I want to give a shout out to our Windows XP beta testers.  Thanks to your reports, we were able to track down that issue that was causing it to frequently crash on some Windows XP setups.  

As you can imagine, in 2012, it is difficult to replicate "real world" Windows XP systems. There's only so many uncles and aunts in the world to bother and after the...you know, "formatting" incident, I'm not allowed to visit.

Should go out in tonight's build.

Modding Guide

Preliminaries

I’ll be updating this as time goes on. I’ll get turned into its own article eventually with a live version in the modding area of the forums.

• To use mods, you need to go to the Options dialog and turn on “Use Mods”.
• Get familiar with this directory:
  • 
• The documents\my games\fallenenchantress\mods directory is read in by the game.

The Tools

On the main menu is the “Workshop”. This is the gateway to the modding tools. The tools we include in game are:

• Builder’s Forge
• Cartographer’s Table
• Particle Cauldron
• Faction Creator

These tools will be in a perpetual beta as we plan to provide regular updates but we don’t have any plans to encourage casual players to make use of them.

Understanding objects

It will help you if you forget that Fallen Enchantress is a fantasy strategy game. Instead, think of Fallen Enchantress as being a particular “Mod” of a game engine called Kumquat (I didn’t name it so don’t yell at me <g>). We could just as easily have made a Baldur’s Gate style game with it. Or more specifically, YOU could make an Ultima style game. Or a Civilization style game.

With this understanding, let’s talk about what ties them together: XML

That is, all of these tools do is create .XML files. We use PNG for most graphics (we do use .DDS as well which is another graphics format).

The Builder’s Forge

The Builder’s forge is there to create non-mobile objects. For our purposes, we’ll call these “Tiles”. The left mouse button selects and places. You can move the view around with your middle mouse button.

When you save the tile, it is placed in the \documents\my games\fallenenchantress\tiles directory. A tile includes an XML file and a shadow PNG.

A tile, on its own, is just eye candy. It’s what you do with it that matters. That brings us to…

The Map Editor

This is what it looks like if you select the cartographer’s table. There are generally 3 things you can make with this.

1. Custom Maps
2. Tactical Maps
3. Stamps

Making a Custom Map

The basics of a custom map are as follows:

• Make sure there are some starting locations
• Make sure there are enough decent places for people to settle.

Someone could make a Civilization style map where everyplace is settleable.

Left-click to select a type of tile and right click to set it. You can click and drag some things (like mountains) to go nuts with it.

Different types of terrain tiles

Different types of objects

We don’t really use triggers in the sandbox game. But in the campaign, we use them everywhere. A trigger is specifies a condition in which an event is launched. A typical one would be to have tiles marked as triggered and if hit, it then tells the game to open up a cut scene or start a quest or spawn monsters or something.

When you save a map, you can specify it not to create any objects for you. If you’ve created the perfect map with every resource placed and every NPC placed just so, then select that option. If you want the game to go ahead and randomly spawn the resources for you, then don’t check that option.

Making a tactical map

A tactical map is a special type of map that the player is sent to under specific circumstances (a tactical battle for instance)

Like strategic maps, modders need to tell the map where players are going to start out at with their units. Tactical maps tend to have (as you can see in the screenshot) a lot of blocked tiles. That’s because most of the tiles you see are simply decorations and as such, need to be flagged as untouchable.

One thing to note is that Kumquat doesn’t yet support blocked tiles in terms of weapons. That is, putting up a wall won’t stop a unit’s ranged weapon from going through it. So cosmetically, don’t put up a wall expecting it to block line of sight or weapons. This is something we hope to change in a future version.

Making a tactical map, on its own, won’t buy you much. It has to be connected to something to be used.

With custom maps, players can explicitly load them at the start of the game. But with tactical, they have to either be connected to a triggering event of some kind (like a quest or goodie hut). We don’t currently support generically pulling in unspecified tactical maps.

Making Stamps

Stamps, are used by the random map generator.  We wanted to give modders a way to contribute to the post-release map generation experience. And so stamps were born.

Here’s how they work:

You create a piece of a map.  Maybe it has a starting location on it. Maybe it doesn’t. It can be big or it can be small.

You are better off making the stamps fairly small so that they’re more likely to be chosen (huge stamps may have a hard time fitting into a given world).

Once you’re done, choose the magic wand tool. Select a tile and it should select all of them. Then select the selector tool (the arrow tool) and then using the Ctrl key LEFT click on each tile you want to de-select.  This is the fastest/easiest way to do it I’ve found. Specifically, you should generally de-select cliffs and beaches (anything on an ocean) because otherwise, your stamp will only be selected when it’s trying to find an ocean sided stamp and that could be pretty rare.

Once you’ve done that, select “Save Stamp” from the top.

In the Save Stamp area, you need to choose which type of map it’ll be used with. Tiny, Small, Medium, or Large. This sets the minimum map size that the stamp requires.

The file gets saved to the stamps directory in your \documents\my games\fallenenchantress and the game will pull from it as long as “use mods” is on. Make sure you choose the frequency you want it to show up on.  If it says “no inclusion” it means it won’t use it unless it gets explicitly specified elsewhere (like a spell).  I’d recommend “common” for most stamps.

Testing your stamp

To test your stamp, you’ll need to open it up in a text editor. There will be a tag called “frequency”. Set it to 5 (remember what it was previously). This will make it show on on a given map size for certain. DO NOT share stamps like this.

I try not to think about the stamps users are going to share. It’s too disturbing.

Up Next…

Goodie Huts

Quests

Monsters

test

Q: What kind of computer do I need to run Fallen Enchantress?

A: You need to be running either Windows 8, Windows 7 or Windows Vista.  If you are running Windows XP, you should make sure you have at least 2GB of memory and a video card with at least 512MB of video memory.

Q: Do I need War of Magic?

A: No. Elemental: Fallen Enchantress is a new game in the Elemental universe. But it is not directly related to War of Magic game-wise.

Q: How do I maximize performance for Fallen Enchantress?

A: If you are looking for the absolute best performance, you should disable outlines and pedestrians and lower anti-aliasing in the options menu.

Q: Does Fallen Enchantress have copy protection?

A: No. We do have a serial number system so that if you buy the game from a third-party store (Steam, GameStop, GamersGate, etc.) you are able to re-download it directly from us into the future.  But you may put Fallen Enchantress on as many machines as you would like that you own.

Q: I’m having a problem with FE, what should I do?

A: All of your FE specific data is in My Documents\My games\Stardock\Fallen Enchantress folder.  There is a file called debug.err. The first few pages tell us everything about your computer. If you give us that along with the last few lines of that file, we might be able to find out what the issue is.  Any time the game crashes, Windows sends up a report so we can look into that.

Q: What else can do I do to make sure I get the best performance and experience?

A: First, make sure you have the latest video drivers. We can’t stress this enough. You’d be surprised how many problems disappear if you just keep your video drivers up to date.  Second, if you can, run a 64-bit version of Windows.  FE will be able to see more memory which will improve its performance further.

Q: I have heard the FE AI is really smart compared to other games, why is that?

A: Fallen Enchantress’s AI is multi-core. That is, while you’re taking your turns, the AI spins up on every CPU core you have to do a lot of additional analysis of what’s going on in the world.  Moreover, the game gets smarter the more you play it. The units you create it will make use of, the sovereigns you make it will use against you in future games.

Q: I just saw the AI do something stupid, why is that?

A: AI’s try to be generally intelligent but can still be specifically stupid. In the case of FE, because it’s a non-cheating AI, it can make mistakes. It may not “see” what you see. So it has to go out and send scouts and then do a lot of calculated guessing. Sometimes it may value something differently than you would (such as city placement – it might decide it’s worth giving up on a 4/3/1 city and instead settle a 4/2/1 city because it wants to be one tile closer to something else (like a river or a shard) to get its area of influence on those things sooner.

Similarly, in tactical battles, the AI may not have the mana available to cast a particular spell or you may make a move it was not expecting and thus disrupt its strategy (which is a good thing, you should do that). 

At the highest difficulty levels, we give the AI money. But as you know, money can only go so far. It can’t conjure up for itself metal or crystal or other resources, doing that would make the higher levels absurd and unfun.

Q: How do I use player mods?

A: First, in the options menu, select “use Mods”.  This will enable the game to look at the \documents\my games\fallenenchantress directory to look for the Mods.  Inside that directory you can add quests, maps, items, and other types of mods.

Q: Are there any other tricks to maximize performance just a bit..bit further?

A: Yes, but this is absolutely unsupported.  You can go to the \documents\my games\fallenenchantress directory and change the resolution to this:

DisplayWidth=1024
DisplayHeight=768
UseDesktopResolution=0
Fullscreen=1

We don’t recommend this but you will get the absolute best performance this way at the cost of visual quality.

If you’re a techie, you can go nuts with that file.  If you mess it up, simply delete it and the game will recreate it at its defaults.

This whole directory structure should be thought of as your play ground to do surgery on the game as you see fit. At any time you can always delete it and the game will recreate it if you get into trouble.

Got the Kindle White yesterday.  I like it. Much better reading than either the Kindle 4th generation or the Kindle touch.  However, it is noticeably heavier. I haven’t decided yet whether that’s a worthwhile trade off.

(this is going to be long…but here we near the climax of the story of the making of Fallen Enchantress).

In the beginning…

So as some of you know, my day job is President/CEO of Stardock.  I founded the company when I was in college to help pay for school – until I could get a “real” job.  Not surprisingly, I was unable to find a real job and so, I’ve been “stuck” here for the last 20 years. I’ve even put my resume on that fancy paper. You know, the textured kind? No luck. So here I am.

When we first got into the Windows market, the games part of our business was largely a hobby. Something we did for fun.  Even today, it’s the enterprise and consumer software I rely on to pay Stardock’s bills. This has allowed us to try some interesting things such as create a very liberal return policy (at the time) that centered around the Gamers Bill of Rights (i.e. if we make something you find buggy that you bought from us, you can return it for a full refund).  Nowadays, most of what’s in the GBOR is taken for granted (reasonable return policies, no CD copy protection, etc.). 

As an industry, we’ve come a long way.  I think the general improvement to the quality of PC games combined with the much much better customer service gamers get is one of the reasons the PC game industry is growing so well again (and yes, I read Internet forums too, don’t let the angry, gullible, or entitled fool you, a PC gamer in 2012 is vastly better off than a PC gamer in 2002 in terms of buying a game, downloading it and having it work and not being hassled with obnoxious copy protection schemes).

In short, it’s a great time to be in the PC game industry.

Beyond War of Magic

We took a bruising for the state of War of Magic was released in. And we deserved it. Ultimately, my job is to make sure the stuff we make is really good and in that case, I failed. On the other hand, a lot of good came from it. Today, we make much much better games.

Why Fallen Enchantress is being “given away” to War of Magic early adopters

Giving away Fallen Enchantress to early adopters of War of Magic is a no-brainer.  First, it lets them know that our deeds match our words. It’s easy to say customer friendly things. It’s another thing to spend millions of dollars to back those words up. 

Putting the principle of the matter aside, it’s still good business. The people who bought WOM early on and were disappointed can see that we didn’t forget about them. Repeat customer are the life blood of businesses.  Making our WOM customers know that we stand by our words just makes good business sense.

Our “crunch” time

Our crunch times these days doesn’t mean working weekends or crazy hours. After War of Magic, we made it company policy that crunch times like that would be forbidden. If it looks like we’re going to “come in hot” then just move the date. Don’t debate it, just move the date.  We did that with Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion and we did it with Fallen Enchantress. Even now, I can’t promise you a specific release date.  I’ll wait for Thursday’s build, talk to the QA team, get together with Derek and others and pick a date.

Such a luxury in release flexibility would have been impossible for us just two years ago. Thank goodness for digital distribution.

Flight of the Indies

In the “old” days, there were lots of guys like me.  We weren’t called “CEOs” back then. We were called game developers.  Eventually, most of these companies either got bought up, disappeared or became work-for-hire studios. It’s a brutal business to be in. I’m not sure how many >50 employee, independent, self-funded game development studios are left (feel free in the comments section to list as many as you can think of).  The result is that we tend to mostly see games that are either huge ($10+ million budgets) or tiny (<$1 million budget).  We’re hoping that if Fallen Enchantress is successful that it will help validate that there is a market for so-called “niche” games of significant budget. It’s one of the reasons we’ve spent so much time making sure we get FE right.

Beyond Fallen Enchantress

Fallen Enchantress paves the way for a lot of exciting and interesting expansions or sequels.  I do hope it does well enough to justify a third game in the Elemental universe (not counting expansions).  It’s a rich world that, thanks to you guys, we’ve been able to develop and mature over the last couple of years into something really special.

The people who helped make Fallen Enchantress

For a modern PC game, Fallen Enchantress has a remarkably small team.  My personal role on the game has been lead developer and AI programmer.  It’s the first time since the OS/2 days that I’ve been the “lead” developer on anything.  We’ll write up a “post mortem” like we did with Galactic Civilizations II.  But broadly speaking, a few developers, a few artists, Derek, Jon, Toby and a few others are the team that made this game.

Here is a sampling of pictures of the team in action:

Derek “Kael” with Bailey. Derek is the lead designer and Project Manager (Producer)

Jon Shafer with his parrot. Jon Shafer designed and implemented the Fallen Enchantress campaign while working on another, unannounced game

Kay (with Jon’s parrot) did all the game icons (like spell icons) and many of the higher quality monster textures

Love all that cool art painting in FE, Leo. Is. The. Man.

Scott (Boogiebac) is our mad scientist, he does…a little bit of everything.

Sarah is my executive planner and keeps me on track between the many different projects going on around here

Akil manages the art team. He modeled a lot of the monsters and generally makes sure things are getting done.

Paul (Mormegil) makes the map stamps and is our UI wizard along with a thousand other tasks

Emily helps ensure we get our paychecks!

Marketing meeting, Angie, Derek, Skittles, Sarah, Nakor, Brian (Yarlen), and Chris making plans

Toby is the Associate Producer, he is the one who helps Derek with UI design, balance tweaking, and produced the tutorials

Sarah is our go-to person on game system implementation (i.e. implementing new features to the game engine)

Jesse, by contrast, is the 3D engine guru. At a normal PC game company, there’d be a 3D engine team. At Stardock, Jesse IS that team.

Jonny & Ari handle graphics engine work and animation rigging respectively. Ari’s the one who made those cool Mite animations.

Kim, our controller, is the one who makes sure I don’t spend all the money on candy.

Cari (Elf) is Stardock’s senior game developer (lead developer of Galactic Civilizations II).

Alan is our up and coming engine architect

Kay making icons

Charles is the go-to guy for integrating XML and the game code along with a million other things.

Of course, this is only a partial list, the credits video is shown at the end of the game which includes our valiant QA team, the support team and other team members who ducked out when they say me coming around with the camera.

…and now back to work.

Great article by someone who got seriously harassed by a so-called Internet troll.

http://www.traynorseye.com/2012/09/meeting-troll.html?m=1

I've had to deal with a lot of crap over the years due to idiots on the net. The most recent due to gullible people buying into things they read on the net without critical thinking. Every comments section is filled these losers who regurgitate crap they read somewhere with no inkling of the reality of the topic. People like that do that not just because they're idiots (and they are) but also because they're pathetic. They think of people in the abstract as if we are just characters in some meta game.

You can't reason with them. I've made that mistake in the past, even recently. The best thing to do is ignore them (or alternatively, ridicule them). But in real life, every one I've met in person was driven not by envy but out of a total lack of sense. They're just sad creatures. But I don't pity them. They choose to be malicious. 

i liked how the author dealt with the situation. every time I see some commenter on some site regurgitate some hateful thing about me or my friends I picture some snotty kid like in the article. 

Greetings!

Yesterday we released Elemental: Fallen Enchantress BETA 5-C.  This build is our first pass at balance and UI enhancement.  

Next week we will have a BETA 5-D which will focus almost exclusively on bug fixing and balancing as well as some new AI counter-strategies so those of you who have posted your game play strategies online (foolish humans! <g>). We are reaching the home stretch.  We will also have a Beta 5-E. After that, we'll see where things stand.

Many of you have been in the beta for a very...very long time. I can't imagine the challenge it is to evaluate the game from the perspective of a typical PC gamer.  But we're going to ask you, once again, to try to do just that:

Please go to: https://www.elementalgame.com/journals and vote on your impressions of the game in your hands.

We are very excited to see what players think. 

These past two years have been wonderful. The community we have built together has been amazing and on behalf of the Stardock team, we really have enjoyed listening to your ideas, impressions and suggestions.

Like all Stardock games, 1.0 isn't the end of our journey. Even as I type, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion v1.1 nears completion. Ideas and code snippets for FE expansions and successors float around. And there's some exciting things we hope to announce in the coming months.

We look forward to your opinions: 

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals