If there were 100 people selected at random, 90 of them would have no idea what I mean in this post. 5 of them would understand and find it bizarre.

I am a creature of the virtual. Before there was an Internet there were BBSes.  The physical world, for me, has always largely just been the place that requires me to move my carcass between terminals to get back into the real world.

In another decade or two, it won’t be “the Internet” but something beyond it where I think more and more people will be like me – the virtual world is the real world and the physical world is just an issue we have to deal with due to having to provide our physical selves the necessary nutrients to continue.

A lot of people I know think of the Internet as a “tool”. It’s a thing they use to help them in “the real world”.  But for me, cyberspace (for lack of a better term) is where I live.  That’s why when something goes terrible (like the launch of our most recent game), it’s incredibly painful because there is no escaping it.  In Cyberspace, everything you do can be tracked, logged, reported on, etc. There is no “coping”. And “unplugging” for our kind is a challenge because the physical world is just so…boring. 

For me, the strengths of being online are in the communities. That’s what I care about.  I work on non-game software to pay “the bills” in the physical world and work on games (and skinning programs) to help build and create virtual communities with like minded people. 

I think in the long-run, human existence will become more and more virtualized. I even had second thoughts about our new house because, in the long run, it won’t matter. Our various sensory inputs will get their “data” from the virtual world.  I’m not predicting we’ll live in “The Matrix” or anything like that. Rather, it’ll be something completely different than what we have now, it won’t be something we can imagine, it’ll be something new and amazing.

Comment here on what sorts of mods you’d like me to make to serve as examples to work from.

Be aware that in Elemental v1.1 that the magic system is moving away from personal mana to a global mana pool (much funner, more balanced) so you will likely want to keep mods focused on things that can be easily modified by that change.

Anyway, if you’re interested, put in your requests here and I’ll start on these this next week and start posting source to the mods.

At first, I thought I was going to end up using the iPhone 4 more because of its wonderful display.  But I’m finding myself slowly migrating back to the iPad for more and more stuff.   I wish the iPad had a higher resolution display now (it’s hard to go back to anything else after the amazing high DPI iPhone 4) but the form factor just works so well.

With my schedule a lot less tight, I’ve finally had the opportunity to spend more time with my kids. Which, today, meant playing dolls with my 3 year old daughter. 

Our first two kids were boys and when we had a girl, we encouraged her to play with the boy’s old toys (I’m a cheapskate) but she gravitated towards the remnants of my wife’s old dolls (i.e. the ones the boys hadn’t destroyed).  We still don’t have very many dolls and such but that’s her favorite thing to do.  My doll’s name is “LaLa” apparently and she lives with “ZuZu” (my daughter’s doll) in the doll house that my wife’s mother made.

Gotta, go, I’m being called back.

I hate leaving all this for the end of the week, especially when it’s good news stuff and our community could certainly use some of that.

So here’s what’s going on!

Elemental: Arena

As some of you know, we put off v1.08 until next week since we wanted more time for QA. See, we can be taught.  But we went ahead and put up the Arena page so you can see some of the features that multiplayer in Elemental will be providing. The changes made to the single player game (data and fixes) have been ported to the MP servers and are still being tested.

https://www.elementalgame.com/arena

Elemental: Arena – Main Screen

Elemental: Arena – Game Screen

Development resources on multiplayer are being reserved based on what the community is looking for.  It does not come from Elemental’s single player post-release budget so those of you who love single player don’t have to worry, the two are very separate (in more ways than one).

Impulse::Reactor will automatically save your games online so you can revisit them later in the event you can’t finish the game in a single sitting. The saves are kept in “the cloud” so that you can access them from whatever machine you’re playing Elemental on.

Elemental: Mods

The second piece of news is that the mods web page has been put up.

https://www.elementalgame.com/mods

This is basically a duplicate of what’s within the game.  The difference here, however, is that players can manually download the actual XML and other assets to see how they were done. 

We have started with the maps and will be adding tiles, quests, campaigns, items, effects and then custom mods such as textures, third party tools, etc. so that the community can interact with one another more easily.  We will also be putting up links to third party resources and websites and wikis.

Elemental: Hiergamenon

The third piece of news is that the Hiergamenon page is now up. 

https://www.elementalgame.com/hiergamenon/techtrees

This is an on-going online resource that will, for now, let users view the XML data from the game in a more accessible way.  The next step is to make it so that players can modify it in a web-based editor and then download their creations for themselves.

Elemental: Destiny’s Embers

For those of you who have bought the book Elemental: Destiny's Embers we had originally planned on releasing the first of the book series of content today but some of our changes require the v1.08 update so its push pushed this as well.

Each character has their own unique equipment and in some cases special abilities (since not all of them are Channelers).

For those of you who have read the book, Nym is one of the characters the download code provides.

Readers who purchased a Kindle or Nook version will also be able to download the content as well, we’ve made arrangements with Random House to take care of those customers.

That’s all for tonight!

I got my wife a Droid 2 to replace her aging enV phone from years ago.  We generally prefer Verizon because their network, frankly, is much much better than AT&T.  Nevertheless, I have an iPhone 4 on AT&T since keeping up on tech is pretty central to my job.

There’s a lot of passion involved in Android vs. iOS.  I’ll stick with just my personal opinion on the matter.  Having spent considerable time now with both, I far prefer the iPhone to the Droid 2.

The areas that matter to me (since I’m only speaking for myself) are:

1. The apps on the iPhone tend to be a lot more polished and consistent. I think the Droid would be better served with losing the physical “back” button since different apps make use of that button differently and often inconsistently.
2. The default polish on the iPhone is a lot better. The Droid 2 at least has some pretty terrible default sounds (“DROIID” as the default ring? as well as for other purposes).  You can hand someone an iPhone and it’ll work without adjusting the settings. For techies, changing the defaults is fine but it seems a little unpolished.
3. The iPhone is a lot smoother to use. Things just flow a lot cleaner and slicker. It’s just a polish thing but still.
4. The iPhone is a lot easier to deal with as a mobile device (for me). I don’t like having to go through steps to uninstall something, especially when there’s an awful lot of junk installed by default on the Droid 2.

Now, in terms of power and openness, the Droid has the advantage in many respects. But as a consumer, I just prefer the iPhone. For whatever it’s worth.

If the weather holds up, I’ll be able to start harvesting honey from the beehives. It’s been a busy Summer so I haven’t be able to add very many supers to the hives but there should still be quite a lot there.

I have good news and bad news.  The bad news is that we’re going to have to delay v1.08 for a few days. The internal QA deadline for the test build was this morning and unfortunately it needed a few more hours before being submitted. Rather than even remotely risk something that is going to cause pain (for our players and us) I’m just pushing it until the next QA slot which is next Tuesday.

The good news is that it means that there will be substantially more game play improvements in v1.08 than originally intended because the team’s spell changes, tactical battle tweaks and such weren’t going to make it for v1.08 but will now look like they’re going to make it.

Our schedule to put up more modding support this week, however remains intact so no changes there.

We’re seeing a lot of really cool maps being submitted into the gallery. We’re going to loosen up a bit on moderation so that we can get your maps up to the public a lot quicker.

I’ve also put in a request in to support mod maps in custom games so that a group of friends can create their own maps and then play on them. It won’t be in v1.08 but we’re hoping to get it before too long.

One of the challenges in moderating the mods is the handling of the more complex mods – tiles, quests, and campaigns.

After v1.08 goes out the door, the team is going to be looking at ways to make it easier for modders to submit these pieces and for users to get and install them.

The challenge on tiles, quests, and campaigns is that they involve a lot of different pieces.  Our job is to make it easy for people to create their own.

To get people started let me break these out:

Tiles

Tiles are created with the tile editor (Builder’s Forge).

When you save a tile, it is saved into your My games\Elemental\Tiles directory. Two files are created – the XML file and the shadow file in 256 and 512 pixel size (for the two shadow quality levels).

On their own, tiles are meaningless. They have to be attached to something else. They are the building blocks for everything else.

To make these shareable, we are going to update Impulse::Reactor to simply look in your tile directory and list those.  Beware though, your load time is impacted by the # of tiles you have.

Quests

Quests are made up of 3 basic parts:

1. The Quest Location (i.e. an Inn )

2. A Quest Destination (i.e. a Dungeon)

3. A Quest Definition (the thing that describes the quest)

If you want to see these parts together open up your: \stardock games\elemental\data\english\core quests folder.

In there, you will see files like this:

I can say, right now, making quests is a chore. It’s one of the things I’ve put in requests for – a quest editor.  The reason quests are hard to make is that the system is fairly powerful.  Quests are capable of not just taking you across the world and running into monsters and getting items but they are capable of loading up maps as well which is something we baked in the future when people might want to actually ENTER a dungeon.

Quest locations make use of tiles as do Quest Destinations. Quest Destinations are actually Notable Locations (goodie huts) that get spawned by the game when the quest is triggered.

Sharing these is a bit more complex as you can imagine. We are going to just add a “Quests” user directory and ask modders to zip their files themselves and put them in the quests directory and then just have the game make use of that.

Campaigns

Campaigns are the whole thing put together.

(Spoiler alert)

The first campaign is called MainCampaign.xml and is in the Elemental\data\english directory.  If you know XML reasonably well, you can probably see how it works for the most part.  If you don’t, there’s not nearly enough space to go through it.

More to come!

Hope everyone had a good labor day. This week we’re working on Elemental v1.08 which we expect out late this week.

Amongst the highlights:

• Multiplayer turned on
• Weapons balance pass
• More performance optimizations
• Bug fixes
• City Manager screen (maybe in for v1.08)
• AI updates

Also, those who have purchased the book, Elemental: Destiny's Embers, will begin being able to download some of the extra content Random House has sponsored.

A lot of the internal “exciting” work has been going on with regards to modding the mod gallery is expected to go up in the next week or two along with easier in-game submissions of mods that aren’t maps.

Stay tuned.