I started playing Champions Online over the weekend (curse you, Shamus!) and of course I had to go with a dual-sword-wielding hero. He does technically have super-strength, but he rarely uses it as a weapon. Some of you know me as “Heron”; some of you know me as “Heron Blademaster”, and that’s this hero’s name (sorry, no swords in the pictures):
From the front; you can see CO's broken cape physics.
I got these from CO’s website.
From the back
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Sorry, I’m not sure how to get those two to be side-by-side without pasting them together in Paint. Anyway, I like the design; it’s I-like-killing-things-with-swords without screaming I’m-a-westerner-who-thinks-he’s-a-ninja.
I played through nineteen levels without having to grind (that’s a good thing) and without being required to join a group just to progress (which happened at level 13 with Lord of the Rings: Online, and is also the reason I stopped playing LotRO). I found that I shared Shamus’犀利士
experience in Snake Gulch, though, which means I got frustrated and started a new character. (I’ll go back to Heron Blademaster in a while.)
Champions Online is a good break from the completely-serious sort of atmosphere of WoW or LotRO; it’s also a good MMO for super-hero fans who like playing alone (like me) because they can’t be bothered to sit there trying to get a group of people together for an hour so they can go spend fifteen minutes killing some guy hiding in a sewer.
There appears to be a clipping problem with the bottom of the cape and the left leg.
Yep. I don’t know why it happened with their profile picture generator – that’s not related to the game as far as I know. (I used their website to grab the picture.) You’d think they’d generate the image with the character at a standstill, with the cape hanging straight down… guess not.
In-game, the cape physics is just as broken. Wear a cape, and jump backwards – the wind will push the cape forward through your legs, and then the cape will hit the front of your knees – having already gone through your thighs – and decide it can’t fall anymore, so there it stops. It’s actually worse-looking than those pictures.
The cape is probably a bezier surface and they just move the control points to wave it. I believe bezier curves and surfaces are GPU accelerated when calculated and rendered, so to do any kind of collision detection I’d suspect they’d have to do the same calculation again in software to see if those control points are acceptable, then push it off to the GPU for rendering. Maybe that process is too expensive?
If this is a superhero game where capes are prevalent (why do superheros always wear capes but not 10 gallon hats?) seems like a mistake not to address it. Oh well!