CoH to be shut down

[Modern Angel]

You all know I am broken, so no one is gonna be surprised when I'll say that I was in love with Auto Assault and I miss it a lot. It was our only shot at Car Wars/Auto Duel in this century, and they killed it and it's never gonna happen again. Sorry for the derail.

That is nonsense. Dark Wind is still going and it's far closer than AA ever was.

[Falconeer]

Dark Wind is GREAT. And that is true Car Wars, absolutely. Let's say I just wanted more. More production value and more content. But yes you are right, I even gave him (Sam) money a few years ago. Dark Wind just feels last century, and Auto Assault, while more silly, felt like Autoduel Online 2004 edition.

[Sjofn]

I liked Auto Assault as well, although a big part of that was the fact I could drive a giant hot pink van.

[Venkman]

Driving games of that type that aren't in first person and let you drive around in reverse with no disadvantages are fundamentally broken, IMO, since you just drive around in reverse while shooting your main front facing guns at all the things that are chasing you. Same issue with first/3rd-person shooters that have lots of melee range enemies and let you move backwards with no speed penalty.

Yea. Most of my love for AA comes from the E3 demo time I had with it, not the shipped product. At that early point it was just fighting and destructable environments with all related mayhem.

[Zetor]

Even after COH is gone, the character creator lives on! I wonder if they're working on an emu too -- and if so, how far they've gotten.

[raydeen]

Even after COH is gone, the character creator lives on! I wonder if they're working on an emu too -- and if so, how far they've gotten.

S.E.G.S. is the closest thing right now.
http://segs.nemerle.eu/forumz/

[Ragnoros]

IIRC someone said (maybe pohsyb) that CoX has never been emulated because its source/server code was never leaked.

[KallDrexx]

Emulators don't use leaked source code, they just re-engineer via packet sniffing.

[Zetor]

Yep. As I remember from the heady days of UO emus (early 2000s), basically everyone just reused the client assets, reverse-engineered the protocol, and rolled their own server based on the coder/group's Vision™. Sphere was waaaay different from UOX in just about every way, some emus used custom clients while others used stock clients / run-time patchers, etc.

(POL 4 lyfe!)

[Fabricated]

My favorite server emulation related thing was Ragnarok Online.

Gravity, the company that made Ragnarok Online literally put all of their server binaries on the same unpatched Win2k box they used to serve up the client. People discovered this, downloaded the server software, and upon looking at it realized it was a horrific piece of shit. The server emulators created reverse engineering their stuff ended up being much better than the actual server software Gravity used itself!

[UnSub]

I wonder if they're working on an emu too -- and if so, how far they've gotten.

You should check in on the Titan Network, but I believe the priority of that community has shifted from creating an emu to creating a new MMO in the spirit of CoH/V.

I believe that CoH/V was particularly hard to emulate, but a lot of progress was made in the last two months before closure.

[Redgiant]

There's a difference between what the community banded together to work on, and what Titan's devs might be doing.

The community is full of passionate folks who love CoH, with as you can imagine a wide variety of professional backgrounds in real life. So they have lots of hands, but debatable how many of those hands are devs, let alone devs with any heavy game development background or knowledge. Mostly it seems like what devs they have come from whatever background their job happens to be, and they just picked up a game platform like Unity to try using. I've never seen anything approaching a quality commercial look-and-feel MMO from that sort of thing.

There's differing opinions on how far those community-driven projects will get, but a group of well-intentioned but randomly scattered skillsets expecting to craft a full-blown MMO is interesting to watch.

Titan's devs are ... devs. Good ones too, from what I've seen over time.

The community have two things going on: The Phoenix Project and Heroes and Villains (both are new code and content, with H&V supposedly being more similar in gameplay to CoH, and Phoenix being more of a CoH2-ish modern engine to build many superhero games on). Neither are Titan projects, who have their own ideas on what to work on. Titan just helps host subforums for them until they get their own sites rolling.

There is supposed to be some teaser about the community efforts due already (Dec 14 iirc).

EDIT: So the teaser is just a series of concept drawings from different people. I'd have thought a first teaser would at least have a model or environment render, just to show everyone the team has the knowledge and tools to make them. And lets face it, for any commercial game team doing that would be easy.

[UnSub]

I totally agree about the Titan Network projects. They've got a few talented programmers / coders who were good at creating some community tools but it's uncertain how long they'll invest into a massive project like working on an emulator / a completely new MMO for gratis in their spare time.

And then it's got people who are all, "I want to help, so I'm going to learn Maya and Unity this weekend and I'll be animating all our models next week!".

There are a lot of strong personalities on the site and I think there will be a fracturing or two of the community before those projects enter indefinite hiatus. Odds of success are very, very slim.

[Rendakor]

I'm confused. Is this Titan thing you guys are talking about Blizzard's Next Big Thing (tm), or some other Titan?

[ezrast]

Titan Network. They maintain the CoH wiki and a number of utilities, including the character planner that I spent almost as much time playing with as the actual game.