August 24th…HURRY UP!

First off, we’re so ready to not be dealing with the beta content. If I have to deal with “You got Gildar!” one more time I’m going to scream. If I go into a tactical battle able to cast a half dozen spells per turn with a single unit I think I’ll curl up. Dealing with the UI as it is in beta 4 makes me cringe.

But it’s more than that. A lot more than that.

What is Elemental? What can you expect? How can you explain it to other people?

I’ve been bedeviled with this issue for months when marketing wants me to explain what Elemental is.

Consider this, my friends: How often do you see new AAA franchises begun? It’s pretty rare. And for good reason. Those of you in the beta understand.  When you are building on a sequel, if there’s something not done, you can just point to the previous  version’s code. In Elemental, we had nothing.

Moreover, when was the last time a new strategy game was made from scratch using the computing resources of 2010 versus  being tied to decade old design decisions? I remember in GalCiv, every time I wanted to eliminate its awful painful economic system (5 sliders!) I’d get screamed at by the community.

So again: What is Elemental?

The released version of Elemental is 3 things:

1. It’s a strategic RPG game (The Campaign = Book 1: Relias).

2. It’s a stand-alone strategy game (The sand box, which is where the beta has been about).

3. It’s a platform (The modding tools). The campaign is made with the mod tools.

The Campaigns for Elemental: War of Magic are broken into at least 3 books. The first book comes with the game. Relias. It’s had its own development team dedicated to just it and you guys haven’t seen it.  Here’s some hints: There is NO technology tree in it. It’s where all the cut scenes and Random House work has been going into and it rocks. Future books will be released in the future.

The stand alone game changes dramatically from week to week based on your feedback. And that’s the way we like it. I’ll be sad when the beta ends only because I really like hearing your ideas and criticisms. We get so inspired by some of the great ideas that the community has come up with.

We will really need to sit back and take an inventory on just how much of a massive impact for good that the beta has had.  Consider just the economic and research systems and how much better they are from our original concept.

Now, I do regret that those of you playing beta 4 will not easily recognize the final game. I mean that literally. The final game will look quite a bit different in terms of UI and gameplay. There are good reasons to hold back on this stuff until as late as possible.

Then there’s the platform.  Originally, we were going to make it all Python driven. But then we realized just how much we could do with XML. Eventually, we’ll expose in-game APIs as Python so people can do even more. But I have to say, the XML data driving has been a real game changer (did I mention that the campaign was done purely in XML?) As an old C programmer, I find this stuff amazing. Seriously, look at some of the spell books. How did they do randomization in XML? I don’t know. But they did it. I take back all the mean things I’ve said about Web developers and XML developers.

Stardock: We’re an indie

It’s not readily known but Stardock is one of the oldest game companies in the industry. Our first released game came out in 1994.  We were an OS/2 developer until 2000 so it’s only been in the past 10 years that most people have heard of our games.  But because we’re an indie with our own platform (Impulse) we can do as many updates as we want as often as we want. 

Let’s talk about the post-release updates:

1. The reviews and sales do not affect this. Even if people hate it, we love it. And we’ll keep working on it long after release because we love Elemental. We’re dedicated to it. And Stardock’s existence isn’t predicated on Elemental’s success.

2. Our updates are OPTIONAL. If you buy the retail DVD, you don’t have to update (at least not initially, we may get to a point with the modding tools this Fall where we’ll need people to update so that they can partake but we’ll see).

3. The point about optional updates matters. Because we will continue to make substantial updates to the game as time goes on. If you like the game as-is, you don’t have to update (unless you play MP).  But the beta community and us are constantly coming up with new ideas and I’m sure release players will have their own ideas.  I’d still like to see dungeon crawls in.  If you’ve played with the map editor, you’ll see we already support making Dungeons. I.e. we’ve already spent a lot of $$$ making art assets so you can make your own dungeons. But the game itself doesn’t have them. Yet.

4. We’re here.  When you’re on the forums, you’re not talking to just some support people (they’re here too! Hi guys!). You get to talk to us directly. We’ll agree, disagree, or give feedback.

Where will the game be available?

Okay, so here’s the deal on that:

In North America, you’re set.  Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop have all been in the beta (yes, their buyers do play the games before they pick them up). And they all plan to carry it.  Pretty much everyone who carries PC games in North America will be carrying it.

Australia. They’re all set too. It’ll be at retail in Australia.

Russia. Yep. They’re set up too believe it or not.

Europe…Well, not so much. There are currently no plans to have a retail presence in Europe. I don’t want to talk too much about this lest I get into trouble but let’s just say, our previous games have been available in retail in western Europe and as much as we like making a nickel per copy sold, we think we’ll pass this time. The retail situation in Europe is just insane and in the age of digital distribution, we’re just not willing to put up with it anymore. One world. One price.  If there’s anything that would make the lives of Europeans easier in terms of getting the game via Impulse, let us know. I know people.

The Collector’s Edition

The response from retailers on the Collector’s Edition has been unexpectedly strong.  Having lots of in-box stuff (the Elemental CE box is going to be fat) seems to have hit a note with retailers and so many of them are picking it up.  We plan to only do one manufacturing run because well, frankly, the profit margins on the collector’s edition isn’t as good as the standard edition but even still, if you can afford it, get it. Holy cow is it awesome. If you miss the golden age of PC games (included 150+ of reading material, figurines, cloth maps, posters, etc.) get the collector’s edition.  As someone who has gone to bed reading various Civilization manuals over the years (and who can forget Ultima IV!?) the CE version really does make the case IMO as to why it’s good to give customers more than merely a piece of digital media.

What’s going to be better than Beta 4? What isn’t changing?

I think it’s pretty well known I don’t like Beta 4. I’m not a troll. I’m the designer. I’ll bullet point my gripes:

• Casters should not get to cast spells more than 1 per turn.
• The UI makes me cry. Clickity click click click. What’s going on?
• Goodie huts are boooring.
• The spells are booooring.
• Tactical combat is boooring.
• The spell books are confusing and make me feel violated and I’ve already consulted my attorneys about the issue. (Sorry Stardock, it’s too late already)
• The spells are all the same and boring.

These are the kinds of things people can expect to change by release.  Technical people can tell you that this stuff is pretty trivial. Making a game is a lot like writing a term player expect that we have to program the word processor prior to actually writing the term paper. After programming the word processor, writing the term paper doesn’t seem so bad.

So we’re all here. Ready to make gaming history! Only 24 days remaining! Of course, bear in mind that Beta 4 and Beta 3C were only 7 days apart. So what I’m saying is that Elemental 1.0 on August 24th is going to be a first person shooter. Enjoy.

It’s interesting to see a case where one isn’t definitely better than the other. Regular lighting looks pretty good I think. It’s sharper. Advanced lighting looks good too. It’s softer. I wonder if this should be renamed to Soft Lighting or something because it implies that one is more “advanced” than the other.

If you can, uninstall and reinstall the Elemental Beta.

I'm finding that Impulse didn't remove the file corespells.xml and a few other items and these have a pretty major impact on stability and gameplay.

There is a nasty memory leak that we're having a heck of a time tracking down.

It doesn't happen consistently and in fact, it doesn't happen to us at all.

Here is what we need:

1. If have experienced out of memory problems,  low the game resolution and run the game in a window so that you can bring up that task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc). 

2. On the Processes list, you should see Elemental. Its memory should start at around 600MB and, over the course of a game, creep up to around 1.2GB. This is normal. 

3. The memory, once you get going in the game, should NEVER go up by more than 5MB in a given turn.  If it does, then whatever is triggering the memory explosion has started.

4. We are looking for saved games, theories, debug.err files, anything that can help us reproduce it. If we can reproduce it, we can eliminate it in hours. But it's the reproducing that's giving us fits.

Thanks!

As we move towards release many of the assets in the beta make their exit. We shall miss them (well, maybe not).

The finished quests start to get put into place, the finalized notable locations begin to be inserted and the unreleased spell books and special abilities start to get implemented.

The beta program has largely been about testing out systems and mechanics. Some mechanics, like the per city level building limiter, didn’t survive. Others, like influence based resource control, replaced them.

Memory Problems

The area we need the most help on right now has to do with out of memory issues. This is something we’re very concerned about because it’s not easily repeatable (but very easy for those who run into it).  So we’ll be asking users who run out of memory to get us their debug.err and their saved games so we can look at it. It could be as simple as some building in the game taking up some crazy amount.  It shouldn’t be hard to track down something that eats up over 100 megabytes per turn (or so you’d think anyway).

The other area we’d like to hear from you are all your ideas, suggestions and wish lists.  We want to make sure Elemental is something really special on day 1 as well as set the game on the path to evolving over time.

New Quests

One of the types of quests that I’m enjoying are the ones where you have to collect various items and bring them back to someone to get them made into a special item.  I’m looking at adding the ability to trade these items between players so if the AI players have found Midnight Stones (for instance) and you need one more to get the boots of eternal dodging then you can trade with them for that midnight stone (and vice versa if they need something the AI can come to you and try to trade for it).

Special Abilities

Here’s a sampling of some of the special abilities we’re putting in:

Poison Shot
Tangled Web
Vengeance
Sanctuary
Deadly Bite
Immunity
Blink
Rain of Stone
Flame Strike
Maul
Sprint
Savage Strike
Confusion
Drowning Strike
Crushing Blow
Dominate
Hurricance
Backstab
Tremor
Searing Attack
Agonizing Fear

But if you have your own special abilities you’d like to see, go ahead and post them and explain what they do. Keep in mind, the more convoluted they are, the less likely they are to go in (e.g. Moonlit Dance – if full moon, target unit has a chance of doing a special dance that causes adjacent units to mimic dance draining them of their will to live if they have an intelligence less than 8 but greater than 4).

Anyway, we’re pleased with how the game is turning out. The only thing we’re sweating right now really is the out of memory issue.

We got the second update with all the new maps and such in. So we should be good to go.

If you experience any problems, report them. Even if you think they're known. Also, if you find you can't do something report it even if you think it's "user error". In the beta, our policy is that there is no such thing as user error. Just bad UI design.

Just make sure you post your debug.err (at the very least) and if applicable your dump file if you had a crash.

Note: The only crash bugs we are aware of is when you're doing a new game within a game or switching between editor and game or vice versa.

We consider anything than rock solid going forward as unacceptable.  In fact, I am preemptively returning Elemental to the store for a refund just to drive home the point.

Starting with beta 4 of Elemental, the modding tools for the game have begun to be made available.

This article will serve as a very very basic primer on how modding works in Elemental. 

During the beta process, the team will try as much as it can to help users learn what can and can’t be done with the existing modding tools. Those who need a lot of hand holding should probably wait until after release since the team will have very limited time available to document what is what until post-release.

That said, the basics are fairly straight forward and I’ll go through them here.

The Legal Stuff

To get this first part out of the way, all of the content that comes with Elemental is copyrighted by Stardock Entertainment. We spent a lot of time and money producing the content that comes with it.  You may not distribute this content to be used for non-Elemental related purposes. As you go through the Elemental folders, you will quickly see why most games restrict what is readily accessible. We ask modders to respect the artistic effort that went into creating these assets.

The Formats

Elemental is very data-driven. What this means is that the game itself contains very little “hard coded” content. This is the basis of what makes the game easy to mod.

The formats we use are:

XML. This can be read in with a plain text editor. Nearly everything in the game is XML. Our editors output to XML.

PNG. This is a popular graphics format used on most web pages. We use it everywhere for static images.

MP3. For songs in the game, we use MP3, a popular audio format.

WAV. We also use WAV files, a popular sound format for sound effects.

DXPACK. This is the format that DesktopX uses (www.desktopx.net). We use it for all of our user interface related elements.

HKB. This is the Havok format. The Havok site has a free exporter for it to use in 3D Studio or Maya or what have you.  However, you will need our converter to use it with Elemental which we’ll be releasing shortly.

The Tools (as of Beta 4)

We include two of the tools with beta 4. The Map Editor and the Tile Editor.

In Beta 4, when you choose one, you have to wait until it loads all the data (we’ll add a fancy load screen later) so at first you’ll be looking at a black screen for a bit.

The Tile Editor

Use the middle mouse button (holding it down) to adjust the rotation of the screen. Hold the left mouse button down to move the screen around.

For Beta 4, just save your tile.

The saved tile goes to your my games folder in documents (documents\my games\elemental)

Opening up your tile in a text editor just shows its XML:

In Elemental, file extensions mean very little. The game goes by XML keys (<TileDesigns> in this case).

The Map Editor

THE MOST IMPORTANT KEYS IN THE EDITOR:

+ and – on the 10-key will increase and decrease the size of the cursor.

RIGHT-CLICKING on the map will cause the selected terrain or object to be applied.

For mountain height, hold down the right mouse button while dragging the mouse. It’s dangerously fun.

When you create something in the tile editor, it is not assigned to anything in particular (a quest, a goodie hut, a city improvement, etc.) thus it is shown as a prop. It won’t do anything by default.

In one of our upcoming entries, we’ll show you how to make quests and goodie huts. But they’re fairly easy to make.  Here’s an example:

<GoodieHutTypes>
    <GoodieHutType InternalName="WhateverYouWantToCallIt">
        <Name>My Weird Village</Name>
        <Description>This weird village will give you stuff.</Description>
        <Medallions>
            <All>CaveGrassland_Medallion.png</All>
        </Medallions>
        <Destructable>1</Destructable>
        <TileDesign>WeirdVillage</TileDesign>
        <DrawnIcon>Gfx/TacticalIcons/Quest_Cave1.png</DrawnIcon>
        <IconSize>50</IconSize>

    <Treasure>
      <Title>Found Gildar!</Title>
      <Desc>Scouring the area, you find 30 gildar!</Desc>
      <Liklihood>3</Liklihood>
      <GameModifier>
        <ModType>Resource</ModType>
        <Attribute>Gold</Attribute>
        <Value>30.00</Value>
        <PerTurn>0</PerTurn>
      </GameModifier>
        <SFX>GoldPouch_1</SFX>
        <Image>Gfx\Items\Gold_Medium1.png</Image>
    </Treasure>
    </GoodieHutType>
</GoodieHutTypes>

Throw that into your quests folder and it should automatically show up in the game (I haven’t tried this yet but…in theory).

Quests, Items, Adventures

Once players get a handle on the basics, we’ll start talking about how to make items, quests, adventures, etc.

Sharing your Creations

You can share your creations in one of two ways.

Way #1: Impulse::Reactor

If you hit Shift-Tab you get the Impulse:Reactor overlay. One of the options is mods.

The mods available in game will eventually be heavily moderated.

For users who want to avoid our deliciously evil moderating ways, you can simply share mods with others the old fashioned way. Just drop them into your my games\elemental folder in the proper place and they’ll just show up.

For Beta 4, we’re only letting maps be shared because our moderator tools are very primitive and the map format isn’t likely to change between now and release.

One caveat about beta 4 (and it’ll be easy to find out which users didn’t read this article) – the game will spawn resources on the map even when you have chosen not to. This is a temporary thing that will be addressed by release so go ahead and continue to choose the save option to not allow things to be spawned because the game will use it later.

Hope this helps and have fun!

We got our beta 4 milestone done a bit early so the team got Tuesday off to recuperate.

So tomorrow, with any luck, we should have beta 4 released. After that, the beta is closed to new users and we move towards release next month.

We’ve really had a blast working on Elemental. I was talking to some friends today on how Elemental is different (in terms of development) from other games and the big difference is, on a sequel or when using an established engine, if something isn’t done, you an always rely on what’s already there.  By contrast, in Elemental, nothing is there.

The team is trying to get in the built in uploading and downloading system in Beta 4. I've told them it isn’t a requirement for beta 4 but they’re obsessed in letting people be able share their stuff.   The campaign for Elemental was done entirely via modding tools so players will definitely be able to create their own cool stuff.

Some of my friends have been wanting to try the beta but I keep warning them off that beta 3C will cause them immense pain and agony. It’s just that bad.  Really though, anyone who wants to “play the game early” should just wait until release. The beta program, as you guys have seen, is a real beta program. Utter pain right to the end. It’s been great though. To me, this is what it’s all about. How often do brand new games get made these days? And here, we’ve been able to interact with like minded gamers to put something really special together.

…

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll try to put together a bit of a mod tutuorial. The modding tools are reasonable solid but we don’t really have any documentation put together. So if you’re the type that needs docs to get going, you’re probably going to want to wait.

…

The big things modders should be able to do right away that could make a big difference to gameplay will be:

1. Better “notable locations” (aka goodie huts). Ours are pretty boring. We’re going to do a lot more with this. But modders starting tmorrow should be able to start making their own.
2. Better “quests”. Our quests in beta 4 are pretty  boring. I plan to go over this in the next couple weeks but I think modders will soon freak out at what is possible with the quest system and shame us on this. Elemental could be described as an RPG engine made into a strategy game. :_
3. Better factions. This will be something to see. We took customizing factions out of the game setup and while we won’t have a fancy UI in beta 4, to anyone technical, they should be able to do some pretty cool stuff. It’ll probably become increasingly obvious why we moved custom faction creation out out of game setup and into modding.

There’s so many good experiences in this beta to take to heart. If I had to name two things I would do differently I would have made stability and performance as two things we would have addressed earlier.  Beta 4’s performance is close to release level.  Stability is much  better but we really need a couple more days to look at memory management.

I have to say, we’ve had so much fun on this project. Elemental is something we’ll be working on for years to come and we’re excited to watch it grow with the community.

We’re finishing up our work on Beta 4 for a release later this week.

Here are a few highlights:

#1 A general polish pass has been done across the board.  Not quite to 1.0 but significantly better.

#2 Players will be able to access the Workshop’s Tile Editor

#3 PLayers will have access to the Workshop’s Map Editor

#4 The tactical battles have gotten a lot of polish

#5 There’s been a lot of love given to spell effects and sounds throughout the game

#6 The game will occasionally design units for you (for players who don’t like designing their own units).

#7 A MASSIVE pass on performance tuning. This same screen in Beta 3C would have been 11 FPS.

#8 MASSIVE pass on cloth map performance to make sure the game runs on Netbooks.

#9 The start of work on the tech trees to make them more challenging (This will be an ongoing thing).

#10 The Diplomacy system has gotten its first pass at the AI intelligently valuing things (this will be an ongoing thing to improve)

We have also done a massive pass at both stability and video card compatibility.  Generally speaking, beta 4 shouldn’t crash on you during the course of a game.  However, we are still working on loading games from within a game (there’s a lot of STUFF to deal with there) as well as loading saved games. It’s still far better than beta 3C but it’s not perfect yet.

We have also dramatically reduced the memory foot print but this is an area we will be making substantial improvements during the next week or so (post Beta 4).

When Beta 4 goes out, we’ll go into more depth on the things players can expect us to focus on in particular for the release version.  Given that Beta 3C was only a week ago, I think the beta community will find Beta 4 a major relief (i.e. how much can change in a single week). 

The stability of Beta 4 (our current internal beta of it) is equal to the day 0  version of Galactic Civilizations II and its performance significantly better than the release version of Galactic Civilizations II.

After Beta 4, our code tree gets separated into the version that will be polished, tweaked and bug fixed for the manufactured version (the version that hits stores on August 24) and then the version that will go towards the release (Day 0) version that will be available on August 24th.

As of today, the game is now sufficiently ahead of schedule that the Stardock team is no longer in “crunch mode”.

If you’re still playing Beta 3C, you should stop before it causes permanent damage (it’s pretty awful).

Our main focus going foward is polish polish polish polish polish (including AI, UI, Balance, Spell Work, Special Abilities in tactical battles, Tester requested tweaks, etc.).

Oh, btw, the campaign (which won’t be in the betas) is pretty damn cool and was 100% made with the mod tools and XML (i.e. you guys could make your own campaigns).

Cheers!

Oh, she’s pretty.

Ah the Krax. She’ll lead you.

I can name my units

Yikes.

Mutant Children

I’m open minded