Yea, a great feature…if I could ever get it to work on something more complex than HelloWorld.c
View the video on the crazy edit I perform to cause edit and continue to fail… 
Even the “barren” and “boring” deserts are dangerous
Having just come from working on War of Magic, the second title in the Elemental universe is a lot more intense. The world is filled with “stuff” right from the start. A lot of the stuff is good. Some of it, not so good. Every tile matters.
Every tile matters comes into play in a big way when you decide to found a city. With food now a local resource, your cities have to feed themselves. You can still build a city anywhere you’d like but obviously if you build in a desert or wasteland that city isn’t going to thrive. And since how fast you build things (or train things) is based on production which in turn is affected by population and local resources (rather than a fixed set of turns) it matters a great deal where you put things.
At a basic level, the source of conflict in Fallen Enchantress is that resources are scarce and someone wants what you’ve got (or vice versa). And those resources are derived from the land itself.
And the land is not your friend.
It’s not fair. My wife won’t let me have chickens. Chris Taylor’s wife lets him have chickens so I’m stuck with just my bees and garden. Chris told me awhile back that they’re thinking about getting bees out at their farm.
I wonder if my wife will let me get an Emu.
In here you'll see little bits of stuff we're working on that aren't fit for a journal entry.
This new forum has been created so that users can post their ideas and wishlists for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.
As some of you know, I’ve never written tactical battle AI before. Galactic Civilizations and Stardock’s other games didn’t have tactical battles. War of Magic had tactical battles but I wasn’t involved in that portion of the game.
This series of journals will take you through the journey of how to write AI for tactical battles. In my experience, games have tended to have pretty crummy AI when it comes to tactical battles (War of Magic no exception).
So for starters, I’ve got help. Seasoned developer Charles Lentz, who has been at Stardock for some years now, is assisting me on this project. The first thing I asked him to do is make it easy for me to do mock battles. When I was working on War of Magic v1.4, which was the first build I even got to look at how tactical battles were done, I noticed that there was no way for me to conduct mock battles. I’d have to “get lucky” and find an AI player who could cast spells to see if it even worked which was time consuming.
So for Fallen Enchantress, I asked Charles to set up a cheat key that would create opposing armies and that it would read from an XML file that I could mod to decide what powers those units would have. That way, I could test out all kinds of combinations.
Since I come from the modding world, I prefer to have my games let me, the player, mod as much as possible. My AIs have not been very moddable in the past because, frankly, the coding necessary was far outside my area of expertise (i.e. making it read variables and data from external XML files rather than just hard coding it in C++). But with Fallen Enchantress, Charles is going to take care of that for me.
So one of the things I intend to do is stuff as much data as I can in XML files. I want to be able to have the AI gather as much data as it can about who it opposes and then look at the XML data to help it decide what to do.
That means I want to make it so that every spell, ability, weapon, etc. in the game has in its XML AI data that I (or others) can mod with good things to go against it.
Does the enemy side have a spell that rains down a fire storm on me? Then I want that spell to include in its XML what spells are good counters to it. Then, the player comes in with his fire mage and the enemy casts a frost shield on her first turn.
Moreover, this gives me the excuse to request the UI team to let both sides see what spells/abilities each other have easily because a good tactical battle, in my opinion, should be a real battle of wits making use of terrain, spells, counter-spells, and maneuver. And the more data the player gets to see, the more data I can let the AI see without “cheating”.
Right now, AirPlay is not well known or understood by most people. I think Apple likes it that way because it will take time for them to truly perfect it. But early adopters know that AirPlay, as much as the iPhone and the iPod, threatens to change the way we think of computing.
AirPlay lets you stream the output of one device to another. It’s kind of the reverse of a remote control setup because you’re pushing rather than pulling. It’s also a lot harder to do. When you’re “pulling” (i.e. remote desktop for instance) you just have a machine that you’re trying to get stuff from. When you’re pushing, all the devices you’re pushing to have to be set up to receive.
So what is going to happen? Well, if left uncontested, AirPlay is going to wipe out a lot of current ecosystems and platforms.
AirPlay today:
With my Windows PC (or Mac) running iTunes I can take a video and stream it to any Airplay enabled device (speakers or monitors or televisions that have an AirPlay receiver on them). Right now, the $99 AppleTV is the go-to device to handle this. I’ve got 3 of these in my house that, using Control4, are then piped to my various televisions, monitors, speakers, etc.
My setup is atypical today. My home office has set of speakers for “gaming” (can’t play L4D2 without the full effect after all <g>) and another set of speakers for listening to music from the Airplay devices (so if I want to have a party where my music is playing throughout the house, I can do that or if I just want to listen to the radio or whatever while my computer is doing something else).
AirPlay tomorrow:
iOS 5 will let users stream their iPad video/audio live to any Airplay device via mirroring. Not a big deal? No, not on the surface. But in 5 years…
AirPlay in 5 years:
Nintendo is a shadow of its former self. Microsoft and Sony are struggling with their console sales because the iPhone X is powerful enough to execute some pretty impressive games and have their output stream to their AirPlay enabled Samsung (or in a nightmare scenario, an actual television made by Apple with AirPlay built in). The iPhone isn’t mirroring the game. The iPhone itself is an extended controller for the game. The player plays the game with their Bluetooth game controller.
Meanwhile, Windows X is struggling in the enterprise because all those Apple displays now have Airplay built in and companies now just issue iPads or iPhones out to employees with a set of apps that are displayed on the monitor with the user controlling them via a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Even today’s iPhone could easily run a Microsoft Office suite (and you wonder why Apple is bothering making an Office suite for iOS in 2011).
By that point, desktop PCs are going to look a little silly. Big boxes under the desk with fans whirring and a bunch of wires sticking out that are dedicated to a single output? Primitive and ridiculous.
Decoupled computing
I don’t know what term will eventually be coined for this new era. But Decoupled computing makes as sense as anything else. Your processing device, input devices, and output devices will be decoupled from one another.
What about Intel, AMD, Microsoft, etc.?
Let me say this: I’m not an Apple fan. This is a future I don’t want to see happen. But technology tends to follow the path of least resistance and the cost-reduction, user experience, and just plain obviousness of this direction makes me unsympathetic to the current stake holders who are doing little to nothing to answer this challenge. So bookmark this post and refer to it when the inevitable anti-trust whining starts showing up in a few years. Apple’s competitors could have done something about this now. It’s far from too late to cooperate and put together a meaningful alternative. Decoupled computing is the future. They need to get with the program now.
Loving the new fog of war. Note how things that are on the edge of the FOW are handled.
So for many years (2001 to 2006) I was a daily regular here. But until this month, I was only able to visit infrequently.
I'm curious to how many of you know who I am. 