Brad Wardell's Blog


My wife's laptop and WinSXS

Published on Sunday, August 5, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Personal Computing

My wife's 3 year old laptop is a ThinkPad T200.  She's been having trouble with it "slowing down" and I finally had a chance to look at it.

Good...gravy. First, 3 years of letting the kids use it (and under her ID instead of making them logon to the accounts I made for them) had taken their toll. Her machine booted up using 3GB of memory.

Second, the ThinkPad coders over at Lenovo should just...knock off the insane amounts of home made junk they throw on there.  I usually wipe out the various "ThinkAdvantage" stuff but hers is the standard setup and 3 years hadn't aged those apps well.

And lastly, and most seriously, is the WinSXS directory.  Her 60 GB hard drive, adequate 3 years ago for her light use (Office, mail, and web surfing) was filled the the brim by a 22 gigabyte WinSXS directory.

Let me tell you right now to save you some pain: There's nothing you can do about it. There is no utility out there that will noticeably shrink it. You shouldn't delete stuff in it. If it bugs you enough, get a new hard drive and start from scratch.  It's a terrible design that remains in Windows 7 and 8.

 

Fallen Enchantress: Pre-Beta 4 AAR

Published on Friday, August 3, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Elemental Dev Journals

Fallen Enchantress Beta 4 is still a couple weeks away.  But I thought I’d share a brief game play example.

It was Summer

The black sorcerer had been wandering for some time…

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The world was healing from its wounds but was now dominated by monsters, demons, and men who would prey on the defenseless. 

He didn’t know what specific event finally made him decide to take a stand. Travelers slaughtered on the plains by bandits? A helpless proto-village overrun by dire bears? Ultimately, it did not matter. What mattered was that Macros had taken a stand and with it, civilization would return to these parts…

Essence

Most of the land remained inhospitable for life. But Macros had scouted far and wide and had at last come to a river basin.

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Here he found a land that would support crops, production and most importantly to the warlock, retained trace remnants of essence from the fallen Titans of old.  This essence would serve as a means for him to perfect his arts.

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With the construction of Athica,  people began to immediately migrate to the city. The little village meant hope, opportunity and most importantly, safety. It was rumored that Macros the Black was a powerful sorcerer. A warlock. He would protect them.

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The first order of business was to begin exploring and expanding the resources available to the village. To this end, Macros put out a call for a pioneer.

Aera, who had just arrived, volunteered. Macros escorted her to a place he had seen during his travels.

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With the outpost completed, the Kingdom of Athica’s influence now reached a rich metal deposit and one of the powerful magical shards, rooted to the earth itself.

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The capital city of Athica was very busing constructing the shard shrine, iron mine and a tower of dominion (designed to act as a beacon to bring people to the village faster).

Inslow

That Fall, Macros met Inslow. While not fond of battle, he was well liked by the village.  Inslow was a friendly but most importantly, he was trustworthy. To that end, Macros put him in town to act as its mayor while he continued to explore the area.

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The area, like most of the world, was filled with danger. Macros, however, was not defenseless.

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His spell book contained many enchantments that had made him a force to be reckoned with in the wilds. Now, as the leader of a growing kingdom, he would use this might to clear away the dangers and make it safe for his people to expand.

 

Progress

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Before the cataclysm, civilization had mastered technologies such as metallurgy, crop rotation, arcane arts and much more.  But with 99% of the population wiped out, few specialists remained. What did remain, however was lore. Soon, sages began to recover this lost knowledge. Each recovered technology might only take a few months to put into place.

The War

The Kingdom of Tarth had come from the north without warning.  Rather than pursuing a policy of open conquest, they instead aggressively constructed outposts throughout the land. Outposts that Macros quickly captured and turned to the purposes of Altar.

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This proved to be a mistake. Lady Irane had already made good use of her time with those resources and had amassed a potent, focused, force.

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To save the capital, Macros traveled by road and into the city.

Irane…was not impressed.

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Soon, all that was left was the capital. With a huge enemy army laying siege.

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The end returns to the beginning…

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With all his forces destroyed, his towns conquered, his allies dispersed, Macros finds himself alone.

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As daylight drains from his vision, his last sight is Irane pointing her mighty bow at his head.

Maybe…he shouldn’t have started a war after all.

Made up songs of little girls

Published on Friday, July 27, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Everything Else

Around a campfire tonight my 5 year old daughter started singing to the moon.

It went something like this:

I love you moon

I wish you were part of my family

I love you moon

If I could breath in space I would run out and hug you

I love you moon

If you were a human I would kiss you on the cheek

I love you moon

I wish you could live with us or at least near the sun

But I wouldn't look directly at you if you were too close to it 

Because it would make me go blind

I love you moon

I wish I could ride my bike and come visit you

You have a really beautiful glow like a big ball of ice cream if the ice cream also glowed

I love you moon

 

 

Outsourcing for me but not for thee

Published on Friday, July 27, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Politics

So why do people demonize companies that outsource to China but it's perfectly acceptable for individuals to go and buy things made in China?

Next time someone wants to rant about company X outsourcing, they should, at least, start trying to buy American if they feel that way.

If I'm a conservative, why are my friends liberal?

Published on Friday, July 27, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Politics

As some of you know, I'm politically conservative.  This is fairly meaningless since my interest in politics is much like my interest in professional Starcraft. I'm kinda interested and follow it probably more than is healthy but I don't get particularly fired up about it.

But I do like to debate. I will debate anything, no matter how mind numbing.  I am thinking that this is why I tend to have mostly liberal friends. I enjoy talking to people who disagree with my views more than people who will say "Amen".

Playing Fallen Enchantress Pre-Beta 4 at 1024 x 768

Published on Saturday, July 21, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Elemental Dev Journals

It’s tough to make a modern game look good at “low” resolution.  But we try our best.

Here are a few screenshots of a work in progress build running at 1024x768.

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I’ve also posted a video on Tumblr. Visit http://draginol.tumblr.com.  That’s where I’ll be posting “rougher” stuff that marketing wouldn’t generally want to be widely disseminated but lets those really interested in the game see what we’re up to.

Dark Knight Rises Spoiler thread

Published on Saturday, July 21, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Movies & TV & Books

The whole Stardock gang took Friday off to go watch this.

I'm a bit of a comic's nut. I'm the guy who spend $50+ a month on comic books so I very much enjoyed the Knightfall and other references and nods to different story arcs.

I enjoyed the movie immensely and will likely be going back again. There was some troubling pacing and the usual frustration of "Oh come on, people with automatic weapons would solve this in a heart beat."

 

Fallen Enchantress updated screenshots

Published on Wednesday, July 18, 2012 By Brad Wardell In Elemental Dev Journals

Stardock is having a pretty good Summer and the good luck continues!  Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion is a huge hit! The Political Machine 2012 is due out at the end of July. And our new fantasy strategy game, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, is about to go into beta 4.

First, a brief catch up:

Elemental is a world filled with magic, monsters, and an epic history.

Fallen Enchantress is a strategy game that takes place in that world.  It is approximately a century since a great cataclysm took place and now the world has been overrrun with monsters, bandits, and ancient terrors.  It is up to you to build a kingdom from the ground up to bring civilization back to the world.

Fallen Enchantress Beta 4 is around improving the UI and making your cities more interesting and special. We’ve also continued to enhance the elements found previously such as the graphics, animation, balance, AI, stability, performance, etc.

Here are some screenshots that you might have seen online:

CityTypes

When a settlement reaches a certain population, the player can choose its specialization which determines what city improvements are available.

 

FE_Economic_System

Cities in Fallen Enchantress use up multiple tiles based on what you build.  In Beta 4, players no longer have to manually place where they put improvements. Instead, players choose an improvement and it is placed for them. Additional improvements will tend to replace an existing one. This solves a problem we found in previous betas where cities became sprawling across the world and made navigation tedious late game (and it saves a lot of memory too).

 

New_Main_UI

We revamped the main user interface to be more intuitive and yet provide more information at the same time.  Now, what you see here is a later-gameish look so there’s a lot more “stuff” here. But as you can see, it’s overall a lot cleaner.  You can look at it and get an idea of what is going on.

 

NewClothMap

The cloth map has been revamped (planning on redoing the rivers too).  Unlike most (as in, pretty much every strategy game out there), you can rotate and zoom in on the map any way you want. You can zoom in and see an individual peasant working on a farm or zoom out and see a strategic view of the world presented like a fantasy cloth map.

 

NewResources

Beta 4 introduces a 3 core resource.  Previously, there were two: Grain and Materials. Grain could be converted into food or other things that might build up your economy. Materials could be converted into production or other things that increase how fast you can build things.  Beta 4 brings back the concept of Essence.  When the Cataclysm nearly wiped out the world, the powerful magic users known as the Titans, were consumed and their essence spread about the world. Essence can be used by Sorcerers (which you are one in the game) to cast powerful spells, enhance cities, and build incredibly powerful improvements that can turn the tide in a war.

We don’t anticipate Beta 4 coming out until August 16th. Sorry for the wait on this but there’s a lot of polish, testing, balancing, and UI to get in there.  And there will be a Beta 5 after Beta 4 at which point we’ll start thinking about a release date.  We’re in no hurry.  The objective here is to create the best fantasy strategy game we can possibly make.