https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Please give your honest opinion on the overall state of BETA 1.

Thanks

In today’s game it’s a 4-way battle on a small map.

I’m still in the stage of trying to keep the world from murdering me.

Playing with a couple of new spells.  Destiny’s Gift sucks up 100 mana but increases a random stat. Given enough time…and enough mana you can make a champion a god. Which is the caveat. The spell can’t be cast on the Channeler, only a champion.

Version 0.80 is an internal build of Fallen Enchantress.  This is basically a test of the AI on normal.

I’m playing as Relias, the sovereign of Altar, a Kingdom of Men.

My opponents are the Blood Elves of Magnar, The Mancers of Capitar, and the Wraiths led by Ceresa.

Note: I’m playing in the debugger so please bear that in mind before commenting too much on graphics as these are set to minimum.

An early battle:

This is the new tactical AI in action.  I’m not sure I like what it decided.  The wolves decided to bypass my strongest unit in order to target my weaker champion. But in doing so they were vulnerable to my main guy.

So let’s see what we can do next…

Details on Windows 8 on ARM are revealed.

You can read Paul Thurrott’s pretty thorough look at here.

So let me make sure I am understanding this:

If I want to make a Windows 8 desktop app (by far the largest market) I need to develop one way (Win32 for all practical purposes and WinRT..maybe..eventually).

If I want to make a Windows 8 phone app I have to use a completely different method.

And if I want to make a Windows 8 tablet app I have to use a totally different way.

And, by the way, if I want to release my stuff in the latter two methods, I have to use the Windows Store, run by the same company that make XBox Live such a miserable experience to support.

And we would do this…why?

Is Microsoft trying to force me to develop for iOS? It sure seems that way. They’re taking a shrinking market and splintering it three ways (4 if you count WinRT on the PC).

In the debugger right now working on tactical AI. And I’ve wondered just how many spells there potentially are in a given game.  The current number: 175 (not counting strategic).

Working on tactical AI today. So many tweaks, so many little stupid errors (typos). Thank goodness I can fix and continue.

So I watched the most recent Star Wars: The Clone Wars (“Crisis on Naboo”) and really enjoyed it.  I enjoyed it enough that I decided to go over to TheForce.Net and see about conversing with others about it.  Oh god. What a mistake.

I didn’t even get to the posting part. I just read pages and pages of bitching about how terrible the episode was.  Then I read the same thing about every episode they listed on there. Just pages and pages of ranting and complaining about how terrible the episode is. And mind you, this is a “fan” site.

Here’s a growing problem: College graduates who have never had a job of any kind.

I get a lot of these resumes on my desk now. 4-5 years in college, living at home, never worked. No mall job. No McDonalds. No summer landscaping. Nothing.

I used to not pay that close attention to that but I do now.  I have to because kids who have never had a job have no idea what’s expected at a job. Basic things like getting up every day and being at work at a consistent time. 5 days a week.

If you’re a parent and you’re not making your kid work so that they can “focus on their grades” you’re doing them a disservice. I won’t interview anyone anymore that has never had a job. I don’t care what their GPA was.

I have so many passwords.

And sites keep making the requirements more and more complex.  Mixed case, numbers, etc. 

I already use LastPass and such but still, I wish we could get to a point where there was some better way to verify identification.

We have promised, many times, that Fallen Enchantress will be so bad that it’ll give you some sort of disease.

It is now time to pay up.

For today, the tactical battle AI begins its development.  And my job is to kill you. Thousands and thousands of times.  Meanwhile, you’ll be trying to kill the AI in tactical battle with your various tricks. They will avail you to naught. You humans and your armies will be destroyed. Your kingdoms crushed. There will be much farting in general directions.

For the past several months, I’ve been asking my diabolical cohort Charles to write me tons of little functions that I could eventually use to build up the tactical AI.  While I worked on the main game and the strategic AI, Charles did put together a decent tactical AI with what he had. 

Unlike the strategic map where the AI can’t see all, the tactical map AI has no such problem. All units can see each other.  The odds are even.  There’s no reloading your game in the middle of a battle. It’s just you and the AI.

So for the next couple of months, we’re going to get to know each other.  You will beat the AI a lot at first. And hopefully, you’ll share your secrets. From those secrets I will ask for new APIs and new XML that will help.  I still have a lot of data requests (I don’t know how many turns have taken place in a given battle so I have no concept of whether we just started the battle or are nearing its end, I don’t yet have access to what spells are good and what spells aren’t – but I will soon).

I will have to solve the AI’s terrible use of mana strategically so that it has mana left over to do horrible…horrible things to you guys.  I will also probably ask for a lot of new tactical spells that the AI is more inclined to use effectively (I got a few cool new strategic spell requests that are being put in that are…simply ridiculously evil).

So to start this conversation, let’s look at some of the things the AI needs to think about:

1. What is the balance of power in ranged units?
2. Should I attack the closest unit or bypass that unit to go after a more vulnerable unit
3. How important is vulnerablity? No point casting a fire dart at a fire elemental but should I spend a day coding about blunt weapons versus cutting weapons? (remember: time is a finite resource, I don’t get a year to write this, just N engineering hours).
4. Should I cast a spell? Right now, the AI wastes magic when it shouldn’t (because it rolls the dice rather than calculating it).  No point in using burning hands if I can kill you with a sword almost as well.

This is going to take awhile and it won’t be in the first BETA 2 build.  Or if it is, it won’t be much better than what is currently there.  But together, we should be able to come up with something pretty lethal.