What are /r/Cityofheroes' favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Could you bring up anything that says anything ill regarding profits? I did a Google and I found this: http://www.mmorpg.com/city-of-heroes/general-articles/profitable-or-not-1000007015

"CoH was profitable even before they converted to Free to Play but were even more so after the conversion."

"The studio’s total annual operating cost was 4 million USD. They grossed 12 million in revenue annually."

"NCSoft paid $8 million USD to buy CoH. They wanted $80 million USD to sell it. They only value it at $3 million for tax purposes."

From Folding website:

TL;DR: We’re simulating the dynamics of COVID-19 proteins to hunt for new therapeutic opportunities.

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Link: https://foldingathome.org/2020/03/15/coronavirus-what-were-doing-and-how-you-can-help-in-simple-terms/

I miss it every day too. Here's my Timehop from yesterday. Moments before the servers went offline.

http://timehop.com/c/1.ZnV2OjQ5MzcxMTU1NTY2MEl37Ky-83K1536VilHJpfQUaSUgKJtzeTUCWymJVFnwAatjlYmI-_f7N1-XMXKCfA

There's a list of things that CoH did that are pretty cool here, that may help in identifying what you're missing: https://web.archive.org/web/20140821072011/http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index.php/topic,5754.msg65089.html

This link should get you a CBR which you can either open with anything that can extract RAR files, or you can use a CBR viewer like CDisplay Ex.

I wonder how accurate that is vs. just not knowing a better setup/more modern setup.

For example, could it be run on a *nix server? How does it play with Docker or other containers?

I’ve always heard the key thing is to have a DEDICATED graphics card, rather than an INTEGRATED one. Based on the specs here it looks like this laptop has an integrated graphics card.

Personally, I use an Acer Nitro 5 you can get at Best Buy now for about $700. The model I use was $100 less when I bought it several months ago and it runs the game like a champ.

https://www.virtualbox.org/

A Virtual Machine software, presuming you're running an Intel Mac you can install windows inside the Virtualbox environment and run windows programs on it. Last I checked microsoft was still offering windows7 iso files for download from their website without serial numbers, it won't be authenicated but it will still run in a VM.

There are many VM softwares and emulators available, I chose Virtualbox because it's open source and not fiddly to set up like Wine.

The source images I used back in the day to compile that spreadsheet were taken with a PIGG editor (I think PIGGViewerPro? can't remember...) directly from the client; at the time Google Sheets didn't have the direct image embedding option there is now, hence the linked URL in the cells

This is the original archive, but if you use the above viewer on an updated client, you'll get also all the new graphics from recent patches

It would depend on what our treaties with South Korea say. It's possible for copyrights to be different in different locations. You sometimes will see this with public domain and sites like Project Gutenberg that has to run a separate Australian site and ask people nicely not to use the wrong one. If we have a treaty with South Korea on this subject, which I can't imagine we don't, then it would determine the legal status of CoH in the US, otherwise it's entirely up to the US what is fair game in the US.

I dig the art, someone else commented on the size of the image and the panels, but my beef is the font. Please use anything but Comic Sans. It's a neat font designed with a specific use case (introducing people new to computers, to computers), but its use outside of that case just screams 'I am unprofessional.' Might I suggest Kalam, for a free comic-booky type font? Alternately, any of the others suggested here might work for you.

Time-consuming computation is less likely than lots of little calculations or instructions, so more cores is probably better than high-IPC cores, but there are still limitations; for example, all events within a zone might be processed in one thread, or threads that are heavily dependent on a parent keeping up with its child threads. EVE uses "Everest Nodes" to handle the processing of a system when it has more activity than normal. Last I heard they have six of those, but 80 or so servers that handle normal nodes. The Everest Nodes have fewer but higher-performing cores.

Memory is important for caching to avoid lots of disk reads or communication, and probably other things I'm forgetting because it's been a while since I read up on this stuff.

Network IO could be a bottleneck with more racks, so if you can do the same amount of work in fewer racks that would alleviate one bottleneck.

Maybe it's not so much "20 players" but "active raid" that was the issue; 2k players standing around with a few off doing missions solo would be no sweat for 16 racks, but suddenly have a Hamidon raid, folks working the RWZ, a few Incarnate Trials, and there's too much load on too few servers. If the software offers enough control, maybe The Hive could only ever spawn instances on an Everest Node.

For comparison to the hardware used by another MMO, EVE Online in 2010 was running a total of 280 cores and a little over 2TB of RAM (across 66 servers - though at the time, most of them were dual-core), and it looks like in 2011 the player numbers were between 25k and 35k concurrently. If we assume that a target of 3k players would only take 10% that, then maybe 28 cores and 200GB of RAM would be enough for light gameplay; taking into account that COH doesn't have as insane an asset/inventory/market system as EVE and RAM can maybe be dropped to 128GB.

I haven't used it, but I've spoken with folks who play Star Citizen using a rented Shadow: https://shadow.tech/usen if it can run SC, it can run CoH. ;D

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Might be just the ticket for you 'till September.... ;)

https://shadow.tech

$30/mo, you get a virtual machine in their Geforce-equipped server farm to install PC games as if it was your own computer, and can connect from weaker computers/mobile devices as long as they're capable of HD streaming.

Laptops usually don't have replaceable GPUs and (easy-to-use) external GPUs are fairly recent and usually require either Thunderbolt or USB3 Type C.

A new laptop with a Ryzen 5 CPU (which also means Radeon graphics) looks like it'd be in the $400 to $500 range from many places.

If you've got a good enough internet connection, I guess you could consider Shadow, but it's $35/mo ($30/mo if you sign up for a whole year, but at that point you could have gotten a new laptop). They provide a remote-access gaming machine, and you can upload your own files (for example, send it your current install of COH/Tequila). I haven't personally used it, but Linus Tech Tips did a review of it a while back. Maybe just do a month to get your COH fix, while shopping for a new laptop?

Been using this one a few years. Super cheap and works great. 100% recommend.

You might try running City thru Lutris.

I haven't done this yet as my Linux box is having heat buildup issues and I haven't take it outside and blow all the dust out.

What I use for trials and such: https://tinyurl.com/Wit-Spark-Pewpew

Fire farming, however, is a bit less... elegant: https://tinyurl.com/Wit-Spark-Firefarm-build

This has, overall, served me well. I would recommend that you use Enhancement Boosters on the IOs in Hasten, for a safer, more survivable rotation.

I was able to get the 64bit client to work on Manjaro. Runs was better than the 32bit client. I get 100-170 fps in game. You will have to tweak settings to get that performance. Ambient Occulsion seems to be a big drain on fps in Wine. The game needs dotnet35, dinput8, and dxd9 installed with winetricks. The only way to get the 64bit client to work is if you use a 64bit prefix. Dotnet35 used to not install in 64bit prefixes due to a bug, but that was fixed at some point.

I really don't know why the only available installer on Lutris is still for a 32bit prefix when the game works fine in a 64bit prefix. If you have trouble getting the 64bit client to work its available on Lutris.

https://lutris.net/games/city-of-heroes/

If you still cant get it to work make sure you have all the packages listed in the link below for your distro if you have issues.

https://www.gloriouseggroll.tv/how-to-get-out-of-wine-dependency-hell/

Im usually either on my blaster main "Star Wrath" or my tank "Crown King Skeller". I'm an Altoholic though and I have like 30 characters so far due to the character creator being so robust but those are the two I've played the most so far.

Hope to see you around!!

I use playonlinux specifically, it sandboxes everything so if you bork something you only bork that one sandbox. Normally I just use 32bit wine 3.0 and install dinput8 to get CoX to run. For Sanctuary I updated my CoX sandbox to use 32bit wine 5.2 and it worked just fine.

The homecoming servers run on OVH, but were previously on Digital Ocean. From what I understand, as long as you can get a VPS that runs Windows Server and has the hardware requirements, you should be golden.

The comics provide some game lore, but not all of it. There are also two CoH novels that provide a lot of the lore too. As I understand it, there was a third novel in the works that never got released:

Web of Arachnos by Robert Weinberg: the origin story of Statesman and some lore for end-game/Incarnate content https://www.amazon.com/Arachnos-Heroes-Robert-Weinberg-2005-10-17/dp/B01FELECZS

The Freedom Phalanx by Robin D. Laws: story about Positron and a history of some of the signature NPCs on the game. https://www.amazon.com/City-Heroes-Freedom-Phalanx-Perseus/dp/1593152213

IMHO both the comics and the novels were great metaphors for the game back when it was live: fun and creative original content that never got full support from NCSoft.

Not trying to sell you but I just noticed it’s now going for $1099 on Amazon.

Razer Blade Stealth 13 Ultrabook Laptop: Intel Core i7-8565U 4-Core, GeForce MX150, 13.3" FHD 1080p, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD - CNC Aluminum - Chroma RGB Lighting - Thunderbolt 3 Compatible

It does only have a MX150 in it but like I said for portable gaming and all around Win laptop use its more than fine and far more power than what you’ll need for COH.

Awesome, thanks for the info on what you run.

Do you think this would run the graphics well at higher quality?

Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15" Laptop, 15.6" HD (1366 x 768) Display, AMD Ryzen 3 3250U Processor, 4GB DDR4 OnBoard RAM, 128GB SSD, AMD Radeon Vega 3 Graphics, Windows 10, 81W10094US, Business Black https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0872K4XCJ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_bgpfFbGVQF42J

I had issues (Island Rum/Homecoming) with sound devices other than basic 3.5mm jack headphones (i.e. no bluetooth, no USB).

What I ended up doing is getting a pair of these: Arctis Headphones

They work with standard 3.5mm jack, but allow me to simultaneously have a bluetooth connection with my iphone/ipad. This also solves the "I want to play music but can't tab out or my mouse controls go all wonky in CoH" issue.