Lots going on this week.  I’m scheduled to fly out on Monday on a media tour to start showing off Elemental in preparation for its anticipated release date late Summer.

Here are some of the things being worked on in preparation for beta 2.

1. Memory use.  We’re consolidating our mapping of how every byte of memory is used in the game. 
2. Performance. We’re setting things up so that we can begin handing over builds to the full QA lab for compatibility testing.  Will the game work on a Netbook? Does the game scale up on the latest/greatest ATI/nVidia cards?
3. Stability. What are the problem areas? They’re almost always due to something not releasing a pointer or not checking the validity of an object. But the text matrices have to be made and handed over to QA.
4. Balance. Yes. Beta 2 begins the phase where it’s supposed to be “a game”.  The AI won’t be very strong in beta 2 since that’s the area I’m responsible for and I have only recently begun coding it. But it should be much further along than in beta 1.
5. Asset integration. This is where we start plugging in screens, units, and other features that were unit tested but not in the main code branch (i.e. they weren’t in “the game” per se). There are still features that won’t be in beta 2 (most notably tactical battles) but things will seem night and day different than beta 1.
6. Sound Sound Sound. A lot of time has been put into getting the sound effects and musical score elements into the game.
7. Map Editor / Campaign. The two are tied closely together. It is our intention to make the campaign in such a way that a modder could create their own campaigns and share with the community. So we’re having to make sure we’re not hard coding things into our campaign.