I’s been a long time.

After a long fight with cancer, we lost a team member, friend, and wife: Anko. She endeared herself to everyone she met online, and cared about everyone more than herself even while suffering from cancer. A lot of our projects for this City of Heroes server were put on hold. This community is still hers, and the work we do for this server give us a reason to carry on, so we’re ready to dust things off and get back in full swing.

Costumes

The most striking thing you’ll notice creating your character is our new color picker. It has a hue slider, saturation and brightness pane, hex code, favorite color swatches, and a color history. Thunderspy has had full color support for years, but the editor was esoteric, error prone, and hidden behind another tab. Fans of the original color palette can still find it via a toggle on the color selection menu.

Now that our tights can have support for asymmetric textures, we have dozens of new color patterns from the community (Nirukti), and dozens more on the way.

All of the faces unique to females were copied to males. This was a low-effort change that made a lot of new character concepts possible. Wanted to make a victorian-era vampire? Now you have the makeup for that.

Emotes

We added over a dozen new emotes with totally new animations. Besides being really cool, these demonstrate our developing capability to add more animations for new powers and emotes in City of Heroes.

• Jojo Point (e jojopoint1)
• Ascend (e ascend)
• Ginyu (e ginyu, ginyu1)
• Burter (e burter, ginyu2)
• Jeice (e jeice, jayce, jace, ginyu3)
• Goldo (e goldo, ginyu4)
• Recoome (e recoome, ginyu5)
• Ghost Trick Death (e ghosttrickdeath, ghosttrick, death2)
• Peter Death (e peterdeath, peter, death3)
• Yamcha Death (e yamchadeath, yamcha, death4)
• Lazy (e Lazybones, lazy)
• Spiderman Pose (e spidermanhunch, spiderman1, hunch, stalk)
• Viewtiful Joe Pose 1 (e viewtifuljoe1, viewtiful1, joe1)
• Viewtiful Joe Pose 2 (e viewtifuljoe2, viewtiful2, joe2)

All emotes are listed in a new Thunderspy category within the emote quickmenu

New Blaster Inherent

Blasters, the “glass cannon” archetype, have always been criticized for being too much glass and not enough cannon to compensate. We tried to think out of the box and brainstormed the idea that Blasters could kite bad guys better if all their attacks immobilized their targets for a few seconds. The immobilizing effect of Blaster attacks doesn’t stack, but attacking an enemy with an attack from the Blaster’s primary powerset will refresh the immobilized time on the target. The effect also doesn’t stack from multiple blasters. Elite bosses and ranks above are immune to the immobilizing effect, but their movement is slowed.

Optimizations

• CMake build system rewritten

  • Correct CMake building to use proper build flags for optimized builds
  • Some fixes include proper optimizations, which should improve performance on all hardware at some level
• All servers are now built in 64-bit
• Fixes to some Cryptic code and improvements overall using modern C standard implementations
• Fixed a bug with animation loading, reduced memory usage and possibly cache misses
• Fixed several bugs due to uninitialized variables
• Removal of dead/unnecessary code, reducing the size of various builds
• Various dependency updates
• Cleaned up most warnings related to power data that was setup incorrectly
• Optimizations to some string handling and the FileCache/Node system
• Build with SSE 4.2 as the minimum required version (2008 for Intel chips, 2011 for AMD)
• Optimize part of FX code when looking up an available unused slot of memory
• Simplified some shadow rendering code involved with hiding dynamic objects
• Simplify some of the particle renderer logic to reduce unnecessary branching
• Make model renderer early-out code for hidden objects when not in debug/wireframe mode to avoid unnecessary rendering logic
• Optimize water rendering to avoid some unnecessary state changes
• Optimize shadow creation to avoid some unnecessary operations and simplify a previously O(N^2) operation
• Reduce memory pressure of various pieces of rendering code

Bug Fixes

• Address a bug causing Invisible costume parts (and possibly others) to be incorrectly treated as invalid and complain with the wrong error that you needed to purchase them
• Add an OpenGL flag to (hopefully) prevent a random client crash
• PhysX toggle now properly stays Enabled/Disabled
• Fixed a possible buffer overflow in MissionServer (AE Server)
• Fixed numerous bugs introduced by OuroDev’s VS2019 port and changes
• Fixed various bugs introduced by our first build system change
• PhysX settings have been reverted to the original Cryptic version from some “testing” by OuroDev, including mismatch w/ the MapServer
• PhysX errors should be better handled
• Fixed a subtle stack corruption bug related to getting System Specs
• Fixed static cubemap generator
• Fixed a crash related to certain costumes that could happen when loading maps
• Fixed crash when previewing Freakshow -> Jackets. Currently this causes coattails to appear that shouldn’t be on some parts in the editor, but that’s better than a crash.
• Address an issue with transparency of other player’s FX, so that alpha should properly be affected for non-zero values
• Fix bug with Karma system that would cause certain powers (Auto, Temp, and Incarnate powers using Location) to incorrectly give participation credit due to type confusion by OG devs
• Fix bug related to item stacking in Auction House caused by type confusion from OG devs
• Remove checks that prevent 3D Sound from being enabled on Windows Vista+ machines

Costumes

• Fixed the Female version of the Katana - Fire Sword
• Removed the pointy ear category for heads since it’s redundant

Powers

• Make pets fly if their owner is using Hover or Fly
• Add Bully Self-Destruct to the Merit Vendor
• Add Bully Tommy Gun to the Merit Vendor
• Remove cooldown from Bully Brawl to match the real Brawl that has no cooldown

Staff

Extended duration of combo counters on Staff powers

Blaster - Time Manipulation

• Fixed the T2 power to be selectable at level 1
• Fix every instance of Recharge Time self-buff being resistable

Blaster - Electrical Mastery

• Fixed EM Pulse to not require prerequisite powers

Dominator

Dark Obliteration no longer accepts Dominator sets as this didn’t follow other Epic powers

Mastermind - Atomic Mastery

Atomic Mastery’s Neutron Bomb now accepts Accurate Defense Debuff, Defense Debuff, and Ranged AoE IO sets

Mastermind - Mercenaries

• Medic’s Med Kit is now flagged as HealSelf instead of HealAlly, like other PBAoE heals tend to use
• Change Medic’s stimulant to only target off other Mercenaries, rather than allowing the player to be a target since they were unaffected
• Lowered the volume on Medic’s heal from 70% to 20% volume

Soul Mastery

Fixed to have Negative Energy resist.

Defender

Freezing Touch now accepts Melee Damage, Universal Damage, and Hold sets. No longer accept Taunt enhancements as they did nothing.

Tanker - Stone Armor

Added the “No Transformation” option that Brutes had

Arachnos Widow

Fix Fortunata and Night Widow specializations to properly be locked out when Tarantula is selected

Gravity Control

Reduced Singularity’s “Pull” target cap from 16 -> 5

Fighting Pool

• Corrected most powers using PvE values for PvP, which is lower than expected
• Fixed Cross Punch to have a higher PvE damage based on its numbers
• Fixed Swirl to have lower PvE damage (which now properly matches Cross Punch’s due to the slightly differing Radius/Arc on the cones)
• Fixed Swirl’s Containment crit for Controllers to deal the correct amount of damage instead of nearly half

Leaping Pool

Spring Attack now deals damage for Primalists

Spectral Melee

Reduce activation time and increase cooldown on Visions of The End in Spectral Melee

Claws

Fixed Stalker and Brute versions of Sharpen Claws

Missions

• Repeatable missions in DA that provide Incarnate Threads will offer the full reward every 2 hours instead of 20.
• Repeatable arcs will offer the Component and Merit rewards every 8 hours. This is still once per set of arcs, meaning the Belladona/Number Six arcs and the DA arcs are separate cooldowns, but not each individual arc.
• Text on the reward selections have been updated to reflect the cooldowns.

Progression

• Doubled giant monster merit reward from 6 to 12
• 150 Vanguard merits can be exchanged for 5 Merits
• Brokers grant their cellphone on first meeting to avoid needing to go to them in person

Enemies

• Striga Vampyri now properly scale up to level 54

Badges

Reduced time offline to earn day job badges to 9 hours each