Penny Arcade today:

So who has a Kinect? What do you think of it?

I have MacOS X Lion running on a 30 inch Cinema Display.  If you have the latest Xcode, you can use Quartz Debugger to enable it.  What it does is allow you to run in a sort of retinal display.  In my case, it turns my 2560x1440 to 1280x720 but with very high DPI. It looks absolutely gorgeous and is exactly what I think most people have wanted out of their high resolution displays all along.

Apparently, new Macs coming out this year are going to have screens that do crazy high resolution (2880 x 2400 for instance) so that users can run them like they would at 1440x1200 except for having everything be super sharp.

I have to say, it is a really great experience to see text and the UI this clear. In fact, it's going to be hard to go back to any other type of display.

On occasion, for those who are feeling daring, I'll be releasing a build off my own machine with some tweaks and changes that haven't been checked into the main project.

Here's this week's EXE update (unzip into to your fallen enchantress directory)

http://draginol.stardock.net/fe-012012.zip

Here's what is different versus the public beta:

+ AI better at expansion with regards to pioneers

+ AI handles magic *much* better strategically

+ Several crash fixes. There is one known crash issue that I have not been able to fix that I think relates to external improvements being destroyed. It's infrequent but it's there.

+ Fixed (I hope) the "stuck turn" problem some have reported -- this is a complex issue due to all the threads interacting.

+ Fixed (I hope) the lock up that some people have reported -- this is a deadlock that results from multiple threads locking conflicting game resources

+ Modified the process event manager to make animation a bit smoother late game when there's lots of things happening on screen

+ Performance improvements

+ Fixed -- I think, the bug that caused AI players to sometimes declare war when you hadn't met them.

Make sure you back up your existing .exe just to be safe. It should be fine but you never know.

If you are running this version, put all reports in this thread.

Derek and I have been passing on the messages and emails and of course various posts on the impressions of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress beta 1. Thank you for the kind comments and encouragement. We really appreciate it. You can imagine how anxious we were about this beta release.

We will be lurking the forums (and third party forums as well -- Si vous savez ce que je veux dire) to gather as much information as possible on everything from bugs, user interface tweaks, game play suggestions, to feature requests and sitting down to determine what to put in there.

We are still some months away from release. There is work to be done but it appears we’re on the right track. There’s still a lot of work ahead for us to do. Lot of cool stuff to get in there and of course lots of bug fixing.

The current plan is to open the beta up a bit more next week.  Eventually, everyone who bought Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 or earlier will be in the beta.

With any luck, by the time we release, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be the PC fantasy strategy game that players were looking for.  Stay tuned!

While no longer run Impulse, our contract with our various worldwide bandwidth providers are still active.

This afternoon, despite only having the beta open to the original WOM beta group, we were doing 3.2 gigabytes per second (not bits, bytes).

Next up: Beta 2 on a single T1.

For some reason, the AI isn't building catapults in this build.

Anyone want to help debug this line of code?

Greetings!

It has been a long time. But the day of the public beta for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress has finally arrived.

How you will get it

If you were part of the original beta (pre-ordered the game) the game will automatically be added to your Stardock account this afternoon around 3pm EST.  At that point, you can go to http://download.stardock.com to download and install it.

What is in the beta?

The beta includes an interactive tutorial plus the full sandbox game.

What are we looking for in this beta?

First and foremost, bugs. Specifically, video and sound related ones. And crashes. We always want to hear about crashes.  In addition, we are interested in your suggestions to improve the game particularly in areas of user interface and game balance.

How are along is this beta?

It’s pretty far. The version you will be receiving is version 0.75.  That said, there are a long list of known issues with it that you will likely notice immediately.  For starters, you will likely see graphical glitches like this. It’s known and should be fixed by the first update which will be next Thursday.

What should you do if you have a problem?

If you run into a problem, like a game crash there will be a file in your \programdata\stardock\elemental – fallen enchantress direcotry. It’ll be a ZIP file which will contain a debug.err (always helpful) and a crash dump file.  Send that to us at [email protected] subject: Fallen Enchantress report.

Also, if you have some sort of issue like even getting the game to start or something, in your \documents\my games\stardock\fallenenchantress directory will be the most recent debug.err. That will tell us all kinds of information about your system that we can use to troubleshoot.

How about those who want to get into the beta?

We will be gradually adding more people to the beta in the coming weeks. Eventually, anyone who bought Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 or earlier will get Elemental: Fallen Enchantress for free.  Users who purchased War of Magic in 2011 will get a discount that they can use to purchase Fallen Enchantress and join the beta.  For everyone else, we plan to open the doors completely in a few weeks.

We are very excited to hear what you think.  There is no NDA on this so you are free to give your impressions (good or bad) as you see fit. We hope you like what we’ve done here. Let us know!

For new users: Here are our Survival Tips!

Screenshots:

The land is your enemy.

Keep remembering that. Because once you treat it as such, your odds of survival greatly increase.

As the person who programs the computer AI in an attempt to survive this world, let me share with you some hard won tips:

#1 DO NOT GO OUT ALONE

Recruit. Recruit. Recruit. Find champions who will join your side and go out into the world.

#2 THE CREATURES OWN THE WORLD

The creatures of the world are territorial. This matters because they are not randomly wandering around. They have a territory and they will defend it. You may not see that territory at first but over time, you will recognize it and respect it. When you create a settlement or simply trespass through their territory, they will react.

#3 DO NOT LET THEM MULTIPLY

Over time, the monsters who have explicit lairs will multiply and grow stronger. That exiled butcherman that’s in the wastes near your city? He’s going to be building up just like you are. Leave him alone and pretty soon you’ll have their entire medieval criminal syndicate knocking on your door.

#4 USE THE MAGIC

This should be obvious but from watching others play, I don’t think people realize how powerful magic is in Fallen Enchantress because it’s not all pew pew magic.  My personal favorite is Haste early on.

# 5 FLANK FLANK FLANK

If you run into enemies with missile weapons (archers for instance) learn to flank. Units have a kind of..area of control that is subtle. You can’t simply bypass them but instead have to go around. Similarly, if you have the archers, space your units such that your melee units can act as screens for the enemy units because they will definitely want to take out those archers.

#6 THE MONSTERS WANT THEIR STUFF BACK

The hardest thing I’ve had to deal with in writing the computer AI is unlearning bad habits. Steamrolling is not your friend. While I (or the early AI) tried to do this to other players, the monsters I had ignored earlier had grown up and started destroying my cities. And they don’t occupy cities. They’re monsters. 

#7 The Wild Lands are NOT a short cut

You will ignore this and then understand what I mean.

#8 DO NOT MINDLESSLY THROW ARMIES AT MONSTERS

Biggest mistake I’ve seen in new players – trying to “wear down” monsters by sending army after army at them.  Kill them or don’t try. Because, like you, they level up.

#9 REMEMBER: FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE, THEY ARE THE CUSTOMER, IT’S THEIR GAME AND YOU ARE A GRIEFING THEM

The monsters in Elemental: FE have been written as if they are the main characters. That is, they have all the capabilities you do. They go up in level, gain new abilities, can get loot, etc. If you’ve ever read the original “I am Legend” you will understand

#10 RUSH EXPAND AT YOUR OWN RISK

The #1 AI challenge in FE has been how to write the computer players in such a way that they expand but don’t end up losing tons of pioneers. It is an ongoing effort. Do I send 3 of them with a couple of bodyguards so they can expand in single swoop or do I send them out to try to sneak past the monsters?  And if I do send them out, am I ready to quickly defend that city?

#11 MONSTERS ARE SHY OF YOUR TERRITORY

Seeing civilization scares them. They will tend to stay out of your area of control. Use that. They won’t attack caravans that are in your territory.

#12 USE OUTPOSTS

FE has a new game mechanic called Outposts. They’re not cities. But they allow you to expand your zone of control far and wide. The resources will then flow to the nearest city letting you create a handful of super cities. It is better to have a few mega cities than a bunch of crappy ones (each time you found a city, your faction prestige is spread further out which slows growth in all cities). It also lets you claim land.

#13 PICK YOUR BATTLES

You and your AI opponents are able to trespass through each other’s territory. However, you can kick them out and they will remember it. This is both good and bad since they are likely to find another way but they may just declare war on you. The AI is the same way about you and may let you cross their territory or tell you go get out. (and this behavior will grow increasingly sophisticated as times goes on).

I hope this helps you survive!  Also, if you have a bad experience with monsters, you can lower the world difficulty which will make them a lot tamer. Or if you’re insane, you can put it further up.

Good luck!

Just want to keep people's expectations in line.

We are talking about a beta so let me walk you through some of the pain you can expect:

There will be crashes

The team has been working hard on making FE the most stable beta release we’ve done before.  However, it will crash as this is the first build that will get widely tested in “release” mode as opposed to “debug” mode.

In particular:

(1) Loading games within games.

(2) Starting a new game within a game.

I spent today recoding parts of this and it “works on my machine” but accounting won’t let me ship my machine with the game.

Balance Balance Balance

We have a long list of balance changes that still need to be made. And let’s face it, a little balance change can change the game dramatically.

Performance

Anyone coming from War of Magic will be happy but we still have a lot of areas to go. If you want to maximize your performance, you’ll want to turn off pedestrians (the little people in the cities) and disable outlines. Those two cosmetics eat up a lot of frames.  However, if you have the horsepower, you’ll be good.  Make sure you update your video drivers just to be safe.

Anti-aliasing will definitely also slow things down horrendously depending on your config and resolution. The game is going to default to your desktop resolution. So if you’re like me at 2560x1440, think twice about turning on 8x anti aliasing.

Graphical Glitches

Anyone who has bought a PC game in the past few months knows this is an issue that has gotten a lot worse in recent times. Until we all jettison DirectX 9 (this is likely going to be our last DirectX 9 game, sorry XP users) you’re going to have a lot of people with unusual issues that we hope we’ll nail down with this beta as opposed to with WOM when the first “release” mode distribution was the release version (the beta versions all had debugging code which covered up various issues).  With FE, the betas are going to all be release mode distributions which means it’ll be like you just got the “real” version. It’ll be harder for us to debug but we’ll manage.

MEMORY

This is a tough one but we really want to keep an eye on memory use.  If you can keep task manager up and look at committed memory in the process list, we want to make sure it stays under 2GB so that people running Windows XP don’t have problems (if you’re running 64-bit the game will use 4GB).  The game is large address aware.

Content

DO NOT judge the final game based on the content of the beta.  New spells, monsters, goodie huts and quests get added in every day.

However: We absolutely want to reduce the number of city improvements in the game. Fewer, more interesting city improvements is the goal so feel free to suggest how we can consolidate what we have to improve on city differentiation.

PLAYER differentiation

The tech trees are pretty similar between different factions. As modders can tell you, this is a content issue, not a game issue. Right now, the objective of the base game is to keep both sides reasonably balanced and let modders go nuts if they want.  However, we do plan to provide more tech tree differentiation as long as it makes sense (i.e. no different for the same of different). This has been one of Derek’s battle cries that he has convinced me on over the months.

The AI

The AI plays the game 100X better than say what it did in WOM.  But I’ve barely touched the tactical battle code (which is still enough to make the tactical battles 10X better than in WOM since they were totally horrible in that game imo).

What we’ll need help on is strategies you’d like to see each player take.  Like in GalCiv, each player in FE has its own strategy.  We’ll be talking a lot about how to make it so Altar plays differently than Pariden in a way that players will easily observe.  If armies end up similar on all sides, we did something wrong and will have to work at it.

There will be NO multiplayer

While internally we have multiplayer, we’ve turned it off. The release game won’t have it either.  The reason is that tactical battles would have to be rewritten to support it (MP code needs to be message based but the tactical battles all call directly to internal variables which makes it easier to have greater performance but it means no MP).  We decided it would be better to have no MP than gimpy MP for FE.  Don’t bother arguing this point as it’s already been hashed out endlessly internally and it’s decided.  We may bring it back in some future expansion but no promises because rewriting tactical is a non-trivial endeavor.

Lots of UI stuff is not in still

We have a victory screen still to go in that’s a pretty big deal. There’s a bunch of other stuff that will go in but by all means, if you have a UI request, post.

Modding and Campaigns are disabled

The beta is a sandbox beta.  You will have to have an Internet connection to play the beta because we plan to be updating the XML data online so that players don’t have to download an update to the game just to get a balance tweak. It is not copy protection or anything like that. It’s for our convenience.  The end result though is that modding won’t work because it’ll be using our online data.

Beta Reporting will be provided

We will be providing how to report problems here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/1010

There is no NDA

The fate of the game is in your hands in the most literal sense.  Because Elemental: War of Magic got such a bad rap (fairly or unfairly is irrelevant), we realistically cannot do a lot of marketing because every article is going to start with “After the ‘disastrous’ Elemental: War of Magic, Stardock hopes to make up lost ground, is it too late?” type stuff followed by comments like “Elemental? Stardock should just give up and make GalCiv III!”  The only hope FE has is for people who actually have the game to spread the word IF THE GAME IS GOOD.

There’s no NDA so you can do whatever video you want or post about it or whatever.  Do with it what you will.

Now, gotta get back to trying to figure out why particle effects are showing up in the FOW.

See you Thursday!