and deep gear system ever. |
| 21:38.24 | seebs | You don't equip items which buff your character, you equip enhancements which buff specific powers. |
| 21:38.44 | seebs | But! The fancy "invention origin" enhancements can have set bonuses that can affect your character. And can do INSANE things. |
| 21:39.10 | seebs | Community's good; trolling is rare and tends to get smacked. |
| 21:39.19 | seebs | ... This being one of the things that I really, really, wish Trion would do more of. |
| 21:39.44 | Wildtide | yes, i'm starting to see a lot of that now that EU has largely moved to one/two servers |
| 21:39.56 | Wildtide | when i saw Anal spam happening, i wanted to cry |
| 21:40.03 | seebs | Oh, and they have mentoring, but it goes both ways and is automatic. Immediately after you get out of the tutorial zone, you can be invited to a group and fight as if you were level 49, although not as well as a real 49. |
| 21:40.19 | seebs | And basically any combination of characters can probably clear any content if they are competent and work well. |
| 21:40.32 | Wildtide | (just need to go see my missus off to work, back in a few mins) |
| 21:40.34 | seebs | That, plus difficulty settings, means that people will advertise for teams, and just say "any archetype, any level". |
| 21:41.00 | seebs | Yeah. I really don't know why Trion isn't doing more about that. It's not as though the five or six persistent trolls on Faeblight are a huge percentage of their population. |
| 21:50.25 | Wildtide | i haven't seen what Faeblight is like, being EU. isn't it an RP server though? seems surprising that you get a lot of trolls there |
| 21:51.29 | seebs | Trolls often hate RPers. |
| 21:51.36 | seebs | And it's not a lot, really. Just five or six. |
| 21:51.52 | Wildtide | enough to actually roll on an RP server? seems a bit sad really |
| 21:52.43 | Wildtide | ouch: "KBM is now officially sidelined. No updates will be coming until I've spoken more with the API dev about this Watchdog performance monitor." |
| 21:54.00 | Wildtide | ohhh, suddenly i hit stage 4, and it's a 2.2Gb download. now CoH is become proper sized :) |
| 21:54.32 | seebs | Yeah. |
| 21:54.51 | seebs | The staged thing lets you play in the early parts (tutorial, Atlas Park/Mercy Island) before downloading everything. |
| 22:00.04 | *** join/#riftuidev Wildtide_ (~quassel@host109-152-140-150.range109-152.btcentralplus.com) |
| 22:09.14 | Wildtide_ | wow, this costume designer is somewhat flexible |
| 22:09.36 | seebs | The CoH costume designer has INSANE depth, although a lot of it is sort of hard to figure out. |
| 22:10.41 | Wildtide_ | yep. i've gone for some odd plant costume on an ice throwing ranged damage char, just to see how it all works |
| 22:11.17 | seebs | Ice blast has some interesting tradeoffs. The hold is really nice. |
| 22:11.58 | Wildtide_ | tbh, for now i'm just having a quick look. need to get some TSW time in before bed |
| 22:12.07 | seebs | Heh. |
| 22:17.56 | *** join/#riftuidev Noshei (~quassel@c-67-161-146-244.hsd1.co.comcast.net) |
| 22:35.47 | *** join/#riftuidev Noshei (~quassel@c-67-161-146-244.hsd1.co.comcast.net) |
| 23:14.12 | Baanano | see you tomorrow |