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.

Bringing in the Recruitables.

Greetings!

So much going on right now that it’s hard to do anything other than ramble.  So I will.

Random House has sent over some advance copies of Elemental: Destiny’s Embers.

This week we’ve been integrating lots of the lore from Random House into the game itself.

A lot of the finalized land textures, fonts and other goodies are starting to go in.  We’re also replacing DirectX 9’s primitive font rendering system with one we’ve been working on for awhile.  I wasn’t sure this was going to get in before release because it’s a pretty big project but it came in ahead of schedule so it’s going to make it in prior to release which is nice.

Today me and Bruno are incorporating the various special abilities into monsters, NPCs, etc. 

They’re doing a lot of work on the tactical battle map and terrain system but I’m not that involved in that area so that’ll have to wait for a future blog.

I’ve been working on the reputation system so that getting married isn’t quite so easy.  It’s going to be controversial but suffice to say, when you’re King (or Queen) you don’t get to marry purely out of “love”. The level of the NPC magnifies how powerful the children are. But the higher their level, the higher your reputation has to be (reputation here defined as your faction’s population/100 * Your relative world power (0 to 1.0).

This afternoon I’m putting in the new diplomacy techs that let you begin recruiting friendly third parties into your armies (various special creatures).

Media Coverage

In 2010 it’s pretty hard for independent titles to get a lot of media coverage.  However, that’s been changing in the past couple of weeks as we start to show off the near final version of the game .

A few examples:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/64973

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/character-design-elemental-war/100928

(http://www.neoseeker.com/news/14458-elemental-beta-journals-pt-1-sexy-mages-battles-and-brigands/)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/07/29/elementals-beta-intro-melts-our-nerdy-hearts/

http://www.gamingnexus.com/FullNews/Elemental-War-of-Magic---Interview-with-Brad-Wardell/Item18934.aspx

http://pc.gamezone.com/ads/interstitial/?oldurl=http://pc.gamezone.com/editorials/item/stardocks_brad_wardell_talks_elemental_war_of_magic_galciv_iii_specula/

http://www.fragworld.org/frag/interviews/interview-with-brad-wardell.html

http://www.gamestooge.com/2010/08/07/preview-elemental-war-of-magic-pc/

I also had a great talk with CNN about our no DVD copy protection system.  The integrated modding system in Elemental where people can share creations obviously requires the player to have an account (much like a forum account is required to comment on this blog) and that account is tied to their serial #. Such a system thus rewards paying customers. We’ve already got several post-release updates in the works including a quest pack, a monster pack, and I am taking time off this Fall to mod and play with the Elemental AI which I’m very much looking forward to.

So that’s all for now.

So you’ve decided to get sucked into the world of Elemental…

So let’s make some “notable locations”.

Step #1: The Tile Editor

First, you make your “goodie hut” in the tile editor.

I’m making an “ancient battlefield”.

Step #2: Define the GoodieHut and its “treasure”

  <GoodieHutType InternalName="Notable_AncientBattlefield">
    <Name>Ancient Battlefield</Name>
    <Name>Lost Battleground</Name>
    <Name>Forgotten battlefield</Name>
    <Description>This was the site of some long lost battle.</Description>
    <Rarity>100</Rarity>
    <Destructable>1</Destructable>
    <PreferredTerrain>Land</PreferredTerrain>
    <SpawnRating>0</SpawnRating>
    <Medallions InternalName="">
      <All>EnchantedSword1.png</All>
    </Medallions>
    <TileDesign>N_AncientBattlefield_01</TileDesign>
    <DrawnIcon>Gfx/TacticalIcons/Artifact_Bones1_ClothIcon.dds</DrawnIcon>
    <IconSize>50</IconSize>
    <Treasure>
      <Title>Found a midnight stone</Title>
      <Desc>While walking through the debris of the ancient scene of carnage you find a midnight stone.</Desc>
      <Liklihood>100</Liklihood>
      <GameModifier InternalName="Dagger">
        <ModType>GiveItem</ModType>
        <Attribute>MidnightStone</Attribute>
      </GameModifier>
    </Treasure>   
    <OnSelectSFX>Click_Bones_01</OnSelectSFX>
  </GoodieHutType>

Explanation:

Step 3: There is no step 3.

That’s really it. You just toss this into say the quests directory and voila. It’ll show up.

Just got back from the tour in LA. I stayed in the loudest hotel in the universe. Holy cow am I tired. I’ve been a little (lot) irritable on the forums this week.

The team is working on a ton of things this week from tweaking how Caravans work to putting in the UI for handling saved games in multiplayer.

This weekend I have to really get on the AI. It’s still nowhere near where I want it to be for release. Heck, it doesn’t even do the “Your civilization makes me laugh, give us 50 gold or we’ll crush you!” type stuff.

Over the years, I’ve written so much AI that it’s amazing how it gets into your genetic memory. The algorithms just spring forth.

Scott (Boogie) has been working on the cut scenes like crazy. I keep forgetting what’s in the public betas and when I go back it’s pretty painful because all the spirit is sucked out of them.

But I have to say, the public betas have been instrumental. I don’t think we would have nailed the memory leak issue without the public beta. Basically, Beta 4 is unusable if you have 64-bit Windows and certain ATI cards. It’s a pretty specific case but holy cow, can you imagine if the game came out with that? Though that’s not the only leak but there were people who couldn’t play more than 30 turns before it ran out of memory. That’s huge.

One of the valuable things on the forums has been the concepts and suggestions people have posted. Even when they’re mod proposals.  There’s some great stuff there that we’ve been able to add in already.

Anyway, I’m going to make this short since I’m looking forward to just sleeping now.

Cheers!

Today’s my last day in California. In the next few days, the previews should start showing up at which point I’ll be free to tell you about the fairly massive changes to the game between Beta 4 (the public build) and Beta 5 (current build) as well as what’s coming up for release.

The high level changes are:

• The finalized Game UI
• The finalized Empire Tree (ala Sins of a Solar Empire)
• Finalized City and Unit UI
• Finalized Tactical Battle UI
• Finalized Font Display (i.e. the replacement of the placeholder fonts with the final game fonts)
• The Finalized Technology Tree
• Civilization, Warfare techs are fairly similar to what they are now except there’s a few more of them.
• Adventure allows players to uncover rare resources, world awareness, and a number of other things.
• Diplomacy uncovers various levels of recruitable units that you can train – i.e. make friends with special races that you can then train at associated settlement.
• Magic tree lets players magnify the power of their spells if they have the appropriate shard (i.e. Morrigan’s Hammer does N damage normally but if you control an earth shard it does 2N damage, Maelstrom will do 1 tile of harm normally but do N radius out for every air shard you control. Moreover, the Magic tree will allow players to discover the special abilities within their own champions beyond their inherent ones i.e. You’ll be able to see what they are in NPCs as well as your existing ones suddenly discovering theirs).
• Zillions of other tweaks and refinements.
• Random House descriptions replacing placeholder text.
• The Finalized Tactical Battle System
• Number of Action points a spell takes to cast is based on the caster’s wisdom.
• Tons of other changes too long to list.
• The Final Quest and Notification System implemented
• Basically nearly all the quests and notable locations from the beta are gone, replaced with the final ones we’ve been working on.
• Hundreds of other game play tweaks and changes.
• And of course bug fixes galore, especially on memory (this got fixed in beta 5, I was quite concerned on this one, but thanks to users helping us, we were able to track this down to our effects system not deallocating properly and on certain newer ATI cards on 64-bit windows it could lose 100 megabytes per turn).
• The Campaign which is made entirely with the mod tools.

So in the next week or so the “gold” version will go out to manufacturing and then we’ll spend the subsequent 2 weeks polishing and enhancing for the release version that will go to users and reviewers.

I’ll go into more detail on these things in about a week. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the mods and such when I have a chance.