Paragon Studio Upgrades

WOW

I've been out of the loop since I quit CoH. Is this End Game something that's been announced before, or is this their first tease about it?

Nice!

Excellent news, even if you're not interested in raiding.
Once again, thanks for the find, Razor

Definitely worth keeping an eye on Paragon, even with STO, KTOR, and other MMO's on the horizon.
It looks like CoH will continue to be the game I just keep coming back to.

In WW's interview, she said that they were already working on a post GoRo issue.
With them that could imply that GoRo is the next update, or it could be her saying they're really projecting far into the future. What are the chances, do you think, that we'll see GoRo by the end of March or in place of a Spring update? Has there been any indication of an issue coming out before GoRo?

Yeah... that's what I figured. I was beeing a bit overly hopeful.
They really need to break the mold and exceed expectations with GoRo where there hasn't been a lot of Cannon content for about a year. The recent issues have been great additions, but we're not getting updates very often at all.
GoRo will bring a lot of people back to the game, but I'm sure Paragon would have liked to keep subscribers that are suspending their accounts in the interim.

I completely agree. I also understand why they don't want to release info, from a business standpoint.

Of course I also understand how the "community" can be vicious over some feature that doesn't materialize in the form the players expect (like the City Vault, for example).

I was just about to mention Ghost Widow's log that gradually released bio info on the different Arachnos characters way back when.


This is a nice, smallish start.

Hooray for some more new info. The Badges in WarWitch's post today, and the upcoming bio supposedly going to be released today would be most welcome

I preferred that screenshot in its original lighting, because it has something that I've been asking for for the past, oh... FIVE DAMN YEARS! If those glowing colours make it to player costumes, I'm going to either die on the spot or ascent to godhood. Possibly both, though not necessarily in that order.

Let me put it this way - five years ago when I started thinking about what I wanted, the list held practically only two things - wraparound cloaks and glowing colours. We haven't seen wraparound capes, though the High Collar one was a valiant attempt to kludge one. But I do not forget my wishes, and if this comes to pass, then I will never have a reason to play another game again. Seriously.

I hope it's not just this particular armour piece that's glowing. I hope we can use glowing colours ourselves, specifically since all that makes them glowing in this way is their self-illumination stat. I hope we can use them for patterns, at the very least. I'd buy Going Rogue just for that alone.

At least as far as I've seen in the limited work I've done with 3D graphics, that's not exactly the case. In a world where light does not reflect off solid objects, you get a combination of very bright lights and pitch-black shadows, which looks very unnatural, since a small room lit up by a light would not be all black behind the pillar. For this you have what's called an ambient light, which is basically a non-directional light which illuminates everything with a certain colour up to a certain level, just to soften up those black shadows without needing multiple "fake" lights. Corresponding to this, textures have their own ambient lighting, which 3D Studio Max called "self-illumination," which is basically the ability to have a texture's base lighting level be something higher than perfect black. This gets lost when the texture is illuminated past that level, but when light drops below it, they retain their lit-up surfaces as though a bright ambient light were affecting them.

This isn't really a function of the particular texture, so much as it was a function of how textures are rendered. Basically, it's one bit of data that ought to be easily tweakable, because it was just a number field in a window in 3D Studio Max. This same technology is what we have in City of Heroes for glowing colours. When you go out into the sunlight, they look normal, but when you go into a dark area, they appear to glow. They don't, they're just as bright as they would be outside. That really ought to be doable via either a slider like they have in Champions Online (even if it's just for eyes) or via a dropdown menu with none/some/lots/bright, and it ought to be applicable per colour, as patterns are basically nothing but masks over a base texture. But we'll see.