Beeker wrote:

I would love to dance on top of a blimp. Even more, on a blimp with a graveyard on top if it. Where all the cool kids could hang out at night.

So is that the kinds of things you can dream up with LSD? You must admit a "graveyard blimp" is a pretty trippy idea - I can even imagine Buffy jumping around slaying vamps on such a blimp. ;)

BTW, since this is a thread about Moguls it would have been cool if we could've selected a blimp as a sort of "mobile Mogul" option. ;)

avelworldcreator wrote:

I thought I actually stood on that blimp. Can't remember.
The blimp will need advertising panels. Good start thought, Don.

Those are concepts, far from a final version.. other things came up, so i put them on hold... I'll swing back around to them soon enough :)

Hiya. I'm the Mogul backer for Miskatonic University. It was our SG on Protector server. It looks wonderful! All of us are thrilled to see it - I've been emailing the update and pictures around to all of our old members. We're all huge Lovecraft fans and are happy we'll have the most awesome base in the new game. :-)

TitansCity wrote:

warcabbit wrote:

I should point out that I'm not sure Avel's right about the flight ceiling. We do have one, but the last time I checked it was... pretty tall. As in 'oh look, there are the clouds. Below us.'

What could be great, instead of being blocked at some vertical point, is to begin to loose some HP due to the cold at the certain distance (like a warning signal which tells you "becareful, you'll be in danger if you keep going so high) and, if the character goes to far, he freezes (like in an ice block or in an ice armor or someting like that), falls withtout being able to do anything like moving or speaking or launching an emote and could only reactivate his travel power after 1 or 2 seconds :)
We could also think about something more as the character is losing big parts of his HP and when he's at 0, he freeze.

Even though what you're describing was a good scene from the first Iron Man movie (or even the classic Icarus myth) the main problem with your idea is what if you have a character whose character concept would make such a scenario unreasonable or even impossible? What if your character is a super-hot lava monster? What if your character is a magical person (or even a demigod) that's not affected by extreme temperatures? What if your character is already an ice-based creature who might actually like the cold?

Your idea is an interesting one but it just would not make much sense to some characters. On the other hand the idea of a "hard flight ceiling" that you just bump up against like a glass wall is also silly too. Maybe instead of a strict hard barrier they could have a small region of space that slows your movement down to a crawl. The further up you go the slower you would go until you finally couldn't go any higher. At least that would give you an indication of where the ceiling limit is without artificially making you instantly stop by bouncing off an invisible wall.

This "slow down" region could be pretty thin (like maybe only have it be at the top 10 meters of the environment). This would still not be a "completely realistic" alternative, but at least it would be a "slightly less artificial" one. They could actually use this slow down idea for the "vertical walls" of the city maps as well. For instance Instead of just traveling north until you hit an artificial invisible wall at the edge of the map you eventually hit the "slow down" buffer to let you know you're close to the actual barrier.

TitansCity wrote:

the idea was mainly to stage this limit (since we have a limit anyway).
As you said, being suddenly blocked by an invisible wall is stupid (and frustrating and causes bumps in the head).
However, in my opinion, whether you are stopped by an invisible wall or slowed down, it all comes down to the same thing in the end.
At the limit, I would rather be stopped in my ascent but continue to have an animation to give me the impression that I continue to climb (and I will stop when I realize that there is nothing more to do)

Again ideally in a perfect game there wouldn't be a "flight ceiling" at all. My point was that if MWM wanted to try to create an "in-game reason" for there to be a flight ceiling they probably shouldn't have that reason involve something like "cold/ice" when there are going to be characters out there that would not be negatively harmed by "cold/ice".

If MWM is going to implement something other than having an arbitrary "glass ceiling" then that something is going to have to be vague/generic enough to "make sense" for all characters. As I've admitted my "slow down" idea is not perfect/realistic by any means but at least it would affect ALL characters equally regardless of their character concepts.

How about a giant fly swatter smacking you down when you reach a certain height?

Impulse King wrote:

Going on a further tangent. Game mechanically speaking a major issue with the slow down ceiling would be... how would you notice? I mean in my experience flying tends to be largely a solo affair so reference points for relative speed are somewhat hard to come by. This could be solved by going into a "hover" pose, but that's yet more coding.

One more time I've never claimed my "slow down" idea here was a "perfect solution" to anything. I'm just suggesting it might be a better alternative than having an artificial 'glass-like' barrier that would bring your max flight speed down to zero arbitrarily and instantaneously.

For what it's worth you make a good point that without points of reference way up in the sky it might be relatively hard to even notice you are being slowed down. Still since my idea would likely borrow from the same mechanic as the "travel suppression" mechanic there would probably not be that much additional coding involved.

In a nutshell I'm assuming the 1km strict flight ceiling would still be "a thing" in CoT. All I'm saying is that at perhaps 990m high the game would start to gradually slow you down so that by the time you hit the 1km mark you're barely moving at all. Mainly I'm simply trying to avoid an instantaneous "max speed to zero" transition which would likely be annoying.

Impulse King wrote:

Much MUCH further tangent. The potential for unintended abuse. My understanding of the Rikti Dropship raids is that slow effects were applied until everyone in the zone could catch up to wail on the target. 3 words. Aether. Pirate. Ships. Putting a slow field anywhere near those is just an evil temptation to determined players. Blimp raids are perfectly acceptable of course.

Not seeing how anything could be exploited with this unless you could "corner" an Aether Pirate Ship up against the flight ceiling barrier anyway. If I had to guess the CoT Devs are likely going to make it so that Pirate Ships won't go anywhere near the flight ceiling regardless.

Impulse King wrote:

Much much much further.. oh you get the idea! Event idea. Take down/ defend the Blimp! For reasons, villains have decided to attack the Blimp, but clever heroes have figured out a way to save it. Take to the air and take up the challenge! (More fun in a PvP shard!)

This sounds fun but again I don't think my "slow down" idea would cause any problem with that.

All you really need to do is create a cloud layer at the altitude limit so people can't tell their motion relative to any visual cues. Once this is done, you could let people reach infinity altitude or stop them in their tracks right there. Either way, they won't be able to tell the difference other than how long it takes for them to return below the cloud layer.

There are going to be glass walls between zones. Since the tech to go seamless as originally planned was a bridge too far. So I don't think there is a reason to have something different for the ceiling too. IIRC the distance from the tram station in IP to the entrance to TV was about 1km, maybe a little more. It's quite a long way up. I don't think there's a lot of reason for people to hang out up that high, unless you have a building that tall. Which we currently do not. Not even Burj. Assuming there isn't an underground space that would count against the total height. I'm curious how the dimensional volume works in UE. The zones IIRC are at least a couple miles in the X and Z. Can you sacrifice one dimension to increase another? Or is there a technical restriction on the Y IE Y is single precision while X and Z are double precision.

just to be clear. the zone itself was close to two miles long. Just the distance from the tram to TV was 1km-ish.

Redlynne was a Ninja Leaping Sprinter ... meaning that my fastest travel speed (short of getting Speed Boost from a Kineticist) was 66 mph.
When playing in groups, it was always something of a "challenge" to be the first to the mission door. Since I'd been playing the game since Issue 2, I basically knew all the navigation shortcuts and had fun beating everyone else to the mission door while limited to Sprint+Ninja Run. I always had a laugh at getting there ahead of other PCs using Superspeed or Superjump or Flight or Teleport.

Good times.

Foradain wrote:

Grimfox wrote:

There are going to be glass walls between zones. Since the tech to go seamless as originally planned was a bridge too far.

?!?

Do you have a reference for this?

At the very least I think any "transition area" between zones (in other words places where we may have to wait while we technically "load in" from one game map to another) is going to be a very different kind of barrier than the one we're talking about related to the flight ceiling. The flight ceiling is likely going to be a REAL "glass wall" that will act as a solid boundary that we cannot cross.

For the sake of reducing confusion I probably wouldn't call the transition areas between one map and another a "glass wall" - I'd probably reserve that term only for solid barriers like the flight ceiling.

Yeah I'd been under the impression there'd be nothing like War Walls

Grimfox wrote:

My memory is fallible. It's been quite a long time since I recall that statement. It is also possible I misunderstood what was said. Or that things have since changed since that time. I have no doubt, I am not up to date on the most recent developments.

My recollection was that seamless transitions were absolutely not happening. I believe it was also stated that there would be environmental barriers between zones where applicable. Obviously they can not extend these barriers up to 1km so I figured there would be glass walls between the zones. I also assumed that they would not want people loading into a new zone by crossing the street unintentionally. The logical conclusion: there will be glass walls.

It's all good - I'm sure plenty of things have changed about this over the years the MWM folks have been working on this.

As far as the idea of having tech that would remove the old school "loading barriers" between map zones goes I can tell you of my recent experience of playing Fallout 76.

In that game the "main outdoor environment" is a reasonable simulation of roughly half of the entire state of West Virginia and in [i]all[/i] that area there are NO transitional barriers between various areas. To give you an idea of the scale of the map it would likely take the average player maybe 30 real life minutes to run their character from one side of the map to the other. That's 30 real minutes of constant movement. ;)

Now Fallout 76 still uses "load screens" when you enter into instanced "door missions" but that's a reasonable compromise and usually only takes about 10-15 seconds. Beyond those instanced door missions the entire "outdoor map" is handled by seamless transitions.

I figure if a game like Fallout 76 can do this then it should be very doable for CoT as well.

Quote:

certain areas will require a loading screen

I'd be betting some far islands or suburbs, unless of course this refers to instanced missions.

I love most of these so far, but my only question is, do you intend to keep the signs on the buildings the way they are now in the final product? The fonts used for them just seem very basic compared to everything else, and ultimately, in my honest opinion, the buildings would look much better without the signs at all.

Brand X wrote:

I don't mind glass walls that load up a new zone. That's better than war walls. I hated the whole war wall lore in CoH.

I thought Praetoria handled the zone walls rather well. The next zone was plainly visible right next door, and you couldn't see the wall until you got pretty close to it. Keep going forward and...suddenly loading screen...and then you're through to the adjacent zone. I wish they'd done that everywhere.

JanessaVR wrote:

Brand X wrote:

I don't mind glass walls that load up a new zone. That's better than war walls. I hated the whole war wall lore in CoH.

I thought Praetoria handled the zone walls rather well. The next zone was plainly visible right next door, and you couldn't see the wall until you got pretty close to it. Keep going forward and...suddenly loading screen...and then you're through to the adjacent zone. I wish they'd done that everywhere.

There is tech in other games that pre-loads nearby zones - so the transition can be seamless or at least greatly minimized. Many open-world games use this method - instead of loading the entire world map into memory it's loaded in "chunks".

Their video editor needs the CHILLLLL

SpaceMoose wrote:

StellarAgent wrote:

Wolfgang8565 wrote:

How about a giant fly swatter smacking you down when you reach a certain height?

Gotta be a Giant Hand. "Thou shall not pass!"

Would you believe a giant hoof?

We cannot pass into the Moososphere.

CoriSparks wrote:

I love most of these so far, but my only question is, do you intend to keep the signs on the buildings the way they are now in the final product? The fonts used for them just seem very basic compared to everything else, and ultimately, in my honest opinion, the buildings would look much better without the signs at all.

This is a very good question. We wanted to share work on new moguls, but some finishing work still continues on the buildings before they enter the game. Many of the signs used a generic font that will be replaced by a stylized font. In some instances the letters are a placeholder on a sign that will have a projection of a photoshopped sign. In some instances, the lettering will retain 3D shape to make the sign have depth, but we will add a more stylized font later. The sign lettering is one feature of these buildings that will certainly have further work to finalize them and improve their look.