With the new footage out it has me wondering:
In CoX there were some powers (mostly in the Stone Armor set) that either added onto your character's body (the infamous poo cage, etc) or then there was Granite, which turned you into a large rocky-looking hulkish type thing.
So, given that the game is separating function from appearance, will it be possible for us to have a power trigger a costume transformation, thus turning the "Bruce Banner" avatar into the "Hulk" avatar when the "Hulk Out!" power is activated, (also providing increased damage, buffs, various momentum effects, etc). Will we have to use Macros to accomplish this? Will there even be the possibility of textures and bodies like the Granite one, or will we have to just make a more-or-less human looking toon and color the skin grey if we want "stone skin" effects?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Why Radiac, what a clever man you are....
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
FYI, I love the new website look, despite the fact that I'm a Phillies fan and it's using the New York Mets color scheme.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
In my defense, I am color blind.
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
Seems like Radiac's question here would fall under the general answer of "we should hopefully be getting many more power customization options than we had in CoH". Beyond that if we also get a keybind system that's at least as good as CoH's was then there will be many things you can do with powers tied the costume changes. I used to set up things like that all the time back in CoH.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Personally I do hope that we get the ability to tie specific costumes to specific state changes, can't find it now but someone said we would be getting automatic costume changes for in-combat out-of-combat and "traveling" state. If we really do get those then extending it to other states and/or abilities would be all the beter, especially the short-term long-CD click buffs. Also having a number of costume change emotes to choose from, at least for when applying it, would be the cherry on top.
Sure, we can get by with using macros or similar but the big advantage of having it as an actual aesthetics option is that we won't have to time the removal of the "temporary" costume.
I'm all for them giving us more ways to link costume changes to various events or state changes.
But related to all this was one of those "necessary evils" that needs to be reevaluated for CoT. Back in CoH there was a timer imposed on costume changes which forced you to wait a full 30 seconds between changes. This was an arbitrary timer and there was no way to work around it. It was annoying to say the least.
Now some of the CoH Devs claimed the reason it existed was that it supposedly prevented griefers from bogging down the bandwidth of nearby players. The theory was that whenever someone close to you changed a costume it forced your game client to have to deal with the network messages involved to process that change. In principle if someone were able to flip between two costumes back in forth as quickly as possible (with no timeout) it could cause severe lag to everyone in the immediate area.
Now I'm not going to say that reason was complete BS because there probably was some truth to that rationalization. My contention now is that networking for internet-based games has gotten much better in the 12+ years since CoH was created and the need to have such a hyper-conservative timer is no longer justified. My suggestion is that if the Devs of CoT still think there is some value to having an arbitrary timer that they at least scale it back to say maybe 10 seconds instead of 30. Having a 10 second timer would be a reasonable compromise between mitigating the damage a griefer could cause and the total annoyance at having to wait a full 30 seconds for something that in a perfect world shouldn't have a timer imposed on it at all.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Or setting a costume change or adjustment to a power then having that sent to the other players in the area along with the regular costume data.
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
For manual costume changes I could see that that could lead to problems and a griefing potential, but if you set it as an aesthetic option for a power then it could be sent in the initial bulk transfer for when your character is in range of another. So you would already have that costume data when they activate said powers and thus no need for an additional transfer.
However, another thing that would also alleviate this would be chashing, that is if they don't transfer it in the initial bulk transfer if would be "saved" after the first activation/showing for as long as that characters data is kept active in the client (a.k.a they are in range). This would essentially limit the "griefing period" to the number of costume slots they have. These two techniques would save lots of bandwidth in the long run, for the price of a higher initial transfer of data amount and higher RAM utilization.
Besides, I'm only asking for a costume option on those powers where it would really makes sense.
Whatever works for that. I'm still suggesting that the 30 second timeout for a manual costume change in CoH was far, far too conservative and far, far more annoying than anything else. Setting it to something like 10 seconds would still prevent griefing and make the rest of us far happier.
Besides if you're serious about directly attaching costume changes to powers then I suspect people will figure out how to "spam" those kinds of costume changes regardless of any kind of timers you impose.
Bottomline you're going to have to rethink all of these issues related to costume changes.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I remember the Kheldians having transforming abilities too. Squid = Blaster, Lobster = Tank, human = controller. Atleast that's how it was in-game and Squid and Lob were always more recognisable than the actual name of the forms.
I played several Kheldians over the years in CoH and I generally liked how they worked. I didn't even mind how vulnerable they initially were to negative energy attacks and thought it was silly that so many people whined about that.
Anyway the real point of this post is to comment on the "squid" and "lobster" forms of the Kheldians. While it was cool that that did change forms the only real problem I had with it was that every squid and lobster looked exactly identical. In a game where getting to design your own unique costumes and body shapes was like half of what made the game great it was always almost annoying to have to give all that up and be forced into looking exactly like every other squid and lobster in the game. At the very least it got confusing when there were more than say 3 or 4 Kheldians on a team and it became hard to keep track of which one was yours.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I agree, though I imagine it might be somewhat difficult, though that being said if it were something designed from the bottom up or thought about ahead of time there might be something the group devs can come up with.
yup yup...did the same. most notably with the ole namesake. wings would "appear" when he flew and "disappear" when he landed. I would like to believe we would see something like that included (meaning the keybind system) when CoX goes live. it's a nice lil QoL to throw at players who want to spend the time to really dial in their characters in various ways. :)
[img]http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/whiteperegrine/84183/69278/69278_original.gif[/img]
Man, I wish I'd have thought of that!
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
Yeah I did that kind of thing with wings, auras and helmets too.
The biggest thing that prevented "costume binds with powers" from working 100% perfectly was the 30 second costume change timeout I mentioned earlier in this thread. For instance if you switched from a winged costume to a non-winged costume when you landed from flying you'd technically have to wait that silly 30 seconds before you could do the reverse. This is yet one more reason I hope they can greatly reduce (or even somehow eliminate) that arbitrary costume timer.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Seconded. I could understand a second or two between costume changes, but the 30-second one was WAY too long.
One of my alts, Moth, did as you're describing with her wings disappearing when she landed and reappearing when she took off. To get around the costume change limit (RP-wise) I said she just didn't bother to unform her wings when she didn't expect to stick around for more than a minute. Still annoying, though.
Hmm, this reminds me of the costume change emotes. I loved using those...
In theory the 30 second costume timer served a good purpose - to prevent people from spamming costume changes which would lag everyone out around them. But when they "solved" that problem they left us with a new one - imposing 30 second timeouts when you DON'T intend to grief anyone is annoying and needlessly harsh to innocent players.
Here's how I would do it to satisfy everyone: I would allow costume changes to happen as quickly as you wanted but I would still keep a running count of how many changes you've done in say the last 20 seconds. As long as you keep the number of changes down below say 3 changes per 20 second period then you're fine. But if you try to spam more than 3 changes within 20 seconds that's when a full 30 second timeout should kick in to prevent any further changes for a full 30 seconds. I've seen schemes just like this used to prevent people from spamming too much too quickly in text chat.
What does that all accomplish? Well oftentimes it would have been very useful to have been able to switch twice very quickly in case you wanted to do the "wings when flying" thing or even if you changed to the wrong costume and quickly wanted to correct it. With my solution the game would only start to punish you for costume changes once it was clear your only intent was to spam them multiple times as quickly as possible.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
That makes sense. The actual number of changes over a certain amount of time could be evaluated by data mining.
Sure... maybe like 5 changes within 30 seconds would handle this even better. The key point is that 99% of players would probably never again have to be "punished" for making a couple of relatively quick non-continuous costume changes.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
And to bring us back around to the original topic, the time limit on costume changes would have to take into account changes made via power use as well. We wouldn't want a power to be unusable due to a 30-second timeout being triggered. (Although it could always be designed to have the power trigger and just not trigger the costume change in turn.)
Powers should have their own recharge timers that work independently from anything else. At least that's how they worked in CoH. When keybinding a costume change to a power activation it's probably still going to need to be the responsibility of the player to use that particular keybind "when it makes sense" and to bullet-proof the keybinds to be able to handle the multiple possible scenarios regardless of what the power in question is doing.
The main thing that "removing" the unavoidable 30 second costume timeout would accomplish is that it would be much easier to coordinate using such a costume/power keybind when you can be reasonably sure the costume change will always happen whenever you pressed the button. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Oh, certainly. I was just thinking that if a power had an innate 'changes costume' attribute, it either shouldn't be counted towards the possible costume spamming counter or should be otherwise accounted for by the code.
Yep. Hmm, I wonder if we can get keybinds that utilize switch/case statements. :D
As long as you don't use the keybind with a power with a near-instant cooldown and then spam it repeatedly. ;)
Allowing players to create their own "features" with key-binds is a genius idea because it is a one-time effort on the part of the developers that allows players to creatively fake many features that they want. I had many characters who's auras turned on or who assumed a certain flight pose during flight, or who changed to a larger, more powerful form when activating a tier 9 defense power--all just using keybinds.
So, that's a long-winded way of saying "big ol'e +1"
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)