Our public beta of Elemental lasted until Beta 4.

We’re going to be making the game available early to everyone who beta tested Elemental (planned day is either Sunday night or Monday morning) and anyone who pre-orders prior to Monday morning will get the game on Monday rather than having to wait until Tuesday.

A quick beta recap for those who didn’t follow it:

Beta 1: Began a year ago.

Beta 1 focused on game concepts and took place purely on the cloth map. In this beta, we talked about all kinds of different game styles we wanted to try to explore.

The key challenge of beta 1 was coming up with a game design that was sufficiently original, challenging, interesting and engaging for players.

Beta 2: Began early this year.

Beta 2 focused on testing the brand new engine that Elemental uses called Kumquat.  It is a 3D engine made specifically for the PC. What makes it special is that because it was made for the PC, it sacrifices memory usage for performance (consoles work the opposite – they have a lot less memory but great hardware).  As a result, Elemental’s hardware requirements are roughly the same as for Galactic Civilizations II allowing the game to run on a very large number of PCs.

The key challenge of beta 2 was performance and stability.

Beta 3: Summer

This beta deal with starting to put the pieces together. Tactical battles, economics, magic, spells, diplomacy, etc.  This was about getting the features in there and seeing what worked in practice (this is why sequels are so much easier – you have an established system).

Beta 4: July

Beta 4 was basically Beta 3 with the modding features enabled.

Beta 5: August

This was an internal beta where all our “stuff” came together.

Gold: August

This is the “release to manufacturing” version. There are actually several of these versions depending on what continent it’s going to for manufacturing with our RTM having been last Thursday evening.

Day 0: August 24th

This is the build where we get to do more polishing, AI improvements, tweaking, bug fixes, optimizations, etc.

Here are a series of screenshots for those whose last experience with Elemental was Beta 4 in order to outline some of the high level changes:

Updated UI

More to come…

There’s been a lot of discussion on these kinds of topics on recent games and I thought I’d give you our perspective on it.

No Copy Protection

Elemental, out of the box, like all of Stardock’s other games, has no copy protection whatsoever.  However, you obviously need Internet access to get updates.  But then, why should this be necessary?

Because Elemental, unlike our previous games, has really been designed to be a game that people can play for decades, this is something that has concerned us. Because we want to encourage people to have the latest version but at the same time, we are aware that some people are worried that 10 years from now, they won’t be able to get the “better” version.

So here is what we’re going to start doing on our developed titles: We’re going to start making archival DVD versions of the game that can be sent to customers.  We already do this with Object Desktop (our most popular non-game product).  This archival version would have no copy protection whatsoever. It would just be a DVD you can put into your machine.

So starting in October, what we will do is make archival DVD editions of our games starting with Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition and Elemental.  Roughly every year or so, if there have been updates, we’ll create a new archival version of the game that people can have sent to them (it’ll just be a DVD).

LAN Games

There’s been a lot of questions of how someone would play Elemental on their LAN with their friends.  Here’s my suggested way to do it with minimum hassle.

#1 You’ll need to install Impulse on the machines that will be playing the game. But that’s all. Just install and go to step 2.

#2 Go to http://anywhere.impulsedriven.com which is the web interface to Impulse. From here, you would download the web package of Elemental. As long as Impulse is installed on the machine, you can install the game.

#3 When you install, type in your serial #. If it’s on a LAN, just use your single DVD key, Impulse::Reactor’s GOO uses smart activation (i.e. it doesn’t have a “activation limit” type system) so you can just install it on the various machines on your LAN.

#4 When your friends come over to play, they will need, once in the game, to logon with their own accounts (so they or someone will have to provide them with a serial # to attach to their account but they can use it at your LAN in game).  This is because on day 0, the data from the game is handled by our servers (this way, when we update the game data for balancing players don’t have to update their game which would be a real hassle for LAN players).  Eventually we plan to release custom servers so that players can make their own stuff but we won’t have that ready at release.

Finally getting to actually PLAY the game some.  I’ve got a huge list of tweaks already for the day 0 build.

I play at really high resolution so this is what my screens looked like:

In this game, I’m slowly wearing Kraxis down.  Which means I’m unhappy because it means I need to do more AI work. Bear in mind, when I play I play at normal where the AI gets the same resources. If I wanted to get creamed, I’d just push up the difficulty but I want the AI to be very intelligent at normal.

This screenshot is full of win.   The beta group pushed hard for special abilities for units and they got their way (the fire giant has 3 actually).  This is something we plan to expand on over the next few months a lot (don’t worry, these things will be free updates).

We’re just incredibly excited about how things have turned out. Though, like all the other games we’ve done, we have a long list of things we want to add and improve on over the next several months. Though, for now, we’re going to stick with polishing so that we can hear what our customers want first before we commit to anything specific.

Availability

Now, one thing I think I can say (and I’m not promising this because all things are ultimately decided by the IT gods) but it is our plan to make the “gold” version of the game available a bit early to those in the beta and those who pre-order will also likely get it a bit early.   We hope to start pre-loading Elemental onto machines early to mid next week to reduce strain.

At retail, Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, EB, etc. should all have it in strong supply. Just make sure you update to the day 0 version (via Impulse) because you will need the day 0 version to play multiplayer or do the mod tools stuff not to mention we’ll have a ton of new stuff in it as well. The download should be pretty small though.

What’s next

Well, for this week, I plan to have fun working on the AI and making some more quests. How much will make it into the day 0 version is hard to say.  The writing team at Random House and us have been brainstorming lots of new quests we can put into the game and I really want the AI to play “in character” (no snarky dialog like in GalCiv).

I’ll put up more later when it’s not 5am.  Just playing around with it.

Starting it up…

 
Book 1 cut scene:

I have been sent on a mission by the Queen.

A battle with Darklings.

The Queen of the West.

Unlike the sandbox game, the Campaign has no tech tree and is a single continuous adventure where technologies, spells and such are gained through quests rather than buildings.

Thus, the campaign plays completely differently than the sand box mode.  It was also created, 100% with the included mod tools.

August 24th: 10 days away…

Elemental has gone gold.  But at 2:17am on Saturday, I’m doing what I love: AI coding.

These days, AI doesn’t get a lot of talk because screenshots do all the talking.

But for me, these games are all about the AI.

This afternoon Elemental has gone gold!

Read more about it along with new screenshots over at WorthPlaying:

http://worthplaying.com/article/2010/8/13/news/76198/

We’re wrapping up work on the gold version of Elemental.  Then it’s on to the day 0 version which is largely about polish, balance and tweaking. 

Update: The team let me know that there is one more tweak being made that would affect this screenshot that isn't in my build and that's the font face is different in the final gold versus what I have on my machine.

We’re supposed to go gold this week and we’ve been burning the midnight oil. Once we go gold, we can move to the day 0 version which is, as far as I’m concerned, the “release” version. There won’t be much difference between the two other than AI. But frankly, if I had my way, none of you would be able to play the game and it would all be just AI vs. AI. they prefer it that way…

You humans and your germs!

Finally a REAL developer journal.

In game development, one of the most important polish points is making sure that the game is always responsive to the user.  It’s better to take 1 second longer than to stutter or hang for frames.

Unfortunately, it often gets very expensive in engineering hours to meet that objective.

In Elemental, we have two areas that are particularly problematic in that area before you even get into the game:

#1 When you first launch the game.

and

#2 Waiting for the game to start (i.e. the time after you start the game and you actually get to the map).

In both cases, the delay is due to parsing in XML. It’s completely a CPU bound issue.

Elemental is designed to support multi-core but we also support single core processors too. And when you first launch the game, that’s where the guy with the quad core is going to notice the biggest difference versus the guy with a single core CPU.

THIS…

BECOMES…

Which has to be parsed…

…

Anyway…

The “stuff” that has to be loaded before you even see the title screen is in the \english directory.  All the other XML gets loaded after. The problem is, there’s a lot of stuff in that english directory.

Thankfully, tile designs don’t have to go in there.  But UNITS do and “GoodieHuts” and anything you would expect to encounter while setting up the game.

As of now (1:43am on Wednesday, August 11) there is 3.31 MEGABYTES of XML (that’s just text mind you) that has to be read in and parsed.  Heck, there's 65K of hats that have to be parsed (I mean literally, hats as in things to put on your guy’s head).

But by far, it’s the units that are the biggest chunk of it.  And we’re adding more creatures every day.  So this is something we’ll have to find a way to deal with between now and release otherwise, the first impression will be crummy for people with slower machines. 

Either we have to find a way to move the unit parsing into a background thread (not as easy as it sounds) or we need to find a way so that we don’t have so many units being loaded up front.

…

Now, the other issue, which there really is no way around, is the time it takes after you hit “Start game” and you get to the map.  All those wonderful tiles have to be loaded and parsed.  There’s 11 megabytes of XML there.  It’s the nature of the beast unfortunately and one that I think most would agree is worth it.  But you can bet, many of us are looking forward to going through all 770 tiles we have as of tonight and seeing which ones we could get rid of.