Here’s what we’ve put together in 24 hours:

So if Microsoft doesn’t restore the Windows 8 desktop to being able to work without jumping back and forth between it and Metro, we’ll do it.

Obviously we can improve on this but we’ll see how much Microsoft fixes things up before we invest too much time on this. Comment here if you think you’d be interested in something like this.  As the Windows 8 beta evolves, we can start to look at what sorts of usability things need to be addressed and put together something more comprehensive.

Update: GO HERE to get it: https://www.stardock.com/products/start8/

Monster Lairs, it turns out, were using a different object identifier. Thus, the AI couldn’t “see” them. It saw the monsters but not their lairs which is where the treasure is. It’ll be interesting to see how much impact this has.

We’ve talked previously about the work done on updating the visuals for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion.

Tomorrow, we plan to release BETA 1 of Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion so users can see both the graphical update and, more importantly, the new Rebellion and Loyalist factions, Titans, new capital ships and the hundreds of other changes and additions to the Sins of a Solar Empire universe.

A lot of the improvements will be subtle but hopefully noticed by players. The team has updated the AI for both combat (using special abilities intelligently) as well as for strategic use to ensure the single player game gets taken up a few notches.

The multiplayer experience is obviously very beefed up thanks to improvements to ICO and the inclusion of Steamworks for taking a lot of the load off of ICO.

So many crashes, so little time.

Well, not really. Not on the time part anyway. I have a crazy amount of time.

I hate to say this guys but I enjoy your crash reports. I’ve mentioned before that this is the first game I’ve been lead developer on since…I think The Corporate Machine which was like 1999. Thanks to the sale of Impulse, I can…indulge myself here.

So anyway, here is why your game crashes (most of the time).

Unlike with War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is very very multithreaded.

That means, that lots of things are happening at the same time.  But it also means a lot of things can be changing variables at the same time.

If we weren’t stuck with DirectX 9, I’d be able to do some crazy insane things with the threads (with DirectX 10+, I could send a lot of my AI onto the GPU and let’s face it, you guys know I’d totally do it because I have a disease when it comes to computer AI).

Now, with FE, I’m dealing with Kumquat which was architected under a very different set of circumstances. So it wasn’t designed to be as multithreaded as I’ve been making things.  This means I have to use what are called critical sections to keep thread A from changing something that thread B is currently looking at.

If I miss one, the game crashes.  If I put in the wrong critical section, the game will hang hard (like lock up).

Here’s a classic example:

Thread 1:

for I = 1 to Number_Of_Cities

City = ListofCities[i]

Thread 2:

if CityConquered THEN Number_Of_Cities++

So you can end up where thread 1 ends up looking at a piece of data that is literally garbage and trying to do something with it.  The result, a crash.

Now, you might say, why have all these threads?

I can only respond by suggesting the loading up of War of Magic v1.4 and playing through a late game.  Nearly all the performance gains in FE are from multithreading.  Your CPU probably has 2 to 4 “cores” on it.  That means they can do a lot of cool stuff at once.

And in the future, when we ditch DirectX 9, I’ll be able to spin your graphics adapter into splitting up its drawing (#1 reason to look forward to an XBOX 720 is that it’ll probably be DirectX 11 based and that’s a very big deal). 

It is a non-trivial effort to nail all these down.  The good news is, it’s not hard. It just requires a lot of testing and evaluation which is what we’re doing. Your crash reports have made a world of difference.

Reading is what I do while I wait for the night to be over to start the next day.

I love my Kindle. 99 cent books.

Anyway, here are a few books I highly highly recommend for those who dig sci-fi

Excellent:

Old Man’s War

The Last Colony

The Ghost Brigades

Post-Human and Trans Human

Good:

The Forever War

The Old Man and the Wasteland

Decent:

Anomaly

Zoe’s Tale

The Doomsday Book (this is good if you like history)

Fatherland

--

Next Month: Non-Fiction…

I spent an hour today trying to “optimize” the performance of game within a game. It has to do with clearing out DirectX objects. Problem is, it’s only slow when I run in the debugger (which is most of the time). In release, it’s instant. So there was no point in optimizing it.

Unlike Beta 1 where users had to post their stuff for us to get their crash logs, in Beta 2, crashes are automatically uploaded to us via Smart Exception which is something originally developed for WindowBlinds but was put into FE beta 2.

Here’s what we see on our end:

You should definitely post crashes and other info in the beta forum so that we can work directly with you. But this way, we at least get all the good details.

So far, stability seems to be very OS specific (Windows XP users are definitely suffering according to the logs).

If you’ve had a chance to play Beta 2, please take a second to go vote.

There's still months of work ahead of us but we're looking to see if we're on the right track.

Thanks!

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Greetings!

The team has gotten beta 2 out the door today.  We really hope you like what you see.

For those of you who won't have time to play it tonight, fear not, we plan to release an update tomorrow with a number of bug fixes that came in too late to make it into today's build.

Hopefully, you find this build very stable (i.e. it shouldn't be crashing for anyone). 

There's still a lot of rough edges which we will be working out through the beta 2 series.  

Use this thread to post general impressions.  Please post bug reports in the Beta forum, we'll be reading through them all even when we're not responding.

Greetings!

This is a play through of version 0.85 of the upcoming PC strategy game, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.  For Fallen Enchantress, Stardock reunited the Galactic Civilizations II team and brought in the Fall from Heaven creator, Kael to design a new strategy game that exists in the Elemental game universe.  The game’s campaign is designed by Jon Shafer, the lead designer of Civilization V.

Tomorrow, February 23, beta 2 of Fallen Enchantress will be unleashed on the unsuspecting public.  Anyone who has pre-ordered Fallen Enchantress will have access to it as well as anyone who purchased War of Magic back in 2010.

Fallen Enchantress is about you. Or more specifically, the world’s most powerful sorcerer who is played by you. It’s about the kingdom you build and the challenges you face.

Once upon a time…

I created a custom sovereign and allied him with one of the included factions, Altar.  Altar is the faction made up by men who fear the rise of the Empires of old who would enslave and ruin the world if they have their way.

My character, DL, is a scholar. He gets an extra 2 research per turn. The large, randomly generated map I’m playing on has 10 others players on it.

Now, immediately I have a few challenges to face.

There’s a Mite infestation. And I don’t mean the good kind of mites….ok, there are no good mites but still. They’re small, they have sharp teeth and they’re mean. 

I also have an unusually good start position. (pro tip: you can press Ctrl-N to have it regenerate the map until you get a random world you like). I have metal and crystal.  Metal is good for making good mundane weapons (swords, armor, etc.). Crystal is good for making arcane items. It’s rare to see both near a starting location.

There’s an exiled Wilding Warrior hanging around an abandoned caravan (no doubt, he being the source of said abandonment).  There’s also a champion I can recruit near by – Ralle.

Ralle has 5 useful abilities (and eventually we plan to have even more specific abilities for champions).

When I try to sneak by the Wilding to get to that caravan, he attacks…

This goes poorly for me. Lesson learned, don’t get too close to the nasties. No problem though, my sovereign is practically unkillable and returns to Athica, capital of Altar to rest and heal.

Act I: Explore

While DL recovers, my first set of pioneers have been trained and sent out.  Pioneers are great as they allow you to construct new cities and outposts.

Outposts are kind of a new concept in 4X as far as I can tell.  Basically, rather than having to have lots of cities, you can construct outposts who capture nearby resources who then feed into your cities.  There’s a shard of power relatively nearby that I am going to have them go get so that I can start accumulating mana.

and then…

Not only is there a shard near by but there is a scenic view.

Scenic views are special places in the world that once had a great deal of prestige in the old Empire. Controlling these allow you to accumulate diplomatic capital which allow players to buy favors from other players as well as recruit various kind of mercenaries from the world. 

If metal is the path to traditional soldiers and crystal is the path to arcane minions, then diplomatic capital is the path to recruiting monsters to be your armies.

In this pleasant example, I have all three which will give me a lot of flexibility.

The first meeting

On turn 21, I encounter the first emissaries of Yithril.

Yithril is home of the Trogs.  It’s not just the killing they do. It’s the eating that really gives them a bad reputation.

It is…unfortunate that they are so close to me.

What’s really unpleasant is that he’s quite powerful already. He’s level 2 (I’m only level 1). He’s upgraded his armor.  Verga isn’t terribly bright but he makes up for it with brute force.

The Trogs are very often the worst foes a Kingdom will face.

Act II: Expansion

Just as there are champions I can recruit, there are champions who are allied with the Empires.  I consider it important, especially with an Empire (the Trogs) near by, to eliminate as many imperial champions as possible, early on.

Narthyssa is particularly unpleasant because she is a berserker and will cast wither. I just know it.

Let’s see a video of what happens: http://screencast.com/t/OUWjphkZ1US

No Wither but 2 vs 1 isn’t really fair. Life isn’t fair either.

Now my next set of pioneers is giong to head over to claim some resources in this area.

The path ensures that they won’t come too close to that troll.

Athica grows

Athica has become a level 2 city. When a city levels up, it can choose a special improvement to be built.

The next faction

We’ll see how that goes…

Meanwhile, after fighting off a wolf scourge, DL has finally made it to level 2 where he can choose a new trait to add.

I was torn between strength and fast.  Fast is an uncommon trait to show up in the options here so I went with that.  Strength increases the damage melee weapons do. 

Technology

Fallen Enchantress has 3 technology paths:

Civilization – good for building up your economy, knowledge, and diplomatic abilities.

Warfare – good for building up your mundane warfare capabilities

Magic – good for building up your arcane related abilities.

The First War

I could avoid this war but realistically, the Trogs are never going to be friendly. They’re the Mongols of Elemental.  Better to deal with them now than later.

Wars, however, are expensive.  Soldiers have to be paid and so my normal rate rate will have to go up.  Increasing taxes will increase my unrest which will decrease how much research I do as well as decrease my production some.

I do have some advantages – magic.

I control 3 Elemental shards which generate mana. This in turn allows me to “buff” my army considerably.

Let’s watch the battle…

http://screencast.com/t/gD3bhMqqEXcX

My Pet Dragon

Well technically my pet Drake.

Yithril had a secret weapon they were working on.  They had captured a Drake nest and were in the process of training a drake. Which…I now own.

No wonder they declared war on me. If they had gotten this thing hatched before I arrived it would have been bad.

Now it’s good. For me.

DL and “Mazy” the Drake.

Time to have some fun..

They have a lot or soldiers.

I have Mazy.

Let’s watch…

http://screencast.com/t/Ng1g2gdKJ3h

(heh, I just showed this to Derek, he says it’s a bug that that lair was supposed to be guarded, sorry guys)

A better person wouldn’t use the drake for the rest of this example.

I’m not a better person.

I bet Verga wishes he hadn’t threatened me.

http://screencast.com/t/G7BnqD7nCQD

And so goes Yithril.

Into a dark place

One of my favorite features of the Master of Orion games revolved around Orion. That is, a super powerful planet that, if you conquered, it gave you a big advantage. Of course, conquering it was very tough.

In Fallen Enchantress, we have the Wild Lands. A part of the map so horrific that few survive that enter.

Those people…the un-surviving (yea, I made that up) didn’t have Mazy.

And so into the deep desert I go.

This is definitely a bad place.

Ut oh, will Mazy live?

Oh wait. That’s right, Mazy’s a Drake. Fire and all that.

And she can sweep her tail.

Now for the show down.  Torax. The living mountain tolerates no unwelcome guests.

Rotax seemed…more reasonably sized on the strategic map.  Now, when put to scale, this is looking…less promising.

This may come in handy. I hope.

Maaaazzzzzyyyyy!!!!

Hello…Mr. um. Mountain…guy.

Heh. You know, no hard feelings right?

And I’m down in 1 hit.

Fair weather friends

My diplomatic relations WITH Mazy

and soon after Mazy’s passing…

Bums.

Act III: Exploitation

After a couple hours of play, here is the known world…

And this is the world total:

So I’ve barely scratched the surface.

Thus far, I’ve founded a Kingdom, recruited a champion to my side, conquered an Empire and took their Drake hatchling and turned it into a formidable weapon…who then died when I ventured too deeply into the endless desert and came face with Torax.

It is now I have to decide what is the best path to victory.  Conquer them all? If so, how? I have good relations, perhaps I should try a diplomatic victory.  I don’t think I can get the Epic Quest victory here because I haven’t encountered the location of any parts of it. It’s a big world.  I could probably go for the Spell of Mastery. I have a lot of mana. But could I survive long enough to cast it?

…To be continued…