Simon

Err...why stop there?  It has nothing to do with HG's financial state (past or present). 

How many companies do you see releasing MMOs?  Distinct companies, mind you.   Answer:  very few.  There is a HUGE amount of work involved in the underlying  engine, which is why games like Doom, Halflife, etc. were all considered revolutionary -- they introduced new engines to the mix.

Once you've developed the underlying engine, you still need to invest in the development and implementation of graphics, layering onto the engine and building your game.  This is another massive investment.  

You'll need to be able to develop your engine and release the game within a short timeframe (so you don't fall into the Duke Nukem Forever trap).  This will require an entire team of developers working on it, with strong project management and a decided vision from management driving everything.  i.e. a not-insignificant business setup.  Look at the size and structure of the big players in the market and you get an idea of the resources needed.

This says nothing of the infrastructure needed to support your MMO once you develop it.

To be done right, you're talking millions.  Many of them.

Ignoring funding and focusing solely on business for a moment, you need to justify that investment.  Why would your game engine be better than the others out there?  Because you use a roleplaying system that is known for both its flexibility and its complexity?  That makes so little business sense it's hard to even imagine getting to a pitch meeting with it.  It's a guaranteed loser.

What would you need to make something like this possible?  At a ballpark estimate, someone (or someones) with about $50 million US in disposable money that they had no desire to ever see again.  Literally someone willing to throw away millions of dollars on a vanity project that is effectively guaranteed to NOT make them their money back.   That's your starting point.  

You do realize that Hero Games did not create Champions Online, correct?  They just licensed their IP to Cryptic (the creators of the game).  Cryptic made the game to follow the engine that they had already created, but existing within the conceptual universe/timeline of Champions (which they bought control of).

See...this is where we run into some misconceptions, I think.

First off, the arm is not as involved as most like to think in a punch.  If you isolate just the arm movement in a good punch, you're looking at about 2 inches of movement of the hand.  The rest comes from the body, with the core muscles being large contributors.

Second, open hand (palm heel) vs. knuckle punching doesn't have the relationship that you might think.  Open hand tends to do internal damage while knuckle punching tends to leave the damage at the surface.  Easiest way to think of it is to imagine striking a fish tank.  If you want to break the glass of the tank, you strike it with your knuckles.  If you want to stay dry and kill the fish inside the tank, you do an open palm strike (and hope that your training was good).

Ayup...we (as a species) are very grabby. 

...which is why it's so hard to learn how to effectively throw a punch ;-)

Re. what the muscles do: the biceps is responsible for the flexing in the elbow joint. The triceps is the one extending. [/anatomygeek]

Yeah...I should have been more clear in that...

If you want still more fun, work through the muscles that are tensed when you clench your fist...and how that affects your ability to extend your arm during a punch...

Scientific method:

You have a theory -- that the force of a punch is directly tied to the physical strength (lifting strength) of an individual.

You expand on that theory - this is still in the beginning stages, though you did some in the thread.

You see how well your theory matches observed evidence/empirical data.  This is where you run into problems.  There is a wealth of data available on both the subject of lifting strength (look to olympic power lifters, for example) and punching force.  Studies done on boxers, in particular, present evidence that is in direct conflict with your theory.  Some of the strongest punchers in boxing studies are the lighter weight classes (the guys with less muscle and MUCH less lifting strength than the heavy weights).  Not proportionally stronger, just stronger punchers -- they generated the most force. Your theory that lifting strength is tied to punching strength does not account for this and would appear to be disproven by the data at hand.

So you need to come up with a different theory.

When you look at punching strength and what constitutes a strong punch, you find some rather interesting things that help to explain why some of the most physically strong individuals don't have correspondingly strong punches.  If you have decent muscle definition in your upper arms, make a tight fist while feeling your bicep.  Notice that it's tensing up?  Now feel your bicep while you throw a punch -- notice still more tensing?  That's a problem.  Your bicep is responsible for bending your arm in -- that's the opposite direction that you want to go when throwing a punch.  So you're actively fighting yourself in throwing your punch.  Learning to throw a good punch is more about learning to relax all but the muscles involved in the act of punching itself (and there are a lot of them).  Easier said than done....particularly in that you need to re-evaluate the motion of a punch in order to accomplish this -- your body has some pretty hard-wired controls in place to keep you from hyper-extending your elbow.

Those power lifters you thought should have good punching strength?  They have pretty massive musculature -- it's a lot to get moving quickly (another part of a good punch) and it's a LOT to have fighting their basic punching motion.

And none of this even starts to get into transference of force, which is a whole other subject in and of itself...

Also look to empirical evidence:  look at the typical body types of a power lifter vs. a boxer (or MMA fighter) -- the act of lifting/squeezing is almost completely different from the act of striking.  Different muscle groups, different mechanics, and different considerations.

You might as well work out the relationship between someone's top sprinting speed and their max punching strength.

There are a large number of factors involved in either...though more in the force of a punch.

Easy example:  go find an iron dumbbell with about 100 pounds of weight on it.  Lift it over your head.  It's heavy, but you should be able to manage that....if not, then tone the weight down.  Then suspend it in the air (tie a rope to it and attach it to something sturdy).  Try and punch it as hard as you can and see how far you can get it to go upwards.

As you wait in the ER for the doctor to x-ray and set your hand/wrist you can ponder the different factors in play for punching vs. lifting.

For a counter example:  setup some force pads on a punching dummy.  Punch the pad as hard as you can.  If you've had some training, you should be able to get into the range of 500 - 1000 pounds of force.  Have someone gently lower the same amount of weight onto you and try to lift it.

Goradin will no longer be joining us in these forums.

Thank you to everyone else for not falling to his level.

test response

Search on full words...and know where you're searching. Generally speaking, using the search bar at the top of the page from the main forum channel listing will search all forums.

 

I'm showing results for "Homunculus" and "Homunculi" (more for the latter). Those are the only two I tried.

Search on full words...and know where you're searching. Generally speaking, using the search bar at the top of the page from the main forum channel listing will search all forums.

I'm showing results for "Homunculus" and "Homunculi" (more for the latter). Those are the only two I tried.

We got the offspring signed up for a swimming class this summer, and they are kicking ass. Soon I will be able to bring them along and resume some of my aquatic hobbies, such as snorkeling, surfing, and piracy.

 

Also the recent forum outage was not due to catastrophic system failure, but Simon putting in version 5.0.3. Doesn't quite fix the last-unread button, but almost. Hopefully people will start trickling back in now; there are quite a few that I miss.

You might want to check the Hero Designer forum for information on this...

I see it! I see it!

 

(Needs lasers comin' out of the shark's head!!)

Not particularly neat...or original...just a quick test.

You can give up or you can find the workarounds...which are really not that bad (at all).

Sitting around complaining is entirely counter-intuitive (and non-productive). I'd recommend against it.

I'd personally recommend playing around with the filtering a bit -- you may find that it provides some rather nice options.

Try clicking one and see what happens. Guess what? If you choose a setting for Show (for example) that doesn't match what you want to see, you can always change it back...and it still amounts to performing a refresh of the page count.

Change the filter at the top of the page to refresh the page count.

Killer Shrike: First' date=' let me agree with you that the way Figured Characteristics were done was broken and needed to be fixed. You are right in characterizing that as an objective, mathematical fact. It DOES NOT FOLLOW however that the only possible solution was decoupling. Another solution would have been to devise a non-broken way to implement Figured Characteristics. Being in favor of Figured Characteristics does not necessarily mean being opposed to change, opposed to game balance, or mathematically deficient. It can mean being in favor of reasonable or intuitive relationships among game elements that make sense. I may have my doubts that the solution Steve Long chose was the best, but I will readily admit that what we have is better than what we had in the past. Lucius Alexander Figured palindromedary[/quote']

 

 

Sure...a non-mathematically broken version of figureds could have been devised.

 

One could argue, that the most elegant way to solve the problem was to de-couple them entirely and allow the flexibility to "figure" or not as desired for individual characters.

 

One could present an alternative mechanism and argue its merits.

 

If a person were to explain, "no no no, what I meant by that is the general idea, but using this completely different, very awesome, and totally elegant alternate implementation I'm about to tell you about"...then that would be a different discussion altogether.

 

However, when people say they miss figured characteristics they generally would be taken to mean as they were implemented in previous editions, and not to mean some other non-existent more elegant / less broken implementation.

vB really needs to work in the option to like a comment...

Re: Hero Central Down for??

Simon could we please have an Update on HERO Central.

 

Thank you

 

QM

...

That's likely the way it's going to stay for the foreseeable future' date=' unfortunately. The difference in the server load statistics is night and day with HC down. The attacks are still happening (sporadically), but are not having much of a measurable impact.[/quote']

Re: Hero Central Down for??

No, there is not.

Re: Hero Central Down for??

That's likely the way it's going to stay for the foreseeable future, unfortunately. The difference in the server load statistics is night and day with HC down. The attacks are still happening (sporadically), but are not having much of a measurable impact.

Re: Hero Central Down for??

It's likely going to be down for a while now -- the DDoS attacks had moved on from the forums to HC (since I had put some countermeasures in place on the forums to limit the impact). I'm currently looking into what areas of HC were being targeted, but it's likely going to take a fair amount of recoding of the site to enact decent countermeasures there...which is something that is going to need to wait for my time to free up.

On the plus side, folks on the forums should have seen a night-and-day improvement in performance and stability since yesterday.