Category: Resources & Rules

CoH – Issue 4

I find it amusing that CoH refers to its upgrades as “Issues.”
Here’s an interview on Issue 4, which focuses on PvP (Player vs. Player) action. Want to fight other PCs? Sign up at the arena. Not something I anticipate doing, but I know it’s been a huge demand of some folk.
The other Issue 4 changes are fairly minor, though there are more costume features:

Costume pieces! Lots and lots of new costume pieces. These are mostly inspired from the world of manga and anime, but I think everyone will enjoy these new options. And we?re adding specific sliders for various body parts. Players will be able to adjust the size of their shoulders, arms, legs and even their foreheads!
Spiffy. Costuming is one of the best features in CoH, and this should help even further.

City of Heroes – Linky Goodness

Various CoH articles I’ve bookmarked. Note that some articles may be found at multiple sites.
General sites

Specific pages

I have several others I need to add to the above list, but I didn’t bookmark them, just printed them out. Later …

City of Costumes

One of the coolest things about CoH is being able to design your own character’s appearance. The character editor is wonderful — indeed, it begs for copyright/trademark abuse just because you can do so many classic characters with it. But it’s so wonderful that the places where it doesn’t quite work are all the more irritating. Things that are missing:

  1. Huge Females: You can be Female, Male, or Huge. The Huge characters are actually Huge Male characters (judging from the lack of mammaries), which makes hulking female characters difficult to do — you simply end up being beefy-but-statuesque.
  2. Kids: Kids (and teens) are not simply short adults — except that’s really the only option you have. Inspired by a classic side-kick? Sorry, old chum.
  3. Just Plain Folk: Every Male is cut. Every female is highly-bazongaed (as Jade points out). Want someone not quite as heroic in stature? You’re out of luck, except to the extent that a costume (e.g., the business suit) may drape those bulging pecs.
  4. Civvies: You can make pretty much every kind of costume you can imagine from the classic spandex set — but only from the classic spandex set. Try to go for more ordinary clothes — a baggy sweatshirt, or an untucked tee, or something like that — and the choices are much more limited. Granted, that’s part of the whole Silver Age vibe of Paragon City (and it’s amusing, when I’m in the sports-jacketed Psi-clone how many supers come by to “rescue” me as if I were a civilian), but a lot of comic book costuming since, say, 1985, has been much more casual, streetwear sorts of stuff. I mean, you can do some of that — a business suit, jeans, a tank top or form-fitting T — but it’s still a lot more limited compared to the cornucopia of other uniform effects.
    So, for example, K-Two has cargo pants and a black t-shirt, which isn’t bad, except that the shirt looks more like a wetsuit top. Sister Chinook has as close to a sweatshirt as I could manage, which wasn’t very close.

  5. Accoutrements: The game lacked capes when it was first issued (and even now they’re a lot more limited, though there’s good game-story reasons). I’m sure it’s because they add a lot of complexity to rendering, and that’s probably why two other obvious heroic accoutrements — jet packs and wings — are also missing, along with some of the specialized weaponry and gimmicks of the comic world — Cap’s shield and the Silver Surfer’s board and Gambit’s staff are good examples.
    For that matter, weaponry other than guns, axes, swords and katanas is missing. It’s a bit goofy that the bad guys can go after you with baseball bats, and the cops flip around night sticks, but you can’t have either of them.

  6. Chest logos: Okay, there are a zillion of them, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could submit designs yourself (requiring human vetting, natch). Or if NCSoft approached some organizations (sports teams and colleges come to mind) to see if some of those logos could enter the game? Heck, even if they had to charge, I’m sure there are plenty of sports buffs and alumni that would pony over to have their favorite team’s logo on their hero.
    The game could use a bit more flexibility with how the chest logos can be placed. Each top has defined for it the size and placement, which can vary dramatically. In some cases this makes sense — for the business suit, the chest logo becomes a small blazer patch on the left breast above the pocket. In other cases, though, it doesn’t Dealing with women’s breasts seems to be a particular problem, as at least some top designs shrink the logo and place it just under the neck (e.g., Sister Chinook’s maple leaf). It would be great if you could set, as a “detail,” both the logo size (small, large) and its placement (either breast, centered, high, bicep).
    Finally, you can put letters and numbers, but how about short words? Athletic department shirts, for example. Or a character name or trademark (“Fair Play!”). You could, if you want, enforce the obscenity filter, and I’m sure some folks would be “inappropriate” anyway, but I think those things could be worked around.

None of these are deal-killers by any means, of course. More of a wish list, along with the ability to make a (subtle, perhaps) costume change each or every other level.

Now I know I’m getting into serious gaming …

So Margie got all of City of Heroes and its related patches in and …
… got all sorts of errors about how her video card didn’t support functions X, Y, and Z, meaning she was S, O, and L.
Downloaded the latest driver, which took care of Y and Z (and thus O and L), but didn’t do much for X (and thus S).
Hrm.
So she called me, and I ducked over to Best Buy, the Insidiously Convenient Tech Store Near the Office.
Now, I’ve intentionally stayed away from the whole video card thing, which tends to be focused on gaming fanatics who spend zillions of dollars to get stuff with the highest frame-rate-pixel-DDR-mega-buffer-socket bits and argue over it with a ferocious take-no-prisoners passion usually reserved for theologians and talk show pundits.
Eek.
So I really haven’t dealt with anything having to do with video cards since it was my job to crack open cases at the office and put in dual-head video for the CAD stations. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the video card aisle.
That I approached it “backwards” and started with the expensive $350-500 cards didn’t allay my fears.
I’d picked up a CoH box, so I had the minimum and recommended video configurations. And, of course, I didn’t see any thing that exactly matched.
And so I was reduced to seeking help from one of the passing BB Guys, who, frankly, didn’t seem to know a huge amount more than I did (though he knew enough to point out that, yes, one of the cards on the list was up on the shelf).
And then came the question — did Margie’s Sony Vaio computer have an AGP socket? Or did I need a PCI card?
Well … crap.
(Ponder, ponder, ponder.)
Ended up going with a different card than BB Dude recommended — a PNY nVidia GeForce FX5700LE. I went with AGP because, if the Vaio had it, then I wanted to use that, rather than the PCI. And I could always return it, right?
Got back to the office. First off — what Vaio model do we have. Hrm. No reference to it in the blog. Rats. …
… and then I found a reference to the reference page for the Vaio at Sony’s site — for our model: PCV-RX360DS. Where, in turn, I found a completely worthless Users Guide … and some marketing info that shows … yes … an AGP slot!
(And, yes, though a PIII/866 is close to the minimum specs for CoH, it’s still a scosh above that, and the 512Mb RAM should help … and the GeForce FX5700LE is above the recommended spec just a scosh.
Now, as long as it’s the right kind of AGP slot, I should be relatively home free. (He said, with great optimism.) Though, to be sure, the minimum specs include using (!) a 56k modem. Gads. It looks like it should be, though — found one ref to this Vaio having a 4X AGP slot, and the FX5700LE is referred to as being 4X/8X.
Hmmm. Looks like someone has gone through this (or close enough), but didn’t leave much info. This thread on the other hand seems to be full of people who seem quite certain of what the correct course is when dealing with going from onboard video to a video card … not all of which courses are the same. The Sony site seems to indicate for my model that it should autodetect the video card going into the AGP card, which would be the ideal, for sure …
We shall see. We’re having dinner out so we can go a Kindergarten orientation at Katherine’s pre-school tonight, so I’ll have to screw around with this after we get home. Crossing fingers …
(Now I remember again why I’ve usually avoided the whole video card thing …)
UPDATE: And the card is pretty, and has heat sinks a-plenty, and a fan. On the bright side, this should also resolve a problem that Margie was having with another game (SimRestaurant or something like that) she got a while back. Not that she’ll ever want to play another game …

C: vs D:

Margie’s hard drive at home is divided between C: and D:. Everything, of course, is installed on C:, and copying over a 900Mb CoH installation Zip file probably didn’t help things any. So the question came up of how to easily shift things between C: and D: without un/reinstalling various applications (bleah).
The three ideas (here described for WinXP Pro) came to mind. Best to have all apps closed during this:

  1. Do a Disk Cleanup. This is in the Start menu under Accessories / System Tools / Disk Cleanup. If there’s old installation files, unused temp files, etc., lurking around out there, this is the place to easily clean them up. Doing a defrag afterwards wouldn’t be out of place. (Margie had already done this.)
  2. Move the swap file over. Under Control Panel / System / Advanced / (Performance) Settings / Advanced / (Virtual Memory) Change. Use this screen to add a paging space on D: and eliminate or minimize the paging space on C:. There may be restarts involved, or multiple iterations to do so (hard to tell, since it turned out that this had already been done on her machine during a previous space crunch; I took advantage to add a large custom size to support upcoming CoH play). (Official MS KB article here.)
  3. Move My Documents over to another drive. Right-click My Documents (off the desktop or the Start menu), then choose Properties / Target. That will show you the current target folder set for your account as the My Documents folder. Click Move …, then choose where you want it to be (e.g., in D:\, creating a new folder called My Documents there). Accept, and Windows will ask if you want to move the contents over there, too. Yup, you probably do. (More info here and here.)

FYI.
In theory, you could some (or, more easily, all) the applications under C:\Program Files to D:\ by doing the move and then tweaking the registry, but, damn, that sounds like asking for trouble.