Maps

[Alkiera]

In a thread on the official boards, there is a discussion, and links to, re-touched textures of the zones with shops in them, indicating the locations of the shops.  One set also includes the new tailoring shops to go live shortly.

I've tried out one set, they work pretty nicely, tho the font is a bit tough to read when the map is full zoomed out.  There's also a program listed there which can browse the game data files and extract data for modification, which is what was used to change the maps.

A Cryptic programmer eventually posted on the thread indicating that he wasn't in a position to say yay or ixnay on the change of map textures, but that overriding some of the binary contents of the data files could have disasterous effects on the stability of the client.  The lack of a Cease and Desist would seem to indicate that Cryptic doesn't care, given they're well aware of it.

Thought it might be a help to some who get lost easily.

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Alkiera

[SurfD]

Hmmmm, the idea of being able to hack the textures on the maps makes me wonder.

If they can hack map textures, whats to stop them from hacking Other textures (billboards, walls, etc).

Sure, it will only be local to YOUR machine, but this brings up all sorts of things:

- Your very own Nekkid Chix on billboards and walls all over paragon city.
- Changing stealth powers to have a bright green texture.

I can see many potential abuses for something like this.

ESPECIALLy since there is no appearent way to have the game auto correct the changes, as it is being applied from an external source from the pigg files (unless they change the code to prevent loading of resources in this manner)

[geldonyetich]

Your very own Nekkid Chix on billboards and walls all over paragon city.

Nekkid billboards?  Heck, look at the nude mods for Anarchy Online and Lineage 2.    They'd make nekkid superheroine skins, no question.

Changing stealth powers to have a bright green texture.

I didn't think Stealth powers had their own textures, but rather they'd "fade out" existing ones.    Eh, but I suppose you could always just turn everybody bright green faded or otherwise.

This wouldn't be a really big advantage.    Truly invisible (with "invisibility" or "superior invisibility" powers) players and mobs are simply not updated on your client, last I checked.     That's the way it's supposed to be done in the "Client is in the hands of the enemy" method.    On the other hand, Stealthed or Phased Shifted are just faded out, so would be vulnerable to that.   Yet, they're trackable if you've already got them selected anyway.

I can see many potential abuses for something like this.

History shows that the developers will end up diverting valuable development time to plug those cheats if people were found abusing it.    A simple CRC check of the textures would nail most people.

[Lanei]

A similar method can be used to override sound and/or music files in the game.  They are all .ogg files, and can be unpacked from the archives the game uses with the same tool that unpacks the textures.

The game looks in the data subdirectory of the city of heroes folder, and various subdirectories of it, and uses any files it finds there in preference to the contents of the packages.  It would be trivial to disable this, and since the patcher is likely to check the dates or checksums of the archives, modifying those is likely not worth the time.

But for now, you can do useful things like disable the annoying sound effects for targeting drone, super jump, etc etc by unpacking the file, and replacing the appropriate sounds with an .ogg thats a couple seconds long of silence.

Sidenote: Alk, take out the quotes around the URL in the BBCode to make it work.

[Sable Blaze]

This has possibilities in CoV. Just think: Roy Lichtenstein art on every billboard. Muzak pouring from every call-box in Paragon City. Existentialist graffiti everywhere...Paragon City shall tremble beneath my six inch spike heels!

You've been warned!