Illusionss wrote:

Lothic wrote:
As far as the "cruel world outside these forums" go I think it would be a desperate mistake to overload CoT with too many "modern bells and whistles" in an attempt to make it appeal to everybody playing bleeding-edge MMOs in 2014-5. CoH needs to be a "spiritual successor" to CoH, not some kind of silver bullet that'll kill WoW, TERA, Wildstar or any other game you can mention. It needs to be successful enough to meet its goals, and no bigger.
When I hear people say "MWM needs to make profit at any cost above and beyond any other concern" it truly scares me.

I don't think anyone has said that this game needs to be "some kind of silver bullet that kills WoW, TERA, Wildstar or any other game." this is not a realistic goal. I frankly do not give a damn about those games. I want a game that we will like and if other people like it - well that's great.
But to say "it needs to be successful enough to meet its goals, but no bigger" seems to me to deny the developers the fruits of success. These people went out of their way, they took time out of their busy lives to make us a game to take the place of what we lost. It seems churlish to say, "I don't want them to be too successful." No. I want this endeavor to be worth their while. They deserve the rewards of success.
I have not seen anyone say "profit at any cost." We are their most important consumers, but they deserve to be rewarded for their hard work. The developers for CoX certainly got paid for THIER work, and no one was horrified by that.
If this game makes it to launch, this will be an industry first - correct me if I am wrong. This endeavor is important stuff. This could change the industry. And I say, SPEED THE PLOW. It needs changing.

As Cinnder mentioned there have been other people in these forums who seem to think MWM's only reason for becoming a game company in the first place was to make as much profit as quickly as possible. For them CoT is somehow simply a useful tool for MWM to amass wealth instead of it being entire point for MWM's existence.

I have absolutely no desire to "deny the developers the fruits of success". I have said at least four or five times throughout various posts in these forums that [color=green]I wish MWM every success in the world and I hope they make a gazillion dollars in profits[/color]. But let's not lose sight of the REAL goal to all this: a well maintained game that stays live and thriving on its servers for as long as possible: that's the cake. If they can do that and ALSO make a huge profit while doing it then that'd be wonderful icing on the cake. Let me be clear in saying earning that huge profit should be goal NUMBER 2 for them, not goal NUMBER 1.

If for any reason MWM loses sight of their primary purpose and simply becomes a money-grab that fizzles six months after launch because they only concentrated on taking our money instead of making a long-lasting game then they'll deserve their well earned failure. If they decide being a "BIG" game company is more important to them than being a "GOOD" game company then the dream is lost. This is why I said (in effect) they should concentrate on meeting the goal of making a good game instead of fostering a profitable business. If it's a good game then the long term profits will follow eventually.

Very exciting. And oddly, I'm most looking forward to seeing what we might get out of water effects. Wading across the bays in CoH was always a disappointment.

Thought I'd show something too! http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5WjwBPuL27I
I really hope the devs add alot of particle effects.

VDG wrote:

Believe me, we drool over particles like those.

So you're saying you're combining water effects with particle effects? :-)

+1 to Radiac for TMBG!

But can the UE4 handle Universe Man's graphics?

I think Triangle Man would get nerfed also. He wins every fight he gets into.

tinyspit wrote:

As i read the article from Rae & Warcabbit on this big joyful news, i wonder...
On the kickstarter it says that "950 000$, Tails ! we'll add several accessory tails" but Warcabbit said on his news "Animated tails are just the beginning. […]Thanks to Epic and Unreal Engine 4, we can do it all. And we can do it faster and better"
I want to ask : do, some levels of the kickstarter, be done before than what you plan and do the other will be done earlier ? :)
NB : sorry i'm not understandable ^^

It's pretty hard for any software development team to know (with 100% exact certainty) which features will or won't exist in a huge software application (i.e. MMO game) several years in advance. Basically I would never hold them to the exact listing of features that were given in the Kickstarter, especially for minor details like specific costume items.

Now it's probably fairly certain that we'll have a good, functional game in general. But whether that means it'll come with specific numbers or types of "animated tails" I'm sure there's no exact idea yet. Obviously getting to use the Unreal Engine 4 is great news for us so maybe that'll mean many of the things that were "unreached stretch goals" in the Kickstarter will be doable for launch. But then again maybe not - there's no real guarantee until we see what happens.

Lothic wrote:

tinyspit wrote:
As i read the article from Rae & Warcabbit on this big joyful news, i wonder...
On the kickstarter it says that "950 000$, Tails ! we'll add several accessory tails" but Warcabbit said on his news "Animated tails are just the beginning. […]Thanks to Epic and Unreal Engine 4, we can do it all. And we can do it faster and better"
I want to ask : do, some levels of the kickstarter, be done before than what you plan and do the other will be done earlier ? :)
NB : sorry i'm not understandable ^^

It's pretty hard for any software development team to know (with 100% exact certainty) which features will or won't exist in a huge software application (i.e. MMO game) several years in advance. Basically I would never hold them to the exact listing of features that were given in the Kickstarter, especially for minor details like specific costume items.
Now it's probably fairly certain that we'll have a good, functional game in general. But whether that means it'll come with specific numbers or types of "animated tails" I'm sure there's no exact idea yet. Obviously getting to use the Unreal Engine 4 is great news for us so maybe that'll mean many of the things that were "unreached stretch goals" in the Kickstarter will be doable for launch. But then again maybe not - there's no real guarantee until we see what happens.

This is basically the situation, yes.

Stuff on the KickStarter stretch goals list is a hard obligation; we *have* to meet those promises. That doesn't mean that you'll see things only appear "in order", especially things where we might need to do early prototyping in order to ensure that they behave right for things like physics... but those prototypes may or may not advance a lot beyond that point until we've gotten further on the actual obligations.

Case in point: a very basic tail of some sort is *likely* to show up relatively early, although it may or may not actually be listed in the Avatar Builder at that point -- not because we want to tease you, but because "basic" may well mean "just enough animation to make sure it interacts right with capes and long coats and such" rather than "animation we are comfortable calling good enough to 'publish'". Or it might turn out that we can do one or two of good quality but not the number that would have been guaranteed as available by hitting the $950k mark, in the early releases.

UE4 mostly makes things easier, but not all of those things are "created equal", either in terms of the original complexity or in terms of how much easier they get. It also may incur a few spots where we have to re-order our original plans because, say, during some given month Epic is in the middle of ripping out and replacing an entire subsystem with something far better, but that month happened to be when we were planning on doing thing X that needs that system to be functioning and stable. In fact, this has already happened at least once, and we've only been working on it for a handful of months now. That said, Epic is pretty good about not leaving stuff "up in the air" like that for very long, and about giving at least a short "road ahead" view so we know what to watch out for.

I'm also quite certain there will be some (good!) surprises we don't announce ahead of time. Either deliberately, or because someone has an inspiration and it ends up being a surprise to us as well. :)

So during my normal boredom during some work downtime I went trolling through press coverage of City of Titans and found some comments back during the kickstarter that the debs planned to write their own networking backend to fit the unreal 3 engine...regardless if that was true or false, I'm curious what sort of networking support the UE4 has. Can any light be shed on that yet or are the debs still NDA on the matter?

It's hardly a complete answer, but there is a quote from The Beard:

Doctor Tyche wrote:

If you'd recall in our update on the server technology, we said we were using Unreal's inherent server as our foundation. Those who think about it would realize that the server for Unreal is the client, running in a special headless mode.

Doctor Tyche wrote:

We tested Unity.
It managed to completely blow up with our test character model, failing to manage even simple vertex morphing. Looked like a porcupine.

Oh gosh.. I cant argue with that. ;D
Its happened to me too with models exported from Blender... but that was my fault. I didnt follow the right procedure to create and export the FBX for Unity. ;)

Morphing in Unity was broken. Only recently did they actually fix it. :P

Doctor Tyche wrote:

I've seen the fix, it still could not handle the level we're doing.

hehe... might i ask, what level are you trying to achieve? Not that i've ever used Maya btw. Just wondering. :)

edit: exporting to FBX 2010 or 2011 seems like the recommendation by others. link: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/210412-Using-Blend-Shapes-in-4-3/page3
(dont know why, but from the discussions it seems the Maya FBX exporter has a few bugs probably?!?)

What about Houdini? Did the same thing happen? Err.. im not even sure Houdini can do Blend Shapes. :/
(googled it.. [url=http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/nodes/sop/blendshapes]Houdini can do it[/url])

[Img]https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRAfwn6d4US8pEU06pzr-rLZ2htNXBoV6O1dIlpgtViAwRK3kOEpA[/img]

Looks awesome. If CoT ends up looking as detailed and realistic as that, it will look a quantum leap better than CoX did.

That demonstration of Custom Gravity looks like it would be very nearly ideal for deployment of a "wall crawler" styled movement utility Power. Just impose a crouched/prone style of quadrapedal animation of a human skeleton limitation (with reduced max speed cap) and you're practically "there" for implementation.

Assuming these "walk on non-horizontal surfaces" abilities can be applied to the person walking and so on (that is, assuming you can turn wallcrawling on and off for different toons based on powers they have) it all looks good to me for the purposes of wallcrawling, gravity control, telekinesis, magnetism control, cool mission maps that have weird physics to them (adds fun to the missions!"), and even to some extent makes traditional "wall scaling" easier to accomplish, I would think. Like ninja-ing your way up a wall with those metal spiked claw thingies they have, etc. The parkour power could probably benefit from it too. not to mention projectiles that actually move like projectiles. you could have a power where you lob a grenade and it makes a parabolic arc on its way tot he target, thus avoiding low obstacles, etc.

So imagine you're standing in front of a 10 foot high wall. You click on a power that works like Teleport did in CoX, i.e. a power that you have to choose a spot on the ground to "place" it. But this power is not TP, it's "lob grenade" and when you click to activate , it gives you the ability to place it on the far side of the wall. So you do that and then your toon lobs a high-arc toss of the grenade over the wall and takes out (or just debuffs maybe) the Outkasts on the other side before they even see you. you'd have to be able to make the wall itself go "transparent" or something just from the POV of the person activating (and choosing a location for) the grenade power though. I hope that's not too difficult.

Radiac wrote:

Assuming these "walk on non-horizontal surfaces" abilities can be applied to the person walking and so on (that is, assuming you can turn wallcrawling on and off for different toons based on powers they have) it all looks good to me for the purposes of wallcrawling, gravity control, telekinesis, magnetism control, cool mission maps that have weird physics to them (adds fun to the missions!"), and even to some extent makes traditional "wall scaling" easier to accomplish, I would think. Like ninja-ing your way up a wall with those metal spiked claw thingies they have, etc. The parkour power could probably benefit from it too. not to mention projectiles that actually move like projectiles. you could have a power where you lob a grenade and it makes a parabolic arc on its way tot he target, thus avoiding low obstacles, etc.
So imagine you're standing in front of a 10 foot high wall. You click on a power that works like Teleport did in CoX, i.e. a power that you have to choose a spot on the ground to "place" it. But this power is not TP, it's "lob grenade" and when you click to activate , it gives you the ability to place it on the far side of the wall. So you do that and then your toon lobs a high-arc toss of the grenade over the wall and takes out (or just debuffs maybe) the Outkasts on the other side before they even see you. you'd have to be able to make the wall itself go "transparent" or something just from the POV of the person activating (and choosing a location for) the grenade power though. I hope that's not too difficult.

Or you could do it like Gears of War, where you just choose the arc yourself

[img=480x320]http://portforward.com/games/walkthroughs/Gears-of-War-2/Gears-of-War-2-small-0432.jpg[/img]