Back Alley Brawler, City of Heroes animations developer, combines awesome with oops:
When we were testing the invasions on the training room, I logged into Galaxy City while an invasion was going on, flagged the BABs trainer as invisible, stepped into his spot and made myself visible, and then joined in the fight against the Rikti.
After it was all over I went back to the trainer to make him visible again, but being invisible…I couldn’t find him to target him. He was completely invisible, even to me.
A couple of days later we got a bug report through QA about the Invasion causing trainers to disappear.
: Zubon
To me, that’s a description of crappy tools for world editing.
There’s always ways to ask the world to give you back references to objects that are near you – once you have a reference you can tweak their properties – including making them visible again.
We’ve had this since the days of MUD – when a big MMO such as CoH has such problems I just shake my head.
In fact, I refuse to believe the tools wouldn’t allow him to see the object. I’d venture to say the guy probably didn’t know how to get a reference because he suddenly couldn’t click on the guy in the room anymore. If he was a tools-coder in that room he’d know a backdoor around the problem.
Speaking from work with the Multiverse sets and what the PWE folk talk like, it seems most simplified tools try to present little more than what’s available to the normal users, and a very basic number of tools. Having the ability to call everything by reference is powerful, but not something you want every GM or event coordinator to have a handle on. Limiting people to what they can see and interact with keeps things from getting too dangerous.
Odd that they’d let that sort of issue go live, though.
It didn’t go live, the Training Room is CoH’s test server.
And BAB is mainly in charge of animations and some graphical effects like auras, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have the tools to mess around with the database/code outside of his usual graphical interface.