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.

One of my favorite shows on TV is Avatar, the last airbender (not to be confused with the recent movie).  One of my long term goals with the AI is to be able to have the AI in tactical battles be able to give the kinds of battles back and forth with  players (as well as eventually in MP as well) that I see on that show.  Of course, such an AI will take probably years to reach that level but we have the luxury of doing that sort of thing (like with GalCiv before it).

The engine team will eventually need to create more systems to do some of the things it would require (i.e. particle effects won’t be enough) but it should be cool.

For today, I’m going through the a lot of the values (weapons, defenses, city improvements) and relooking at their balance. I’m finding it way too easy to just “rush” nearby enemies because the values grow so much, so fast.

Another thing I’m looking to do in the next few weeks is to start porting my C++ APIs to Python. Not only will this make it much easier to do tweaks without recompling but other players can see what I’m doing directly and make suggestions or even try their own hand on it.

Update

[More dev journals to come this week but I'll be locking comments, people can discuss different pieces in the forums].

Our story so far…

On August 24th, Stardock released the long-anticipated PC strategy game Elemental on schedule…

Except, of course, that’s not quite what happened. Stardock released the game a couple days early to beta testers and pre-order customers – the same version reviewers were given (v1.0) and the results were painful in two basic ways:

1. The new engine that Stardock developed turned out to have a lot of compatibility problems resulting in crashing and out of memory errors for a significant percentage (I’d go as far as to say as many as 30% of users – which is a gigantic number – anything over 5% is considered unacceptable).  It’s not commonly known but the engine in our previous games (GalCiv II, The Political Machine, etc.) was developed originally in 1997 and enhanced over the years.  Nowadays, most companies just license their engine from Gamebryo (Civilization V, Oblivion, Fallout 3) or the Unreal engine. You are now seeing why they do. 

2. The above ensured ruinous reviews but even without them, the game UI and some of the game mechanics just didn’t live up to people’s expectations, and AI issues.

The purpose of this blog is to help answer questions so that we can move forward.

So here are some of the questions / comments I’ve gotten in emails and private messages and on various forums that I’ll try to answer:

Q: What is Stardock’s plan for Elemental going forward?

A: For the immediate future we’re going to go down two paths. First, the v1.0x versions will continue to focus largely on compatibility (crashing or weird video issues) as well as bugs and turning on multiplayer.

Then, we will work on v1.1 which will serve as our answer to player feedback. Enhanced AI, improved UI, a tutorial, updated quest system, new magic system, numerous other tweaks. This version will serve as the basis to make a demo version of the game.

Beyond that, we will be looking at player feedback. That will work towards v1.2 (October) and v1.3 (November). Once we are satisfied that the game has met reasonable expectations, we can then focus on the first expansion pack: Elemental: War of Magic – Book 2, Cerena.

Unlike Book 1, which is fairly short because it’s only meant as a kind of introduction (the game is mean to be played in sandbox mode. GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire didn’t even include campaigns, we are generally not very pro-campaign-y people as you can gather, campaigns have limited replayability).

Book 2, Cerena is the excuse to introduce more far reaching game mechanic changes and begin to add in the multiplayer modes we have long been thinking of (from custom servers that yes, will work on your LAN that has no Internet connection) to tactical-only modes.

That first expansion pack will be free to everyone who owns the game at the point of v1.3.

Q: Stardock should just put out an expansion and re-release the game as a Director’s Cut.

A: NO. While we do intend to release future new versions of Elemental beyond the War of Magic series, we will not be re-submitting Elemental “patched and fixed” for re-review.

A lot of people seem to think that Stardock knowingly released the game “full of bugs”. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.  As people who have played through the various versions can attest, weird stuff is very machine specific. For instance, the illustrative outline on graphics causes no difference (not even 1 frame) on our test matrix machines and yet results in 20+ frames for others who have, on the surface, similar hardware configurations for us.  The PC Gamer UK reviewer ran into a white tactical battle screen that we had never encountered before (nor had it shown up during the public beta). 

The low metacritic score for Elemental (about 3 out of 5 average) needs to serve as a long-term reminder to us and anyone else who might think that you can simply put out a major retail game in 2010 with its own custom engine without a massive massive long-term beta program and a long-term QA process. If you can’t do that, then either license your engine or don’t expect people to shell out $50.

Put another way, the blistering feedback on Elemental: War of Magic should serve as a scarlet letter to make us “never forget”. So no, no re-launch of Elemental: War of Magic. It is, what it is.

For fans who are disheartened, look at on the bright side. We will be able to see how much effect word of mouth is. If we do a good job making the game live up to its potential and expectations, then we can see what effect that has on sales. And we plan to share those details with you.

As it stands today, Elemental has sold approximately 82,000 copies.

Q: I heard Stardock is laying off people, I thought your non-games revenue funded the games team.

A: It does. It funds ONE games team. But Stardock has been hiring up across the board to build a second studio. Only Elemental can fund that.  “Stardock” is made up of 3 groups: Enterprise software (our #1 revenue source), Consumer software (Object Desktop, Fences, etc.) and Consumer Entertainment (the games). That’s not counting Impulse which is a separate, profitable entity that doesn’t get affected one way or the other by the success of the games or the enterprise software.

Q: Brad Wardell: You should just kill yourself! [I actually did get this]

A: I’m sorry our recent entertainment product didn’t meet your expectations but I don’t think it would be helpful if I manually modified my date of expiration.

Q: Brad Wardell – you have a martyr complex! You always take personal blame for everyone! Get off your cross! [yes, got this too]

A: That is my job. If you’re going to spend years railing about CEOs not taking responsibility when something goes wrong, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me not to take responsibility when things go badly on a launch.

In addition, some of the issues are directly related to my specific decisions.

Q: Your act is getting old. Fool me once on Demigod, fool me twice, shame on me! [got this too in various forms]

A: The Demigod debacle ultimately resulted from a fundamental communication failure between the publisher (Stardock) and the developer (Gas Powered Games). It took us a long time to figure out exactly how the connectivity issue occurred (i.e. many months). Ultimately, and sadly, it boiled down to a miscommunication. When you host a game in Demigod (even now), you are given a dialog for your port #. It was believed by the Stardock team that Demigod handled direct IP connections and thus its raknet  based port system would only be used when that failed.  GPG, by contrast, thought Stardock was handling direct connections too. It turned out that that port # part (even now) doesn’t have a function and so 100% of connections attempts when to the Raknet system which overwhelmed it.

The reason why Stardock rightly took the blame is because, as the publisher, we should have looked at the beta tester connectivity logs and seen that 100% of connections were being passed to Raknet for the socket rather than the 10% anticipated. Add tens of thousands of users quickly and bam. A different system had to be developed. 

But Demigod didn’t suffer from compatibility issues. It was very solid right out of the gate (for pretty much everyone) and was an excellent game on day 1. GPG did a great job making a great game. And Stardock did do a good job making a good backend. But one miscommunication between developers resulted in disaster.  Only a much larger beta test would have discovered the problem. The system wasn’t “buggy”. Not that it does anyone any good now, but at least people can see and learn from what happened.

Point being, the situations are not similar.

With Elemental, the issue is the game itself.  With Elemental’s MP, the system works because from day 1, Elemental’s servers are just hosted by Stardock. No P2P.

Q: What do YOU think of Elemental?

A: Elemental is the finest game we’ve ever released. Ever. At least, that's what I thought on the day we released it.  However, I have come to the painful conclusion that we will have to dedicate more effort to making the game live up to the expectations of our customers as a whole. You'd be surprised how easy it is to confuse the enjoyment of making a game to the enjoyment of playing it.

Q: My post was hidden on the forums! I have a right to post my anger!

A: No. No you don’t.  Believe me when I say I speak from first hand experience, there are entire forums dedicated to letting people post about their anger about something.  The Stardock forums have never ever been some forum of free speech. And they never will be. If you’re looking for that, you should go elsewhere.  I’ve been moderating “forums” since my Commodore 64 days as a “Sysop” and “Subop”. A few toxic users can wreck a community. 

If someone needs/wants technical support, has a question, has a suggestion, wants to interact with the community, that’s great. Go for it.  But if your purpose is to vent your rage on other users, us, the game, small animals, what have you, the moderates are instructed to take a very dim view of that. 

After the release of v1.08 (this week) I intend to instruct moderators to be even more stringent on that sort of thing because we (as a community) need the Stardock developers themselves to participate on the forums. 

While I have two decades of people telling me that I should kill myself or that <product X> is a “piece of shit” as well as various wishes that I get cancer and die “bleeding from every orifice) (yes, there are people out there that post these things) my development team are just normal people who are excited to talk to gamers who have cool ideas and we’re not going to subject them to haters (and most haters don’t have any idea they’re being hateful).  Rule of thumb: Just treat people as if they’re right in front of you.

Q: You’re getting screwed in the reviews! I can’t believe <website X> wrote <Y>

A: NO. We’re not getting screwed. While some of the review scores do have a bit of “dogpiling” to them (relative to review scores given to other games) I have yet to read a single review that I felt was unfair in terms of the text.

If anything, I feel bad about putting some of my friends through this.  It’s no secret that Tom Chick and Troy Goodfellow are friends of mine.  The question isn’t how I feel about them criticizing or giving negative reviews of the release version of Elemental. The question is how they felt having to give a negative review of a game of someone who’s their friend? It’s called integrity.  I’ll take a 1 friend who will tell it like it is over a 100 yes men.  

So when I read the reviews, my first reaction isn’t anger but sorrow at having put people I respect through having to give something I know they were inclined to like and wanted to like through that. It’s also the reason I will not be re-submitting some “patched” version for review.

It also redoubles our collective efforts to live up to the standards we have set.  We will be working on Elemental for a long time. We love it. We live it. And together, we will make it awesome.

Now, let’s move past the drama. Let’s do the things that need to be done going forward to have fun and create something that will stand the test of time.

It is great to be back to the land of high speed Internet connections. 

The team got v1.07 out this week which addresses some of the issues reported by players. There’s a lot more to do of course.  Here’s a few notes on what’s on our plate right now:

• Enabling multiplayer. Why isn’t it up now? Because the same problems that would cause a user a problem in single player would happen in MP too except now there are now multiple human beings involved which increases the frustration.  I’m going to look at the response to v1.07 this weekend and see where things stand.
• Improving the AI Part 1. There is a little (lot) of confusion on the AI.  Minor factions aren’t supposed to build. They’re just there.  I think we’ll have to change that to either make it more obvious that they don’t do anything (like change the style of city to be more obvious) or have them behave more like major factions. 
• Improving the AI Part 2. I am hoping to be able to get my AI updates into v1.08 (next week) to make the major faction AI substantially more capable. The basic problem with the AI is that a lot of data changes were made very late in development (values for weapons and armor and how much various improvements do) that heavily altered the AI’s evaluation of what was “worth” constructing or how much it needed to protect its sovereign and such. This is the kind of thing that will have to be addressed – for starters.
• Game Mechanic Changes. There are going to be quite a few game mechanic changes based on our own experience and reading on the forums.  Keep posting your suggestions. 
• Magic System Changes. This is an area that’s going to get a lot of changes. For instance, Essence will become a boolean (true or false). Your mana will come from a global pool of mana that is from the shards. The elemental spell books (earth, air, fire, water) will get moved out of character creation and into the tech tree so that players can determine what spell books they want.  Various spells will gain a mana “maint” rather than using “enchantment slots”. This all brings us to the next part
• General UI. There are some outstanding posts on the forums with suggestions about the UI that we’re looking at. But generally speaking, we want to eliminate a lot of what I’d say (with the benefit of hindsight) gratuitous complexity (enchantment slots, tile limitations on cities, obscured game mechanics, etc.).  We’ll get very specific with the community as we start to put these in.
• Performance, Compatibility, Memory.  These three things remain the most troubling and frankly, heart breaking issues.  On a personal note, nothing pains us more than when someone accuses us of “rushing” the game.  The phrase “works on my machine” is not an acceptable excuse. We just blew it on so many levels that it will require a detailed post-mortem (which I do plan to provide so players, customers, and others can learn from our mistakes in general and my personal mistakes in particular).  When I read the check-in logs, I wince at how specific each “crash” is (“Crash caused by user having 8X AGP card in 4X AGP motherboard with soft lighting turned off when in the unit design window”).  There’s a reason most games license their engines (Civilization and Fallout 3 use Gambryo for instance, other games use Unreal, and so on).   We use our own home grown one “Kumquat” which is proving to have serious teething issues that we are most definitely suffering the consequences for.

There’s a ton more to add here but these are a few of the things on our mind. It’s been, as you can imagine, a horrible horrible couple of weeks.  We’re doing out best to make sure Elemental lives up to its potential which brings me to the final part.

Elemental’s original release schedule was to have the first release (War of Magic – Book 1: Relias) and 2 expansion packs (Book 2: Cerena and Book 3: Magesta). 

What we’re going to do is that for users who own the game by a certain date will get (at least) the first expansion pack for free as a token of our appreciation for hanging in there with us.  As some long-time Stardock gamers can tell you, our expansion packs aren’t minor things. 

Have a good weekend!

Greetings!

I'm pretty far from a good net connection so I'll keep this brief  

Let me say that I'm glad that most people seem to like the game.  This message, however, is for those who are disappointed with Elemental so far.

Stardock is not just a game studio but it is also a publisher.  What does this mean?  Well, historically, the way it works is a game is released and if people don't like it, they're supposed to buy some expansion pack for it that "fixes" things that people thought should be in the original version. 

We don't have to do that because we're both the studio and the publisher.

That means we can release free "expansion packs" for Elemental until such a high percentage of players love the game that only then can we discuss sequels or paid expansions.

Having had the opportunity to finally get out of the office for the first time in months has let me look at the game (and ahem, play the game for crazy amounts) of time from a new perspective.

I should also say that regardless of sales or reviews, our commitment to Elemental will not be affected. As some of you know, most of our company's revenue doesn't come from developing games. Even if the game didn't sell another copy, we would still continue our update schedule. 

So what will be the concrete results of this?

1. In September we will release v1.1 which will be the first major revision to the game that takes into account the feedback we're getting from players. This will be a  pretty substantial change. In particular, character creation, magic (think, shared mana pools), 

2. We are going to go ahead and make a more traditional tutorial. I'm not a fan of tutorials but some of my grognard friends have had trouble figuring out the mechanics which means to me that we have to do something about that.

3. We are going to move Book 2: Magesa out of a future expansion pack and into the base game in a future "mega" update, likely late Fall.

4. As mentioned on the forums back in July-ish, we plan to make a new DVD gold master available to those with limited Internet connections later this Fall.

5. As discussed (I think) last Winter, I will be taking a sabbatical this Fall specifically so I can dedicate time to AI and modding so that others, long after me, can use the Elemental engine to create other things (you will need to know Python to really go crazy with it).

6. I will NOT be ceasing my postings on other forums.  The guys on Qt3 and Octopus Overlords and elsewhere are my friends. I'm no more going to stop posting there then I would stop going out with my friends to movies and other "public places" where, heaven forbid, someone datamining my comments might find a "gotcha moment". Those people are my friends both on the forums and outside the forums. Interacting with you guys is a major reason I like making games in the first place.

7. To those reviewing the game: I would urge you to review the game prior to v1.1. I say this because v1.05 (the release day version) is the version of the game that was originally released and if that version of the game is considered flawed then my view is that Stardock should suffer the consequences for that. We appreciate the kindness and patience many people have shown.  I just think game studios, including Stardock, need to be conscious of what they release and not expect to "patch themselves out of trouble". I do believe Elemental is, by far, the best game we've ever made but I also agree with most of the criticisms I've read too. The state of PC entertainment has changed since 2006 (when we released GalCiv II) and it is our responsibility to stay with the times. 

In short, we love this game. And we love this community.  We're not going to be leaving this game to work on some other game.  We're with it and you guys for the long haul. 

I won't be around to answer questions until next week so I hope this answers some questions.

So here I am, minding my own business in my home computer room working on AI stuff for a future Elemental update when my wife comes in.

“Why aren’t you packed?” she asks.

“I’m packed,” I say, referring to my duffle bag with my iPad, laptop, and various computer books.

"We’re supposed to be leaving and all you have are gadgets and work books.”

“They’re not all work books.”

“Oh?” she asks. “Which of these isn’t?”

“Well, see ‘The Halls Below’, that’s not a computer book.” I respond.

“Isn’t a Penny Arcade book?” she demands.

“Well, sure, but it’s not a computer book.” I try to assure her.

“You’ve spent all afternoon and this evening on the computer instead of packing clothes, tooth brush, swimsuit, and other real people stuff?” she asks.

“Well, look, something came up.”

“Oh, tell me, husband.” she says.

“Well look at this, I can assassinate the AI’s sovereign with just a regular army.”

“So?”

This is where I, understandably, became shocked.

“So? So?!” I exclaim. “These are Channelers. Imbued by the Destiny to rebuild the world and I wiped one out with a bunch of guys with Lord hammers while my sovereignw as out on a quest. That’s an outrage.”

“Well there’s nothing you can do about that right now.”

“Ah, but I can! I wrote a function AIUnit::EvaluateAreaThreat(x,y,radius)! The guys have all these cool vectors where I can quickly determine what’s in an area quickly. It’s amazing stuff that I can use to make the AI wipe the floor with these bloody humans.” I explain.

“Vectors are just glorified arrays anyway,” my wife (CS major) says. “Besides, we are supposed to leave and we’re missing out on a beautiful full moon.”

“I saw it, you can tell it’s fake.”

“What? Fake? What are you talking about?” My wife says.

“It’s an uncanny  valley thing. I saw the moon earlier. They rendered it wrong. There’s clearly two light sources.”

“ARE YOU INSANE? Who is ‘they’?” my wife demands.

“I dunno who exactly. I don’t want to get into a blame game here. The model seems right, I think it’s just a lighting issue.”

“GET. OFF. THE. COMPUTER. NOW.”

See you guys in a week or so.