Oh OK that's cool
but I don't play mastermind types so
no I don't have a picture to post.

Fireheart wrote:

In fact, it would be nice if we could construct an attack rotation for them and have them stick to it on command.

+1

Much can be improved on the pets of masterminds. More customisation options for the appearence of them is just the start. I would like the powersets to have a very general theme. Not ninjas but stealth pets. Those could be ninjas, commando troopers, robotic drones with a stealth generator, undead assassins and so on. Not beast, but team oriented melee pets, which could also be gangmembers, undead soldiers, samurai spirits, melee robots and so on. I think you get where I am going.

[youtube]nC5h27sinjM[/youtube] [youtube]Z8GTxxGEdVM[/youtube]

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I'd be really surprised if the pets weren't handled similar to the PCs themselves. You know how powers are basically their game mechanics, with whatever animations and specifics you want? Like a fire set is about hurling fire, but it could be from your hands, your nose, your farts, a souped-up flamethrower, or whatever?
Why wouldn't Operator pets work the same way?
For example, you wouldn't have robots or mercs as the pets, you'd have beam weapon users, and you would simply build their models to be mercs or bots or whatever. With, of course, some defaults so a player doesn't have to spend three days setting everything up... if they don't want.

That's a pretty nice idea too. I'd be able to produce something interesting results for my operator, Gravemire, if that was put into place for Operator minions.

Undead with laser guns is a funny image

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Bleddyn wrote:
Undead with laser guns is a funny image

Laser guns... or beams of Hell's own light shooting from their eyes?
You decide!

I like the sound of that!

Kiyori Anoyui wrote:

Like Lin said It would be cool to have options of what pets you want. So if you had beast mastery all your minions could be dogs, or all cats, etc

Subject to availability of animal bodies like that, of course. Initially, all the bodies will probably be just bipedal humanoids.

Cyclops wrote:

Kiyori Anoyui wrote:
Like Lin said It would be cool to have options of what pets you want. So if you had beast mastery all your minions could be dogs, or all cats, etc

or...My Little Pony?
Sorry, that evil thought just popped into my head.

But that would make the anti-bronies cry

I urge you to do it now. Bigot tears amuse me

Kiyori Anoyui wrote:

Cyclops wrote:
Kiyori Anoyui wrote:
Like Lin said It would be cool to have options of what pets you want. So if you had beast mastery all your minions could be dogs, or all cats, etc

or...My Little Pony?
Sorry, that evil thought just popped into my head.

Hey, whatever you're into, I don't judge xD
Bleddyn wrote:

But that would make the anti-bronies cry
I urge you to do it now. Bigot tears amuse me

That.. was disturbing... I like it! =3

Heh...stick around then I specialize in writing disturbing stuff...........

Cyclops wrote:

Kiyori Anoyui wrote:
Like Lin said It would be cool to have options of what pets you want. So if you had beast mastery all your minions could be dogs, or all cats, etc

or...My Little Pony?
Sorry, that evil thought just popped into my head.

Dude, I named my robots after grade schoolers. You've got a ways to go.

You better believe that someday someone's going to deploy the Mane Six.

I want to make enemies scream in terror while allies suddenly appear to be backtracking 20 feet away from me via sending these out as minions [img]http://s29.postimg.org/jlomv320n/dead_space_3_stalker_by_betti357_d691svv_png.jpg[/img]

Hey....they would would be good stealth pets ([s]If they would stop screeching like raptors[/s])

Redlynne wrote:

The biggest limitation is going to be the avatar rigs. Bipedal. Quadrupedal. Hexapedal. Octopedal ... and so on and so forth.

It's even worse than that. Wolf quadripedal isn't like leopard quadripedal isn't like show horse quadripedal... they're all pretty much different animation sets.

I've seen a lot of games, heck, a lot of [i]anime[/i] get animal animations completely wrong. The latter is on Hayao Miyazaki's latest complaint list: he doesn't like how animators spend all their time inside grinding out drawings, and not outside watching the real world and learning from it.

Gorgon wrote:

Need someone to write efficient code for arbitrary-limbed creatures to actually walk over landscapes with foot placement cognizant of the land?

IK seems to be a difficult thing to do, so a dev whos a rocket scientist who LOOOVES MATH can have that job! ;)

On the pedality of things, I'd think floating pets would be easy. Either the floating Shard eyes or wisps or the Mu bound ones, but those still require new animations.

I'm still all for there being a type of Pet user who creates one customizable sidekick NPC

I've got this concept kicking around in my head of a person without powers, but has a single tame wyvern that they ride around the city.

Want that so much.

[img]https://media2.giphy.com/media/h2bpr4CWlwlJS/200_s.gif[/img]

I'm hoping that the pet sets are equally separated between mechanics and aesthetics as all other power sets, maybe even more so by being able to choose different "power sets" of the different tiers of minions. The absolutely best would be if we could build every individual minion in the same way we would build our own toons, with a large selection of presets for those who just want to get going or have a base to tweak.

However, I do not expect any less customization of Operator primaries than any other power set, which means that it would start with having a few types of minions that are thematically accurate to the set. How the themes will be done I don't know but I guess it will be slightly different compared to the rest since the "power theme" of the minions doesn't really have to match your own "power theme".

The best option would of course be to have both, quadraped (both "feral" and taurs") and many other types, like naga and robots with wheels/tracks, avatars and "character creation" level customization of pets. Just think, the ability to run around as a complete wolf pack or pride of lions and not just you controlling a pack of wolfs or a pride of lions. Or how about the other way around, you (as the player) as the "pet" while the henchman (single pet) as the "master".

Though I admit that having anything outside of bipedal humanoids in the character creator will be years, maybe even decades, down the line. If they consider it at all that is. Though once they create the basics of quadrapeds (and others) for the NPC's then it shouldn't be that big of a stretch to get a basic version in the character creator, since I'm assuming that they are making the basics for NPC's as "flexible/customizable" as they do for player characters. And I can't believe that there will never ever be any form of wildlife or non-humanoid pets or enemies (like the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Snakes]Snakes[/url] in CoH).

If MWM really have to choose one or the other then my vote is for "character creation" level customization of pets.

As for pictures, they need to be accessible from/to the internet and then just use the img-tag from either [url=http://www.bbcode.org/examples/?id=10]BBcode[/url] or [url=http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp]HTML[/url] with the full URL to the image.

Someone may have already mentioned this but....

http://cityoftitans.com/comment/91057#comment-91057

"Either way it is our hope to allow for a wide range of customization to summons sets. And it should go without saying but "nothing is set in stone" in this regard yet." Nothing is guaranteed, but apparently, they are considering customization for summons. Well, if it happens, guess my team would look something like this.

Yea....i am a big kid.....but seriously, some type of creation for pets would be great.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Yeah, I don't think the question really is if summons sets get some form of customization, but rather to what extent we will be able to customize them. At a minimum I expect the same level as the other sets, that is that the visuals are divorced from the mechanics.

Darn! And here i thought i would Finally get to fly with Falcore! :<

Just kidding. ;D

As a kid this was my fave movie, even more than Star Wars, as a kid. :)
1st time i saw that movie i was 7. I might have thought maybe books were special, but didn't see any pictures in a number of them.
That's Until I came across, Super Hero Comic BOOKS! :O

Rest is.. well..... I'm here, aren't I!? ;)

Ghosts! Zombies are fun, but how about some little poltergeists, spectral warriors, and other spooks?

No one has mentioned Clowns! The internet must be broken.

Be Well!
Fireheart

It would also be great if the medic didn't try to tank. Every time,Medic: "Wait guys I got this!" *dead*.

Phararri wrote:

I sort of, kind of hope we dont get too much customization for minions because it seems like it would take a herculean effort.
I just hope CoT has a variety of types.

I'd agree it might be hard for any game to allow for the customization of any kind of minion, especially if it tried to include literally any kind of standard animal or other multi-limbed critters. But I could see where being able to customize humanoid minions would be relatively simple - just let players individually create them via the avatar builder just as if they were new player characters. The game could let us create/save these unique people-shaped minions and let them be "assigned" as specific minions that would be castable via a summoner's pet/minion powers.

As far other animal/non-humanoids go the game could just add more unique types as time allows for.

Hero_Zero wrote:

Lothic wrote:
just let players individually create them via the avatar builder just as if they were new player characters.

+1
"THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!"

Especially since the competition is planning similar capabilities. One of the reasons I could not enjoy the MM was because I could not decide what my minions looked like and none of options offered appealed to me.

blacke4dawn wrote:

This is exactly what VO has said they are gonna do, but with a somewhat different set of costume pieces available and most likely a slightly different UI. There is a pretty big benefit in being able to share costume pieces in this way.

Did the VO folks give a good explanation for why they would make it so that a "different set of costume pieces [would be] available" for it? Perhaps they want to make sure players could tell the difference between player characters and minions based on what they can wear. If that's their reasoning then why allow for minion customization at all? I would probably find it annoying if a game let me do some minion costume customization but arbitrarily limited the system so that I didn't have 100% of the same options for minions as I do for player costumes.

I hope that if CoT considers this idea for humanoid minion customization that they will not impose limitations like that. Frankly it'd be a pain in the butt for the Devs to have to decide for every single costume item "Will this be allowable to minions or not?" It'd be far easier for everyone (players and Devs alike) if minions could simply wear any costume item the player character itself has access to.

blacke4dawn wrote:

There will obviously be many options that will differ between players and pets/minions, just as there are options for NPCs that are not available as player options.

I can see a legitimate reason why a game would always want to keep a few costume options as "non-player/non-minion" because they'd want some unique NPC bosses to have some unique clothing.

But I'm struggling to think of a good rationale why a game would not want pet/minion clothing to be 100% identical to what's available to players unless (once again) they wanted to make it incredibly clear what's a minion versus what's a player in the game environment. If that concern is actually not a big deal then I would continue to support the suggestion that whatever clothing is available to a player character should be available 100% to any minion they could summon. Think of it this way: If a character of yours has access to clothing item XYZ why shouldn't one of your own minions be able to wear the same thing?

Phararri wrote:

I am just shooting in the dark but maybe the quadrupedal like feline will have specific areas of creation, the arthropod etc etc. My guess is it will be a hassle to make a Frankenstein for animals; so maybe they will allow a little tweaks for your spider or scorpion, but the spiders will not have the options avian will, such as wings and beaks? They did say human can have animal visuals like horse bodies, so maybe the pets are limited?
I am going by the dev conversation but that is what it sounds like to me. Sounds like a family affair. Choose a family, tweak within the family's features? It seems crazy difficult to may a scorpion claw attach to your wolf, unless the creator is fairly extensive, almost like dev tools, where you can choose to put a part somewhere.
Just speaking generally.

Yeah pretty much everything I've been focusing on in the last few posts have been customization possibilities for humanoid minions and re-purposing the main player character Avatar Builder to do that. In the grand scheme of things that's probably far more likely to happen in CoT before anything else in terms of pets/minions.

Naturally I'd assume being able to customize animal-like pets/minions would involve an entirely different set of development issues and I wouldn't expect that to include thousands of options by Day One, if ever. If we eventually get a large number of different kinds of non-humanoid pets/minions for CoT they may provide more ways to customize those like what you're talking about. I'd guess being able to fully Frankenstein together things like ManBearPigs would be pretty far down the line.

desviper wrote:

blacke4dawn wrote:
This is exactly what VO has said they are gonna do, but with a somewhat different set of costume pieces available and most likely a slightly different UI. There is a pretty big benefit in being able to share costume pieces in this way.
Yeah, why even waste the dev time on limiting the costume sets? If there's confusion between if I'm fighting 1 PC and 9 minions or 10 PCs, I'd think it'd be clear on targeting, as it was for CoH.

Won't be that much dev time as you might think since it will just be entries in a database.

However, they never really said exactly what they meant by different. As Lothic pointed out, on the NPC side it is perfectly reasonable to "reserve" some looks for major actors in the Lore but for the pet/minion side it could be just that the inclusion of animals is the "difference".

Afaik that is technically still a factor but not nearly as big as before. Not only because we have more memory on the cards themselves but also due to more intelligent and efficient loading and handling, though everything you want to use to render a scene still has to be put into the cards memory before it can be used.

Tough the new [url=https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/amd-vega-gpu-specifications]Vega architecture from AMD Radeon[/url] will make card memory restrictions effectively a non-issue since they can utilize normal system memory and even SSD space as if it was card memory.

Huckleberry wrote:

If you can't make your minions look like a character, we would never have Snow Miser and Heat Miser minions. That would make me sad.

Exactly. There are countless examples of masterminds/minions in media where the minions are wearing outfits that are virtually identical to their master's outfit. I continue to see absolutely no reason why a so-called "humanoid minion customizer" in this game or any other should ever arbitrarily restrict any costume option that's otherwise available to my player character.

Lothic wrote:

Again the only theoretical answer I can imagine is that the Devs might think it'd be unfair (in PvP) if someone created a bunch of minions that looked identical to the player character. As confusing as that might be I'd actually think that'd be pretty awesome - even if I had to be the player that had to face a human opponent trying to confuse me with a half-dozen cloned copies.

I'm with you on this Lothic. I think that would be sucky in an awesome way.

One difficult but possibly interesting option is to require pets' appearances have at least one major difference. The difficult part being setting down what constitutes "major" in code.

The basic idea being that your pet can look just like you, except (choose at least one: taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, translucent, 2P colors, black on left instead of right, holographic flickering, no face, costume has "PROPERTY OF ___", leaves trails of oil, yes I know that's not oil, etc.).

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

One difficult but possibly interesting option is to require pets' appearances have at least one major difference. The difficult part being setting down what constitutes "major" in code.
The basic idea being that your pet can look just like you, except (choose at least one: taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, translucent, 2P colors, black on left instead of right, holographic flickering, no face, costume has "PROPERTY OF ___", leaves trails of oil, yes I know that's not oil, etc.).

If we get the ability to set costumes on a per individual minion basis, instead of the more likely per tier basis, then such systems can be gamed in other ways. The most obvious one would to make them individually different so that you can't tell what the difference is between the master and its minions.

As an example, if the only difference would be height and/or bulk then how would you detect the player if there are no one alike that you could eliminate as a "tier group".

This is why think that if MWM should do something about this then a marker that is not tied to the costume is the most efficient way to go.

Hope the player isn't blue/green colorblind. And you can probably mix up the costumes into a blue & green visual camo to make it hard to keep folks straight.

There's what Final Fantasy 14 did with player summons and standard nameplates. A player nameplate is displayed as a name, followed by the Free Company (basically a guild or supergroup) in brackets, while the summons display their name and the person they're attached to underneath

So my summoner is:
Patricia Baker ((hella))

and her summon is:
Ifrit-Egi
((Patricia Baker))

Immediately tells you what the pet is and who it belongs to. Add an easily identifiable symbol next to the name to denote the type of minion it is and you're golden.

I remember in CoH, the player had a red-orange nameplate, while minions had NPC nameplates of white, blue, yellow, etc. If I remember correctly.

Furthermore, I feel we should allow a multiple-man type Operator: an Operator that spawns near copies of himself. Having cosmetic differences totally brakes the RP of that.

For PvP, maybe put a tint over minions, akin to Dark Souls maybe. Minions get a subtle white shade over them, like Phantoms do in the beloved Souls.

Actually, I had a change of heart, again.

I would like to have different pets than the next guy. Everyone walking around with the same wolf or ninja dude is mundane and uninspiring. I think it is time to allow pet customization. Even if it they are only editable within the frame of their model, which means no hybrids,which is completely fine and more realistic. Are there even any mmo that allows pet customization?

This needs to happen though, huge summon customization would be awesome too.

Only Mastermind I wanted, was an army of catgirls, just to go around beating people up with :p Maybe each other different elemental powers, for a bit more of an anime feel to it. :)

Brand X wrote:

Only Mastermind I wanted, was an army of catgirls, just to go around beating people up with :p Maybe each other different elemental powers, for a bit more of an anime feel to it. :)

Catgirl Mistressmind?

The ability to create any one of these gangs from the classic movie [url=http://warriorsmovie.co.uk/gangs]The Warriors[/url].

Wolfgang8565 wrote:

Ive always had respect for Masterminds, I could never in my life play one. I tried it once and I just couldn't figure out how to play it right lol

Ironically I always had more fun with the supposed "non-control" I had over Fire Imps as a Fire Controller. After years of learning how to indirectly "heard" the Imps via moving my character around the concept of controlling henchmen individually (as well as myself) just proved to be far more "micro-management" than I ever had the patience for. I probably played several Masterminds for a few hundred hours but never really fully enjoyed it as much as the "move by themselves" nature of the Imps. To each their own I guess.

Wolfgang8565 wrote:

The way they PvPed was also amazing.

Also, perhaps ironically, Masterminds were usually the easiest type of AT for me to pop. Not that they were an inherently bad AT - I suppose I just ran across quite a few players who did NOT know how to PvP with them.