Where do the civilians come from? By civilians, I mean the non-targetable (for now), not-NPC, decorative citizens that should outnumber the combined players and NPCs. Are there a couple dozen pre-defined ones copied over and over and over, or are they randomly generated from a type of costume designer, or will the devs have to design up hundreds of individual Sims?
I have a couple reasons for asking...
1) If this will require lots of labor on the part of devs just putting together outfits for the population, I bet you could get them pretty well outfitted by releasing a 'character creator' that's pretty limited in scope (just civilian clothes, no Super costumes) and letting players populate the place while you work on the game. Save time, get people engaged, good publicity (hey, check out this dude I made that will be walking around somewhere)
2) Funding...would companies pay to have their logo on T-shirts in game? I wouldn't find it annoying to see some skate punk wearing a "Do the Dew" T-shirt.
3) Flavor. No idea how much of a pain this would be, but how about different flags for civilian clothes pieces like climate, purpose, style. Use RNG to crank them out based on geofencing and weather; on Sims in the business district with temps in the 50's would get built up from dress pants, shirts/ties, dresses and don overcoats in winter. Parks would have joggers in shorts in summer, outerwear and hats in winter. Again, this may be way too much of a PITA to waste limited resources on, but running around town and seeing the residents in business districts dressed differently than the harbor would be a nice detail, as would seeing some seasonal variety.
Thu, 10/10/2013 - 12:30
#1
Spawning civilians
I agree with you. If it will help the devs and the community is willing (I'm sure most of the community would be) then I would make a lot of civilians for them. Or, if they make, like you said, a rng costuming system as they spawn. That being said I think I'd like to make that unique civilian :) This is my post about costume ideas and you can follow the link to City and maybe expand on that idea. http://cityoftitans.com/forum/cot-costume-genre-list-and-ideas
Zekna, Black Mana Guardian. (sewer power leveler)
I think this would be a fantastic way to both save the devs some work, and let the players enjoy themselves~. And it could come with some pretty hilarious results that could add some fun. I can imagine running down the street with my character, only to come across a super fat manlady abomination.
And if there still weren't enough civilians running around still, or too many fugly ones, then the devs could come up with a way to fill the partially filled gap either with a random generator, copy/paste template, or just making them.
Well we know the Devs are still planing to release a "costume creator" app long before even having an alpha/beta of the actual game ready to go. It's always possible that they may allow us to create "civilians" for the game using that app.
The hard part would be for the Devs to have a huge range of "civilian" type costume items available and ready to go to make that a viable possiblity. I'm hoping the game will eventually have a huge number of costume items of all types but the problem would be having that much player accessable content front-loaded and ready from the very beginning for the costume app.
I think what's going to be more likely (in terms of overall game development) is for the game to start out with just a handful of standard "cookie-cutter" civilian NPCs just to get the ball rolling. Maybe eventually the Devs will allow us to submit unique civilians to help flesh out the background population. But that would probably be an ongoing post-launch process, not something they'd easily be able to support as a pre-launch thing.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Well, you know when a daddy civilian and a mommy civilian love each other really much.....
Technical Director
Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider
They get mugged while being oblivious of their surroundings? :/
With a teeny bit of Science!, and maybe the services of the best fertility clinic in the N.E.R.D., two mommies can do it. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Shape shifting daddies can do it too..
.. hmm.. fun cosplay opportunity for Folsom Stre.. nevermind
Crowd Control Enthusiast
With my mighty Lost changing wand, I could make a civilian all by myself.
Roight! Roight! That's enough of that! This sketch is getting too silly!
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Alright, Colonel Serious... and now for something completely different.
It would make sense to me, for civilians to spawn and despawn by using street-side doors, vehicles, and transportation hubs. What would NOT make sense (except in unusual circumstances) would be for 'Little Suzy Schoolgirl' to stroll over to a manhole cover and hop down into the sewers. An issue I found in CoH is that the civilians seemed to come out of nowhere, bound for no place in particular, and endlessly walk back and forth for no reason.
Even random NPC civilians ought to have some sort of story-plan for where they come from and where they're going.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Based on Fireheart's request, I see a SimCity simulation for Civilians in the offing.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
What are we offing civilians now?
There goes our T rating
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gswt1Azc9Rg]/rimshot[/url]
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
What if Sailor Superheroine popped up out of the next manhole cover down to battle supervillains shortly thereafter?
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I'd consider that to be unusual circumstances. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
The only problem I had with the CoH civilians that made me definitely pause and think "that's kind of silly" was that sometimes there seemed to be "civilian flash mobs" where a whole bunch of them would gather up into a horde on a given sidewalk for no particular reason. It was like all of their random movements synced up over many hours and made them end up in one place at one time leaving other nearby areas complete devoid of people.
Sure it would be nice if the pathing of the average CoT civilian could be a little more "scripted" so that if you actually took the time to watch any single one of them their activities would make sense beginning to end. Maybe UE4 has some built in tools that does that kind of thing better without too much effort. But for the most part it doesn't bother me too much if most civilians just sort of exist in the background without much rhyme or reason. Just as long as they stop bunching up in weird ways I'd probably be fine with it.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If you were to stand on the sidewalk of a busy street and just watch, you would see people walk by. Unless you either approached them to ask or followed them (both options being creepy) You would have no idea where they were going or what (besides walking) they are doing.
That's not to say we can't have better scripting. Try to avoid silly situations as Lothic pointed out. They could interact a little with the world. Perhaps we see an NPC stop to buy a hot dog from a cart, or enter a shop empty handed and exit a few moments latter with a bag.
Eventually a NPC will loop back to their starting point, but is it really such a thing to even worry about? It's like watching a movie looking for all the production errors that made it in the final cut. Most people are never going to notice unless you point it out, and even if you do, they really won't care.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Not really about spawning, but it would be nice to see family groups, joggers, and someone walking his dog.
Cape Radio did a [b]Derp Patrol[/b] one night in Atlas Park. The DJ would Follow a Civilian on the street, and everyone else would Follow the PC in front of them forming this long conga line chain snaking through the streets. Needless to say, it was QUITE ridiculous ... especially since the even ran for the full 3 hours of that DJ's time slot. It also conclusively proved beyond any shadow of a doubt that Civilians weren't *purposefully* going anywhere, they just made random "Derp" decisions about where to go next.
Watching the Derp Patrol tie itself into knots at street intersections was always worthy of hilarity.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
But people in the real world also do silly things sometimes.
Flash mobs are a real thing
there are people in the real world who like to sit and watch people in crowded places just for laughs because you never know why people are doing what they do
and most of the time it would be creepy to follow people around
the only reason you're doing it in the game without feeling like a creep is because you know the people aren't real
but if you were acting normally, you wouldn't notice that they weren't
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
Right... groups of people do form flash mobs and do other silly things from time to time in the real world. But what we are talking about here are very obvious software/pathing problems, not something the CoH Devs actually intended to create.
For instance there were examples in Independence Port where the street terrain would actually "corral" hundreds of civilians into single-file lines that walked around in vaguely circular patterns like they were on some kind of invisible slow moving merry-go-round. These problems were overtly obvious and visible from a mile away - you didn't have to be lucky or spend an hour following single civilians around to notice.
All I'm suggesting is that hopefully the Devs of CoT can establish some better pathing rules that will keep civilians from doing unmistakably "not normal" things. Individuals doing random (even derpy) activities are fine as long as they fall within the bounds of reason and don't involve half the NPCs in a given zone.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
This is again putting on my "what I'd like to see" hat, but my personal ideal would be for every NPC to be spawned with a "goal" in mind, and to have his pathing based on getting somewhere to achieve said goal. The easiest examples would be of the form, "Bob wants to go to the store to get food, and bring it back." Bob would spawn at an apartment building door, walk to a grocery store, go inside, then retrace his steps before unspawning at his apartment again.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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You definitely have to have a playground with a slide and then have people randomly walk up the slide and then slide back down again when they get to the top. That's key.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Let's not forget the pathing bug in King's Row that resulted in dozens or even scores of NPCs running in circles up and over that one mission entrance door. It was so common that they added a history plaque for it.
Which is functionally the way that SimCity was designed to work for modelling the SimCitizens, even as far back as SimCity 2. It was the way the game generated Traffic and determined the "load" on the city's infrastructure. Hence my comment about SimCity up above.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I like that hat! Makes me think of games like Skyrim, or even going all the way back to Ultima (5, I think?) where NPCs actually wake up, go to work, go shopping, farming, fishing, etc. and home in the evening. Of course, a modern city has more variants on the 'olde worlde' typical schedule, as well as a much greater population, but it would be interesting to see. Definitely not important for release, but it would be nice if the foundation were there to allow this sort of thing eventually.
Spurn all ye kindle.
N.E.R.D. Is already way past that and is now working on allowing two daddies to do it :)
It is just a matter of finding the right type of magic. Science and mutations did not work out so great apparently, and demonic magic produced some rather ... unfortunate results, so after the mess was cleaned up (and part of the city rebuilt) that line of research was shelved. In silver and lead shielded boxes and hidden behind a large variety of religious wards ...
Well, the twins are over six years old, now, so I should hope they (the N.E.R.D.) have made some progress. ^_^
The main problems with two daddies are (1) neither parent produces gametes with a full complement of mitochondrial DNA, so that must be worked around, and (2) the lack of a uterus for gestation, which necessitates either a host mother or a uterine replicator.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
With a little time travel, a female civilian could be her own surrogate mother.
This thread keeps tempting me to discuss the definition of "male" and "female" wrt seahorses.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Sea monkeys
It would be very nice if civilian NPCs spawned with a goal in mind, walked to the goal, and then returned. I'd hate to be the person tasked with scripting the hundreds (thousands?) of paths for game characters that are functionally no different than trees and grass. Adding AI capability to each one so players can stop them and engage in a short dialog would very quickly lead to infinite man hours dedicated to non-essential game elements. I'd rather see that time and creativity devoted to better missions and better mission narratives.
However, the one thing I definitely would like to see is more children and pets! A city is not just adults wandering to and fro. It is also children playing in the parks, dog sitters walking packs of different pets on leashes, guys with parrots trying to get people to stop and pay for photo ops, farmers selling produce out of the back of their trucks, so forth and so on. To make the city feel alive it needs people of all ages and all occupations.
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+1.
Oh wait... You must be thinking of the previous generation?
Nah, the children are probably in front of a TV. ;)
Not playing Catch, Not braking any windows, not walking the dog, not riding their bike, not playing jump rope, etc...
:{
Oh wait... not breaking windows Is Good! ;D
I'd love to see the children too, but due to rating board silliness we probably won't get to have children in our fair city. However, that wouldn't stop civilians from walking their dog in the city.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Yeah the question of NPC children roaming around in MMO games has always been a strangely touchy subject.
I think for the Devs of these games it's always been a question of not only trying to justify the extra work it would take to create the child body models but also the extra headaches of worrying about players getting upset with seeing children potentially put in harm's way in a video game. With both of these concerns in play it's fairly easy to see why most games just don't bother at all.
I hope CoT will ultimately be able to create all sorts of "background NPCs" including children. I think in practice it would be fairly easy to make sure that no NPC child is ever depicted being harmed by anything in the game. The real trick is if they could be worked into the game with so little extra effort that the worry about "keeping them safe from harm" becomes the only real implementation issue left to deal with. Perhaps UE4 will solve the "trivial to create" half of the problem at any rate.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
WoW has children in Stormwind/Ironforge. I can see more of a problem in a single City based game, but there is nothing to say that you cannot put the children into area's where no combat can occur....
Yeah it doesn't surprise me to hear that WoW has a few child NPCs running around - that game's obviously big enough that whatever Dev time/effort it took to create the special child body models was considered justified.
Again I think the CoT Devs could probably figure out a way to keep children "safe" easily enough even in its city setting. It'd be a valid concern but not a prohibitive one. The real twist is whether or not it's worth doing from an overall time/effort point of view. Obviously CoT does not have WoW's budget to play with.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
All depends as to *how* you are going about it. If they are going for a wide range of NPC physics, then I can actually see it being not all that much more time consuming than doing a "generic" normal NPC.
Probably the most time consuming part could well be the clothing... which I am sure that some players would want "adult sized" versions of anyway.
Creating the character models, including clothing, need not be a huge time sink. Using Mixamo (https://www.mixamo.com/) dozens of fully clothed child models could be created and rigged in a single day,
Animating them is another question, naturally.
I'm not sure I completely understand the morality issue. No one is suggesting child enemy NPC groups or child NPC involvement in missions as victims of enemy NPCs. The child NPCs would be nothing more than window dressing. No different than trees, park benches, or traffic lights. Maybe I'm dense, but I honestly can't see how that would upset anyone.
If anything, the biggest problem might be RP players who want a child for the virtual family or people who want a Mastermind (what are we calling them again? "Operators?") with a bevy of child thieves like the Artful Dodger. Both of whom I would suggest sending a very clear "No. Not now. Not ever." signal to.
Anyway. Children playing in the parks and running around in the neighborhoods is something I always felt CoX needed, especially on the hero side. Maybe even on the villain side. Out here in the real world children manage to find opportunities to play games even in war zones.
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How many players, once they see child NPC's will get the idea and say... "HEY, I wanna Make a child PC that fights and beheads foes with BLOOD splatter!" ;)
If NPCs are targettable (say, by more lawless, honorless, violent PCs who want to show what monsters they are), then it would seem arbitrary at best if "child" NPCs were exclusively untargettable. Why can't Evil Eddie bully that random citizen? He can! ...well, why can't he steal the ice cream from that 7-year-old?
...though admittedly, having wandering micro-quests like "steal the ice cream from little billy" would be humorous, if only for the ridiculousness of supervillains caring about the little kid's ice cream.
Anyway, the "morality issue" is a concern over PCs being able to target and abuse child NPCs.
It could be directly prevented, but that would mean having some sort of arbitrary distinction between targettable and untargettable NPCs, which impacts consistency of presentation.
I'm not coming down on one side or the other of the debate, here, mind. I'm simply outlining the reason it's a concern and one of the reasons child NPCs are tricky from a Moral Guardians standpoint.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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I think much of the "moral weirdness" surrounding children appearing in MMOs has to do mostly with of the history of MMOs themselves. Remember that even today a huge majority of MMOs are still set mainly in medieval, fantasy and/or sci-fi COMBAT oriented settings that don't really lend themselves to having too many peaceful places for children to hang around in. I think most people have at least unconscious hang-ups with the idea of children being in potentially dangerous war zone type places even if it might be "realistic" for them to exist there. Games like CoH and CoT are relatively unique in that children are practically expected to be seen in the backgrounds of modern urban environments as opposed to being something that would be "unexpected" to see in those other traditional game settings.
Then there's the whole idea Izzy brought up of RPing either as or with child characters. The superhero genre does have a precedent for having children with superpowers so based on that alone it should be an option for players. On the otherhand as soon as you'd allow players to directly have or interact with child characters I'm sure all manner of ugly/naughty things would start to happen.
It's going to be a tough call for the CoT Devs regardless. Do they let the door open enough to allow for completely unharmable/untargettable neutral children NPCs (which Segev points out would make them questionably functionly "different" from adult NPCs) only to deal with unforeseen consequences or not? I guess we'll see.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Thus my use of "rating board silliness". To you, me, and many other people children just as moving scenery would give us no moral qualms, because we know they can not be hurt in any way by the NPCs or PCs. But to others the appearance of being in danger, say our moving scenery's trip takes her by an adult civilian being mugged, is enough to justify a M rating for the game.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Maybe only have child NPCs in noncombat areas?
Personally I'd be just as offended if a PC were able to do something to a parent pushing a stroller as doing something to a kid
I also think the devs would have to sign up for a much higher level of RP oversight for child toons. If the game is wildlysuccessful, add it in a later update but otherwise I'm not sure the cost would justify the benefit
CoH's character builder did allow one to make heroes with a pre-teen appearance. I had a few, but they were all Controllers and Masterminds, so they were somewhat distanced from the mayhem. No 'Kick-Ass' levels of violence.
Not once, did someone in our fine CoH community offer one of my children offense. Granted, I did not hang out in any of the RP centers and none of the kids were on Virtue, which may have been some protection from people saying, "Hey, little girl, would you like some candy?"
I don't think we need to worry overmuch about limiting the models to 'adult'. Just keep the kids out of the warzones.
Be Well!
Fireheart
As long as the CoT character creator is flexible enough with the standard adult body models so that we can make semi-decent looking "preteen" characters we'll probably be fine. I'd agree you could in fact make shorter, child-like characters in CoH but I would argue the inability to reduce the female chest size lower than maybe a C-cup bra size sort of ruined the effect at least for the girls - they always just looked like tiny adults to me. *shrugs*
Regardless if they ever do make purpose-built child models they should probably be strictly kept "NPC only" just to avoid most of the problems we've covered here.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I dealt with the chest issue by using bulky chest items, or loose-fitting ones. Like this: [URL=http://s105.photobucket.com/user/fireheart5150/media/KittenDreams1.jpg.html][IMG]http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m207/fireheart5150/th_KittenDreams1.jpg[/IMG][/URL] <-- Clickable
That said, I'm hoping that CoT's Character Creator has an effective chest-slider, so I can use a wider variety of costume pieces. Alternately, well, I played those child-characters for several years, so I could just decide that their CoT incarnations have grown up a bit.
But it would be much cooler if all of the models in the game could be created with the CC. Including any exclusive costume items. That way, if they ever got released, they would be properly usable.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Sure there were a few costume choices that did a semi-decent job of "concealing" the situation. Gods know I spent hundreds of hours in the CoH costume creator overall so I did manage to get by with a few designs for my younger alts I could live with. Still at its best it was hardly optimal.
This specific topic has actually come up in other threads and according to the Devs the CoT female body model is supposedly going to allow a greater range of "chest sizes" than CoH did. They didn't think that absoutely "flat chested" would be possible - but they did imply that the low end of the scale would go much flater than CoH allowed for.
Obviously time will tell but any improvement in this area would be great not only for making younger girls but even waifish adults as well. I have no problem with "[url=http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140804180353/marvel_dc/images/f/f7/Power_Girl_0020.jpg]Power Girl[/url]" sized superheroines but not every super powered female is going to have a supersized rack as well. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Noooooooooooooo
The real question should be... how will they handle certain costume pieces?
ex:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/KMjjLpS.jpg[/img]
It would seem that the mesh for the whole Torso was swapped out, or morphed to accommodate a costume piece.
Meaning, in a few cases.. boob sliders were mostly ignored. :/
Is this acceptable for this day and age costume pieces? :P
Not exactly sure what you're upset about but I think the following examples will show that waifish "non-top-heavy" heroines can still look great.
[img=300x220]http://www.scifinow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/87561_summer_glau39_122_76lo.jpg[/img]
[img=300x200]http://images8.alphacoders.com/480/480226.jpg[/img]
[img=300x200]http://i57.tinypic.com/24mewjt.jpg[/img]
[img=200x300]http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/10/105264/4344380-1775158458-12539.jpg[/img]
My point here was that CoH didn't really allow for relatively small sized chests even with adult sized females which was a limitation of the game as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah I think much of the limitation had to do with how various static costume items interacted with the body models in CoH. Hopefully the more modern software technologies being used for CoT will not "lock" the body models into such limited ranges of sizes/shapes.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I was joking ...
Like it was obvious...
Next time use a smiley face or something. ;)
For what it's worth I have seen OTHER people argue in forums like these that the only kind female characters there should be in superhero games are Power Girl clones. For all I knew you were one of those people. Again I have nothing against top-heavy superheroines - just clarifying there should always be other options.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Ok ;)
There is a tongue-in-cheek game whose name I cannot remember, but whose theme is "badass gun-toting women," which has "classes" that include the Holy Rollers (aka nuns with guns and fast cars) and Batwinged Bimbos from Hell (what it says on the tin), amongst a few others.
The latter of the two I named have a defect called "top-heavy," which gives them penalties to balance as their abnormally high center of gravity can cause them to topple. They are, as the game puts it, at risk of "falling forward and almost, but not quite, smacking face-first into the floor."
This same game - while I'm on the tangent - had a flow chart for determining what sort of damage was done to your vehicle if you were shot at while driving. There is a box in it which asks if you have a dashboard gewgaw (e.g. a hula dancer, bobble-head doll, etc.), or mirror ornament (e.g. fuzzy dice). If you do, the bullet takes out this item, but does no further damage. If you do not, it keeps going on the flow chart and likely hits something more vital.
Yes, your dashboard decoration is effectively [i]armor[/i], thanks to genre convention.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled video-game discussion.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
With no intention to reinforce the tangent, the game you mean might be [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Eyes,_Small_Mouth]Big Eyes, Small Mouth[/url].
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Nope. [I]Macho Women with Guns[/i].
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Wow. I never thought of "Russ Meyer movies" as a videogame genre before. Do they have a Kickstarter I can contribute to? ;)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
It's a PnP game, actually, and it's been out for a while. Foradin got the name right; as I said, I couldn't remember it, but upon reading his post I recognized it. It's at least 8-9 years old, now, as I first heard about it when I lived in the dorms, and there have been 5 years in college but not in the dorms and nearly 3 years of being out of college since then. DriveThruRPG seems to have it for sale for about $6 as a pdf, and credits Mongoose publishing. (result of a quick google search)
BESM is a personal favorite PnP system of mine, but definitely is not Macho Women With Guns. BESM CAN be run that tongue-in-cheek, but is not inherently so.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I know that costume! And that character (MINE)! :D
[url=http://www.btrc.net/oddsrpgs/mwwg]Macho Women With Guns[/url] was followed by Renegade Nuns on Wheels (added vehicle rules), Bat Winged Bimbos From Hell, then Macho Women With Guns the Final Chapter (part 1!), and finally ... More Excuses to Kill Things.
As gloriously ridiculous, tasteless and tacky as all of that sounds (and the writers played it up beyond the hilt!), lurking underneath all of that is an actually decent game system designed for tabletop wargaming and RPG play ... and yes, I own all of those books. *^_^*
Still, for my money, the best product to come out of the [url=http://www.btrc.net/]Blacksburg Tactical Research Center[/url], the people who made and sold Macho Women With Guns, is ... [url=http://www.btrc.net/3g3][b]Guns! Guns! Guns![/b][/url]. Mein Gott Und Himmel! 3G is quite possibly the BEST be all, end all, RPG resource for firearms ever produced in the western world. [b]I >FNORD!< YOU NOT![/b]
A friend of mine who is an electrical engineer once asked me to give him a firearm equivalent to the energy stored in a bank of capacitors used in a circuit board he was building, knowing that the capacitance was already [i]well in excess of what could kill a human[/i] from a sudden discharge. My friend needed a way to ... impress ... upon the assemblers that if anything went wrong during assembly, DEATH would be a very likely result. So he gave me the power capacity in Joules, I pulled [b]Guns! Guns! Guns![/b] off the shelf, went to the ammunition tables and looked up the equivalent gunpowder charge (at our present tech level).
Answer? [b]12 gauge shotgun shell[/b].
Needless to say, my friend was rather ... pleased ... to have such an obviously LETHAL reference point of equivalent energy (easily understood by Rednecks) when explaining to assemblers that Doing It Wrong™ could result in Life Ending Injuries™ from having the equivalent to a shotgun shell's worth of ELECTRICAL energy discharge rather violently (complete with molten metal fragmentation effects) into the face of the assembler (at very close range) who hadn't paid attention to the lecture he was giving them right then and now. I am told that there was a sudden rather ... earnest interest ... in safety precautions concerning that particular piece of hardware from that point onwards ...
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Why would random civilian NPCs be targetable or attackable? I would NOT favor this idea. It would be no different than a destructible cityscape. Civilian NPCs are just background. Entertaining and sometimes enlightening, but still just background. It seems to me it would be very poor game design to have players standing around busting up the background.
Non-destructible cityscape. Non-attackable civilian NPCs. Let the sadists go play League of Legends.
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Torchwood, Children of the Earth (series 3)
has a couple of unbearable moral dilemmas for heroes regarding children. Including one that will keep you up at night if you put yourself in the place of the person forced to make some of these decisions.
The first thing I always do in character creation, if at all possible, is to push the breast size slider all the way to the small side.
That at least brings her to a D or E cup and does not give me sympathetic back aches just watching my avatar in the game.
What game are you playing that the slider at the minimum still has them that big o.O
I'm thinking anything controlled by Korean or Chinese companies ... with a few notable Japanese ones thrown in for good measure ...
"You always want what you can't have."
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Children are something I would like to see in the game because it would just be weird not to see them.
They should be untargetable, unless they're combatants, even if it means we have a special (and therefore inconsistent) rule to make it so.
You should usually have them run away and completely disappear when fights break out. but sometimes I want to rescue them.
Yes sometimes they should be combatants. As Lothic pointed out, there is a longstanding precedent for Child superheroes and even a few (Very few) Supervillains, and one famous child who's a murdering vigilante (Hit Girl).
You might not remember this, and it probably seems strange to you, but there was a time when most people thought superhero stories were supposed to be for kids. In fact at one time anyone over the age of 13, who admitted that he liked comic books was likely to be seen as retarded.
The comic book industry spend a lot of effort for years to overcome this prejudice but I think they went too far, now most of the comics aren't suitable for children and it makes me feel like we stole the comics from the kids. Please don't do that with this game.
If I play, my children will play, and they will want to make toons that look like themselves.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
In Elder Scrolls Online you can find children in major cities (ie. "safe" places) but not out in the wilderness.
Doing this in City of Titans would fold back towards my notion of having [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/world-pve-control-points-city-titans]World PvE: Control Points[/url] in City of Titans, in which the NPC Faction that holds sway at a particular Control Point determines that cast and character of an entire neighborhood.
So if the TCPD has "ownership" of a Public Park Control Point, then there will be kids playing in the park and civilians strolling around freely and openly, people enjoying picnics, and a Police Presence watching over everything [i]when there isn't an active battle for the Control Point[/i] (ie. during the "lulls" in the action).
If the Mooks have "ownership" of that Public Park Control Point, instead of having a family fun atmosphere you'll be seeing a part of the city that is "run" by organized crime with Muscle Men in suits overseeing the "order" that they have imposed upon the neighborhood.
If the Anarchists have "ownership" of that Public Park Control Point, you'd see trash can fires and gang bangers vandalizing anything and everything on the streets.
Note that the [b]geometry[/b] of the location wouldn't change ... but the population and activities happening within it would. That way, a single neighborhood can wear multiple different faces ... somewhat like City of Heroes did with the differences between Day and Night (which, of course, happened on a regular cycle of 12 minutes each). But instead of tying those differences to a preset Day/Night cycle which the Players cannot influence, Control Points would have battles that Players can participate in to influence the outcome.
Get "enough" Control Points in the city and you'd have a diversity of neighborhoods that aren't always filled with the exact same stuff standing around waiting to get knocked over by Players. You'd also open up the possibility of Turf Wars between various NPC Factions, leading to the rise of "politricks" and a motivation to fight for the city (including Take Back Our Neighborhood! movements).
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
All I ever wanted from this is to be able to have a slider that would span all the way from "Flat" to "Power Girl". The problem CoH had was that it only allowed for the "C/D cup" to "Power Girl" subset of that spectrum. Sadly you could never get close to "Flat" in CoH no matter what you tried.
If CoT can get any closer to providing the other half of the human female breast size spectrum I'll be happy. To me this limitation was as weird as it would have been if we were all forced to make our chracters 6ft or taller. Just saying there are plenty of people who are shorter than 6ft tall...
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
People today still think cartoons and comic books in general (whether superhero or not) are for kids (and notably male children). I'd say it's far from being thought otherwise.
Doesn't matter if adults used to read them and openly did so, it's become very much a "child" thing at least in the US (I won't speak for other countries, but I'd wager it's likely the same in Europe too).
While it would have been great to have, I figured some of it was a limit of their engine (or maybe thinking "Superhero MMO" ...though slider all the way to the left kept you out of most common super power category,just didn't make you flat).
CO can allow you to get flat for instance, but it starts screwing with almost all the outfits, if not having the chest look to point outwards.
I don't even think DCUO gives you an option really.
FFXIV actually let's you go pretty far down, but not far up (for humans anyways).
Been awhile since I checked out Aion, but I thought it allowed you to go pretty much go in either direction.
So, with UE4 maybe this won't be a problem? Could have been an engine related (DCUO likely related to being PS3 playable).
Oh I realize CoH's problem in this area was at least 99% due to the limitations of the engine/body model they had to work with. I'm not trying to accuse the CoH Devs of arbitrarily setting the breast size range they gave us on some kind of whim just to piss us off. In fact knowing that they couldn't give us every possible size (flat to huge) it made sense that the subset range they did end up giving us tended to be on the "bigish" side which applied well enough for most cases in a superhero-based game.
The Devs of CoT have actually already told us that their UE4 based body models will allow for a greater range of small versus big in the female chestal region. They already explained how it probably still wouldn't be possible to go all the way down to washboard flat - again based on inherent design limitations. But as I said if they can get the minimum down to be noticeably more minimal than CoH allowed for it'll be a step in the right direction.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I really don't think that's true anymore.
People associate comic books with nerds of any age.
Just look at "Big Bang Theory"
The target audience for most superhero comics is from 13 to 30.
A lot of the stories and art are just not appropriate for children at all.
and comic books aren't even sold in a lot of places where kids used to get them.
Now they're mostly available only through specialty shops or subscriptions or online.
This limited availability keeps most kids away unless they just happen to live near a comic shop.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
For the Marvel comics I read, I don't see them bad for anyone 12 and up, but I know plenty of people who still see it that way, even when they don't think of the movies that way.
Although there are plenty of people who still feel comics, animation, and video games are just for kids, they are slowly dying out as the 18+ market continues to grow. Another generation and it will be a non issue.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame