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Emotes in Character Creation

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Cyclops
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Emotes in Character Creation

******* Disclaimer: This may not be practical, but it would be cool ***********************************

OK, that said the latest video release was about character creation, and had the figure dance, do silly stuff, and play the air-guitar.
In COH we could see the animations for all the powers in Character creation

Somewhere the Devs said we could do poses in CC, so how about a few emotes?
the air guitar would be cool. dancing is a must. would it be difficult just to make them ALL available?

How about walking/running on an invisible treadmill? We could move the camera 360 degrees while the avatar stays center screen.

Frankly this is a quality of life issue, and the CC needs to come out sooner rather than later...but this would make for a cool addition down the road.

Oh and the store needs to sell facial expressions for us role players, and animated talking to go with expressions...I am so making movies!
and Raquel Welch hair... You know the poofy 60's style...I want to at least purchase that. you could make a whole retro hair pack for sale.

Devs, please tell the whole crew that you guys ROCK!

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Considering that we will get

Considering that we will get to choose from all the appropriate attack animations for our primary secondary and travel sets (no idea how they intend to handle tertiary sets in this regard) then most of the work in including emotes would most likely lay in the UI, getting that looking good, since the code needed would already be there, just need to have it request a different "group" of animations for selection.

I agree though that this doesn't need to be in the initial stand-alone one but can be included later on, preferably launch imo.

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blacke4dawn wrote:
blacke4dawn wrote:

Considering that we will get to choose from all the appropriate attack animations for our primary secondary and travel sets (no idea how they intend to handle tertiary sets in this regard)

Well, if the Tertiary powers will simply be powers from the Primaries and Secondaries, I'd be shocked if you weren't able to select their animation as well.

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Interdictor wrote:
Interdictor wrote:

blacke4dawn wrote:
Considering that we will get to choose from all the appropriate attack animations for our primary secondary and travel sets (no idea how they intend to handle tertiary sets in this regard)
Well, if the Tertiary powers will simply be powers from the Primaries and Secondaries, I'd be shocked if you weren't able to select their animation as well.

They have said that there will be aesthetic decoupling for tertiary powers, and they want to bring it out for temp powers as well, but my main concern is the selection UI for it, and how we "save" it to a costume slot. Don't think it would really be appropriate to have that in the CC since it has a high chance of "overwhelming" people.

My understanding though of tertiary sets is that they will be either "weaker" version of AT powers (like a weak summon) or those that can't really be placed within particular sets (like combat movement).

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And, being Tertiary powers,

And, being Tertiary powers, we probably won't be seeing them during the initial character creation.

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We have discussed including

We have discussed including the possibility of including a emote function in the character creator. Unfortunately, I'm out of town and tired from anweekend of intense training in an unrelated (to the game) opportunity and can neither recall the details if a decision was reached, if it was put on a qol list or not. I will track the post and bring it up when I get back home and talk to the team (if no one pops in bere before then).


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I think it'd be neat to have

I think it'd be neat to have the emotes in the Avatar Builder.

However, any issue solved my having emotes in AB would be solved by giving 1 free costume change token on creation. That way, if something looks great in the AB but awful in-game, you can change it. Maybe limit it to an hour or something to prevent abuse?


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If one saved the costume,

If one saved the costume, before finalizing the character, one could delete and reset fairly quickly? Or, perhaps, Level 1s have free costume corrections?

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Run a low level mission that

Run a low level mission that gets the attention of a publicist. The publicist then sends you to a designer she knows who can work on your image. There you can try out any new costumes and looks you want and you get one change for a moderate price, to be paid off in the form of another mission for the designer. There you have one free low-level costume change in case people don't like their original character look.

The publicist then also becomes a mission generating NPC for missions that build up influence, assuming influence is the in-game currency. And you can even sign off at your publicist's PR firm for a day job that protects your influence from depreciating.


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The last few posts in this

The last few posts in this thread have touched on how CoH used to "charge" for costume changes and various ways to avoid it for low level characters. It's probably worth a quick generalized discussion about how to best handle that issue in CoT for -any- level character.

Back when CoH first started the costs for costume changes were fairly significant for anyone who liked to tinker with their outfits. In fact those costs were just about the only legitimate "money sink" in the game, especially for high level characters. But as the game progressed the Devs not only tossed out costume change tokens like candy but significantly reduced the basic INF cost for costume changes. Combine all that with how easy it was to horde INF and eventually the "cost" of costume changes were effectively insignificant. For instance by the end of the game I had some older characters that were not only sitting on billions of INF but also had like 70 or 80 costume change tokens they had never used.

Basically it was clear the whole idea of even "charging" for costume changes became questionable at best. Yes I can accept that it makes sense that people should have to pay SOMETHING for costume changes. But should CoT even attempt to make it a huge money sink that negatively affects newer players and/or low level characters harshly but barely applies to long-time players?

Huckleberry wrote:

Run a low level mission that gets the attention of a publicist. The publicist then sends you to a designer she knows who can work on your image. There you can try out any new costumes and looks you want and you get one change for a moderate price, to be paid off in the form of another mission for the designer. There you have one free low-level costume change in case people don't like their original character look.

The publicist then also becomes a mission generating NPC for missions that build up influence, assuming influence is the in-game currency. And you can even sign off at your publicist's PR firm for a day job that protects your influence from depreciating.

Huckleberry's idea of a "publicist" is an interesting one. Instead of just making a player have to have X amount of INF for a costume change or using a change token the whole idea of having to "pay" for a costume could be worked into the game and become part of a series of missions. Remember that the CoH Devs didn't even really want "change tokens" to be a permanent solution because they only intended them to be a quick fix for broken costume items. I read in the forums years later where some of the CoH Devs kind of regretted introducing them to the game because like anything else many people just horded them or used them for unrelated high cost makeovers. Coming up with alternatives to tokens and/or INF would probably help CoT in the long run.

P.S. It's also worth mentioning that the CoH Test Server was the perfect place to try out costumes before you "did it for real" on your home servers. I probably spent hundreds of hours (and billions of "fake" INF) there. We can only assume that CoT will eventually have a test server of some sort but if it does then that's where I'll experiment with costume designs before I actually "pay" for them regardless of what CoT wants as payment.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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I'd prefer the "cost" of

I'd prefer the "cost" of changing a costume to be "next to nothing" so that it isn't a barrier to playing Barbie Dress Up.

You could do something like having a "square scale" IGC cost (1 IGC for first change, 4 IGC for the second, 9 IGC for the third) which tracks the number of times you change your costumes around, and then just have the "number of changes" get reduced by -1 every day synched to "server maintenance times" (whenever those are going to be). So a costume change that would cost you 16 IGC yesterday, will cost you only 9 IGC today (42 vs 32 IGC cost). This means that the only people who get charged ludicrous amounts of IGC for changing costumes are the people who are *constantly* changing their costumes around (did I hear a Clothes Horse just gallop by?).


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

I'd prefer the "cost" of changing a costume to be "next to nothing" so that it isn't a barrier to playing Barbie Dress Up.

This is effectively what I was getting at. I agree there should always be some nominal "cost" to making any given costume change but I'm not really sure it needs to be level-dependent like it was in CoH. Why do we have to assume that a total makeover for level one character would always cost a tiny fraction of what it would cost a level 50 character? Maybe your level one guy is a Batman-esque billionaire who wears super high-tech stuff and my level 50 guy is a beach bum who wears t-shirts and flip-flops.

Redlynne wrote:

You could do something like having a "square scale" IGC cost (1 IGC for first change, 4 IGC for the second, 9 IGC for the third) which tracks the number of times you change your costumes around, and then just have the "number of changes" get reduced by -1 every day synched to "server maintenance times" (whenever those are going to be). So a costume change that would cost you 16 IGC yesterday, will cost you only 9 IGC today (42 vs 32 IGC cost). This means that the only people who get charged ludicrous amounts of IGC for changing costumes are the people who are *constantly* changing their costumes around (did I hear a Clothes Horse just gallop by?).

Clearly there's no functional reason why the game should prevent players from spending hours changing their outfits countless times. But from a roleplay perspective I could see if a hero is changing their outfit every 10 minutes it would be hard for the public to accept that so there should be a "penalty" for too many quick changes.

Your suggestion here would definitely encourage players to keep the number of "quick multiple" changes down to a minimum. My only comments are that if "costume change cooldown timers" are going to be used there probably ought to be a timer per costume slot not just per character (because one timer might unnecessarily screw over people who had say 5+ outfits and just wanted to make a common eye-color change to all of them) and I'd probably make the cooldown period say one hour instead of one day. Remember we'd basically only want to "encourage" a player to not make a huge number of quick changes not outright make the situation overtly annoying.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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desviper wrote:
desviper wrote:

I think it'd be neat to have the emotes in the Avatar Builder.
However, any issue solved my having emotes in AB would be solved by giving 1 free costume change token on creation. That way, if something looks great in the AB but awful in-game, you can change it. Maybe limit it to an hour or something to prevent abuse?

I have to disagree since the underlying issue is that you can't see how the costume pans out together with emotes (and presumably different environments) until after you have hit "done", and that is not solved by handing out free costume change tokens because you still can't see them working together until after you've hit "done". Counting on that players will be able to not only remember the emote animations but also being able to accurately imagine how those will make the costume "flow" is ridiculous imo.

Lothic
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It would be awesome if we

It would be awesome if we could get all sorts of "extra" features in CoT like emotes in the costume creator or even access to something like a little miniature "holodeck" inside the costume creator so that we could have a space to run around and truly asses the costumes BEFORE you actually pay for a costume and leave the costume creator. But as I mentioned before CoH already provided the ultimate "costume checkout" tool without any of that fancy stuff... they called it the Test Server.

Now obviously relying on something like a Test Server to solve these problems assumes there will be a Test Server for CoT but the chances for that seem fairly likely. Assuming that's the case the Devs could save all the additional time it would take to create those extra fancy features and focus on other things.

Trust me when I say it was always worth the effort to "test drive" costume changes on the Test Server, especially for major makeover changes that were going to cost millions of INF. In that environment you could make as many changes as you wanted because you weren't spending "real" INF or "real" tokens. Also if more people were willing to make use of the Test Server for this kind of thing the pressing need/desire for a bunch of extra costume change tokens would be eliminated. Remember as I mentioned before the CoH Devs actually admitted that the whole idea of "costume change tokens" didn't work out the way they intended and more or less implied they were a mistake. If the CoT Devs listen to that its possible they will try to design CoT WITHOUT costume change tokens. If that's the case then using the Test Server as the "costume test drive" area would become even that much more important.

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I started a thread similar to

I started a thread similar to this already. I didn't mention emotes specifically in it, so i didn't think it was worth mentioning here. But now that this thread has moved on to discuss what your character looks like in different scenes and lighting conditions, I feel it is time to mention the other thread.

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/early-benchmark-and-character-creator

If the character creator also includes a benchmark test it accomplishes two things:
1. It allows you to see your character in actual game content with the actual graphic settings that your computer can support. You can even use it to see your character in graphics settings you know your computer can't support smoothly for gameplay, but which will allow you to see how other players with better rigs would see your character.
2. It allows you to tweak your graphics settngs to give you the frames per second you need while still giving you the best graphics you are comfortable with. Conversely, if you don't like the graphics settings you are stuck with to achieve the FPS you desire, it gives you time to upgrade your machine before opening day.


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

If the character creator also includes a benchmark test it accomplishes two things:
1. It allows you to see your character in actual game content with the actual graphic settings that your computer can support. You can even use it to see your character in graphics settings you know your computer can't support smoothly for gameplay, but which will allow you to see how other players with better rigs would see your character.
2. It allows you to tweak your graphics settngs to give you the frames per second you need while still giving you the best graphics you are comfortable with. Conversely, if you don't like the graphics settings you are stuck with to achieve the FPS you desire, it gives you time to upgrade your machine before opening day.

Given that the MWM folks are planning to give us the standalone costume creator app before the main game is released it does make some sense that including a "benchmark tester" at that point might be of some value, especially if it could also serve a dual purpose of being a "costume checker" to make sure your costumes would look good in various in-game environments.

While the general idea of having a "benchmark tester" for the game is interesting I would probably lump something like that into what a film editor might call "cutting room floor" bonus DVD material. Here's what I mean by that: When software developers create an application as large as CoT they'll often create internal testing tools/programs that they don't initially intend to release to the public but are thrown together to help create/test various parts of the finished product. Sometimes those rough tools prove to be so useful and well designed that it doesn't take much extra time/effort to "polish" them up and make them something worth releasing to the general public as new features. In this case if the Devs of CoT are forced to create some kind of internal benchmark tester for their own development then maybe it'd be worth the time and effort to dust it off and present it to us as a player accessible tool. I'm not completely sure it'd really be worth getting if the Devs had to create it from scratch JUST for the players. Basically what I'm saying is if they have a leftover one lying around then sure but if they'd have to create a brand new one just for us then I'm not so sure.

There are alternate ways for a person to decide whether their computer hardware will be beefy enough to handle CoT without the CoT character creator having to "recreate the wheel" with its own benchmark tool. Again such a thing would clearly be a "nice to have" but I simply question its overall long term value, especially when you consider this is the type of thing a typical player might look at for a minute or two and then never use again. The only real way to give this thing "long term" value would be to play up its use as a "costume checker" even though, as I pointed out earlier, the Test Server would already be the ultimate ready-made "costume checker".

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Now obviously relying on something like a Test Server to solve these problems assumes there will be a Test Server for CoT but the chances for that seem fairly likely. Assuming that's the case the Devs could save all the additional time it would take to create those extra fancy features and focus on other things.

Pretty sure that these extra "fancy features" won't take that much additional time as one might think. You can easily use the argument of "use that time for something else/better" on every QoL feature so not really a good one in this regard.

For emotes alone the base system needed is already in place due to the aesthetic decoupling so adding a another UI element that select from a different set of animations shouldn't be that big of a task, so the majority of the work (90%+) would be in the UI element itself. If they have an emotes-menu like CoH did then there's even less work needed to be done for this specific feature since they can "attach" that to a simple text-box or similar containing the current animation being played.
Effectively the same thing for lighting since it's just changing the intensity of the light source.

For backgrounds there will be some significant additional work in putting together a number of representative backgrounds to choose from but that will mainly be in using existing assets so don't see it as being "too much" work to be worth it.

Ohh, and CoH in "local dev mode" did have an additional dropdown in the CC where you can select from different animations, not just emotes. As you essentially stated in another post here, if MWM builds that functionality for internal purposes then why not extend it to us?

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blacke4dawn wrote:
blacke4dawn wrote:

You can easily use the argument of "use that time for something else/better" on every QoL feature so not really a good one in this regard.

Actually it is a good argument for this particular case. I would only agree with your general statement about QoL features for those features where something like the Test Server would NOT be directly available to serve as a very functional alternative.

But in this case the Test Server (at least back in CoH) was uniquely suited to allow players to spend hours spending "fake" INF and tokens transferred from the live servers. You could make dozens of changes and then run around in any zone you wanted looking at how your costumes looked anywhere you wanted. To be perfectly honest during the periods when there wasn't a new Issue to test one of the only serious practical day-to-day uses for the Test Server (other than to play PvP) was to use it to "test drive" costume changes before you did them for "real" on the live servers.

blacke4dawn wrote:

Pretty sure that these extra "fancy features" won't take that much additional time as one might think.

For what it's worth I would not hate any extra fancy "emotes in the character creator" features the Devs of CoT managed to provide. I'm simply pointing out that if CoT provides for a Test Server (which again seems likely) it would serve as the ultimate test bed for any costume creation "double-checking" thus mitigating the pressing need for them to spend -that- much time making it possible to examine costumes inside the costume creator in the first place.

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If character creater is sent

If character creater is sent out prior to opening day, and by all accounts it will be. The there can not be a better advertising campaign then to make it publicly available to play with.
Adding emotes, adding a benchmark, adding features that make the game look cool and get potential market wanting to play their characters in the game when it comes out, are all "worth it."


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

If character creater is sent out prior to opening day, and by all accounts it will be. The there can not be a better advertising campaign then to make it publicly available to play with.
Adding emotes, adding a benchmark, adding features that make the game look cool and get potential market wanting to play their characters in the game when it comes out, are all "worth it."

Personally when I buy a car I usually care more about the basics: how it drives, the gas mileage, the warranties and so on. I rarely buy a car based on how many automatic mirror presets it has or how many cup holders are accessible in the backseats. Priorities are important.

Don't get me wrong - obviously the whole idea of releasing the character creator first as a standalone app will be to "showcase" the game and get people interested. Clearly the more features they can cram into it the better. But frankly I'd be more interested, at least in the beginning, in getting as many costume item options as possible than to get a million "emotes" to dance around with. Sure if they want to load up the costume creator with all sorts of "bell and whistles" a year or two AFTER launch then more power to them. But to start with I only need the basics. They should be hooking me with as many costume items as possible - that's the MAIN PURPOSE of the costume creator app after all.

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I doubt the same people

I doubt the same people creating costumes are the same people making emotes. This does not have to be an either-or proposition.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

I doubt the same people creating costumes are the same people making emotes. This does not have to be an either-or proposition.

Obviously. But I'd still rather the people who would be making emotes be working on animations for the real game long before adding QoL emotes "just for" the costume creator. Again priorities are important.

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Interesting. That is an

Interesting. That is an assumption I never made. Rather, I assumed that any emotes for the character creater would be emotes that already existed in the game.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Interesting. That is an assumption I never made. Rather, I assumed that any emotes for the character creater would be emotes that already existed in the game.

Sure but they would ALL still need to be created at some point. Again I'd rather the animators focus on the main animations for the game before they spend too much time on the QoL "emotes" regardless if those emotes are intended for the main game or "just" the character creator.

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Perhaps you forgot this

Perhaps you forgot this update from July:
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/happy-4th-julyand-lot-more

The emote team has been hard at work for a while now. I wouldn't worry too much about whether their effort will be an impairment on the rest of the game's development effort any more.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Perhaps you forgot this update from July:http://cityoftitans.com/forum/happy-4th-julyand-lot-more
The emote team has been hard at work for a while now. I wouldn't worry too much about whether their effort will be an impairment on the rest of the game's development effort any more.

Yeah... Until we start getting some things to test I'll be "moderately concerned" about any effort that MWM might spend that's not strictly necessary. The costume creator doesn't NEED emotes, it NEEDS costume items. If the costume creator ALSO gets some secondary emotes by the time it's released that would be icing on the cake, not the cake itself.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Huckleberry wrote:
Interesting. That is an assumption I never made. Rather, I assumed that any emotes for the character creater would be emotes that already existed in the game.
Sure but they would ALL still need to be created at some point. Again I'd rather the animators focus on the main animations for the game before they spend too much time on the QoL "emotes" regardless if those emotes are intended for the main game or "just" the character creator.

I'm not sure what you are trying to argue here since to me it just doesn't make sense. It sounds to me like you think that it is the animators that will either have to implement it into the CC, or make specific versions for the CC. Neither is true.
When we say "QoL increase" here we are referring to the feature itself, not individual animations. We will have an emote system at start, even if somewhat sparse, so I don't see why what the animators work on becomes relevant in regards to this feature.

Personally (with my limited experience in coding, and even less with UE4) I don't see it as more than a 15 min job since effectively everything needed to do it will already be implemented because of the aesthetic decoupling system, that is the ability to play any animation assigned to your chosen power sets. "Copying" that ability and change it to use emotes instead is very little work for the QoL increase.

And as mentioned earlier, their internal testing tools may already have this ability so just "moving" it to the CC would most likely be even less work.

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blacke4dawn wrote:
blacke4dawn wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:
Interesting. That is an assumption I never made. Rather, I assumed that any emotes for the character creater would be emotes that already existed in the game.
Sure but they would ALL still need to be created at some point. Again I'd rather the animators focus on the main animations for the game before they spend too much time on the QoL "emotes" regardless if those emotes are intended for the main game or "just" the character creator.
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue here since to me it just doesn't make sense. It sounds to me like you think that it is the animators that will either have to implement it into the CC, or make specific versions for the CC. Neither is true.
When we say "QoL increase" here we are referring to the feature itself, not individual animations. We will have an emote system at start, even if somewhat sparse, so I don't see why what the animators work on becomes relevant in regards to this feature.
Personally (with my limited experience in coding, and even less with UE4) I don't see it as more than a 15 min job since effectively everything needed to do it will already be implemented because of the aesthetic decoupling system, that is the ability to play any animation assigned to your chosen power sets. "Copying" that ability and change it to use emotes instead is very little work for the QoL increase.
And as mentioned earlier, their internal testing tools may already have this ability so just "moving" it to the CC would most likely be even less work.

Even if you want to play the "game" of estimating how much extra Dev work it would take to add an emote viewing system to the CC I can give you an ALTERNATIVE that wouldn't cost the Devs ANY effort at all... Use the Test Server to test drive your costumes to your heart's content.

On more time I wouldn't hate the game if they gave us a CC with all sorts of fancy bells and whistles. But when we will very likely have an extremely capable workaround (the Test Server) I find it hard to justify ANY Dev effort be used for this at least until well after launch.

It's like if I gave you a gun and you asked "How can I test this out?" and I told you "Well we have this perfectly reasonable Test Range you can use to test it for hours at zero cost" and you replied "Nope I don't like that. I want you to spend extra time making me a robot that will hold my gun and pose with it". What am I supposed to say? Sure I'll waste time on your posing robot? No of course not... I'd respectfully tell you to stuff your robot and go use the Test Range.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Even if you want to play the "game" of estimating how much extra Dev work it would take to add an emote viewing system to the CC I can give you an ALTERNATIVE that wouldn't cost the Devs ANY effort at all... Use the Test Server to test drive your costumes to your heart's content.
On more time I wouldn't hate the game if they gave us a CC with all sorts of fancy bells and whistles. But when we will very likely have an extremely capable workaround (the Test Server) I find it hard to justify ANY Dev effort be used for this at least until well after launch.

You may see it as "unjustified" but I bet you more will not see it so since having to shut down your normal client, potentially transfer character to test server, install/update test server and then launching that client is a fairly big "task" compared to just entering CC and choosing an animation from a dropdown (or similar). The QoL value is, imo, just too big to ignore for a year or two (as you mentioned).

Quote:

It's like if I gave you a gun and you asked "How can I test this out?" and I told you "Well we have this perfectly reasonable Test Range you can use to test it for hours at zero cost" and you replied "Nope I don't like that. I want you to spend extra time making me a robot that will hold my gun and pose with it". What am I supposed to say? Sure I'll waste time on your posing robot? No of course not... I'd respectfully tell you to stuff your robot and go use the Test Range.

Bad analogy, primarily in that you seem to be mixing two different concepts/scenarios. Me "testing it" vs. robot "displaying it".
I see it more as the difference between a gun range 3 hours away (test server) vs. the abandon quarry 30 mins away (CC), or given the appropriate surroundings even your own back yard. The extra effort of "implementation" would be in something as simple as just bringing a bench and setting up a couple of cans/bottles as targets, NOT in building something complex like a robot.

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Presumably if the chat client

Presumably if the chat client is available in the CC then you wouldn't even need a new UI. You could type in the emote (or select from the list per COH) and the character on display would use said e-mote. No additional work at all. If the emote exists it could be used. We already know that animations will be available in the CC via power decoupling, I don't think it's a stretch to say that e-motes would be readily available as well.

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I would like to "build" a

I would like to "build" a personality as my character grows.

We've seen how cut scenes can change as you go into instances or into a boss fight.. different characters should react differently during those cutscenes (not always being forced into the singular cutscene animation). At least that'd help with the storytelling aspect. I also like to use those moments to type out in-combat plans so I'd like to see bubbles *although i plan on using voiceRP for the most part*.

With the proposed 3 costumed idea (out of combat, in combat, and travel) you can enjoy watching an emote of your character "amping up" in the cut scene.. rather it's loading a gun, bring out the claws, glowing from a certain part of the body, turning you face on fire, ... the possibilities are kind of endless.. but a simple emote can really bring concepts to life during cutscenes.

Also there are the "frequently used emotes" that each character wants to use while moving through story.. talking to a communicator, speaking telepathically, using earbuds etc to speak to the NPC off-screen and get the next clue of the story, etc.

While my character wont likely ever "giggle" I'd like to chose response emotes that DO fit prompts in the story.

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JayBezz wrote:
JayBezz wrote:

I would like to "build" a personality as my character grows.
We've seen how cut scenes can change as you go into instances or into a boss fight.. different characters should react differently during those cutscenes (not always being forced into the singular cutscene animation). At least that'd help with the storytelling aspect. I also like to use those moments to type out in-combat plans so I'd like to see bubbles *although i plan on using voiceRP for the most part*.
With the proposed 3 costumed idea (out of combat, in combat, and travel) you can enjoy watching an emote of your character "amping up" in the cut scene.. rather it's loading a gun, bring out the claws, glowing from a certain part of the body, turning you face on fire, ... the possibilities are kind of endless.. but a simple emote can really bring concepts to life during cutscenes.
Also there are the "frequently used emotes" that each character wants to use while moving through story.. talking to a communicator, speaking telepathically, using earbuds etc to speak to the NPC off-screen and get the next clue of the story, etc.
While my character wont likely ever "giggle" I'd like to chose response emotes that DO fit prompts in the story.

So, you'd like a menu or dropdown with a few slots to place emotes in, then, when writing a mission, the writer can use $prepareforbattle and it'll play the emote in that slot?

That'd be pretty neat, and make cutscenes a bit more immersive. That's much better than CoH's "fist slam" loop emote.


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desviper wrote:
desviper wrote:

JayBezz wrote:
I would like to "build" a personality as my character grows.
We've seen how cut scenes can change as you go into instances or into a boss fight.. different characters should react differently during those cutscenes (not always being forced into the singular cutscene animation). At least that'd help with the storytelling aspect. I also like to use those moments to type out in-combat plans so I'd like to see bubbles *although i plan on using voiceRP for the most part*.
With the proposed 3 costumed idea (out of combat, in combat, and travel) you can enjoy watching an emote of your character "amping up" in the cut scene.. rather it's loading a gun, bring out the claws, glowing from a certain part of the body, turning you face on fire, ... the possibilities are kind of endless.. but a simple emote can really bring concepts to life during cutscenes.
Also there are the "frequently used emotes" that each character wants to use while moving through story.. talking to a communicator, speaking telepathically, using earbuds etc to speak to the NPC off-screen and get the next clue of the story, etc.
While my character wont likely ever "giggle" I'd like to chose response emotes that DO fit prompts in the story.
So, you'd like a menu or dropdown with a few slots to place emotes in, then, when writing a mission, the writer can use $prepareforbattle and it'll play the emote in that slot?
That'd be pretty neat, and make cutscenes a bit more immersive. That's much better than CoH's "fist slam" loop emote.

I agree. That's brilliant in its simplicity. Genius.


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For the first time I feel

For the first time I feel like one of my loosely plotted ideas was understood by the forum community! Huzzah! Thanks guys.. regardless of the rest, you guys are awesome

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