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

The concept of diplomatic capital as a resource came from the beta community and WOW does it provide a lot of use.

Diplomatic Capital can be earned through the diplomacy tree as well as certain very rare resources on the map.

If you hold onto it, you gain advantages in the value of trading things.

Now, when trading with the AI, you never get a 1 to 1 ratio (you can’t trade 10 materials for 20 materials).  But what happens is that as players get better diplomatic capital ratios, they get better and better deals.

But on the other hand, if you need the money right now, you can spend it:

I think there’s a lot we can do with this concept as we go forward. It definitely gives diplomacy some teeth, especially when we get into getting various players to declare war on each other.

Greetings!

I must say, this has been the best beta experience we’ve ever had.  I think one big reason for this is because Elemental is a brand new game. The sky has been the limit in ideas to try and retry.

Today marks the one month from release date.  We’re pretty excited about how things are coming together.  The changes in performance and stability have been pretty dramatic along with the sheer amount of game balancing and AI changes.

I do wish I had more time with the AI before 1.0.  But then again, even if I had another year on it, I would still wish I had more time for the AI.

Today we’re mainly focusing on bug fixing. Bugs in quests. Bugs in loading ships. Bugs in spells.

And I had to admit this but even I have bugs in my code…

More to come…

I’m listening to Enya.

Sorry we’ve not been posting as much. Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up.

Some highlights of work this week:

• Performance is MASSIVELY better.
• Been doing a lot of focusing on stability.
• Been tightening up the game mechanics considerably and taking into account the many discussions here.
• Tactical battles are much better
• AI is much better
• A lot better filling out of the tech trees to balance things.
• A lot of work on the quest system to have the quests and goodie huts be more rewarding

Things we’re still not happy with include but are not limited to:

• The magic system. This deserves its own post so I won’t go into it. Elegance in a design document can be just work in a game.
• The UI. We are going to update the UI but it’ll not be in the RTM version but will be in the v1.0 day 0 version. Right now, there’s just too many clicks.

I’ll post more as time permits. Stay tuned.

Loosely speaking, here are the 5 different technology paths and what you’re supposed to accomplish with them.  Our challenge is to make sure each of these 5 paths are meaningful on their own as well as can be mixed and match to create an endless combination of strategies.

During the betas, we have been turning on and off different trees in order to get a sense of how effective any given path is.

The purpose of this journal entry is to discuss with you guys things you think would be interesting in these 5 areas that have not been present in existing betas.  Some of these ideas will make it into the RTM version, others will make it into the release (day 0) version and some may make it into the future.

First, let’s recap the 4 victory conditions since ultimately all objectives lead to one of the 4 conditions:

1. Conquest. You killed everyone.
2. Spell of Making. You cast the spell to bring in a new Forge of the Overlord (you win).
3. Quest of Mastery. You find and put back together the old Forge of the Overlord (you win).
4. Diplomacy. You get everyone to ally with you.

Imperium/Civilization

The world has resources. And your territory expands as your influence grows to make use of these resources. This tree allows you to increase your utilization of these resources. The most important resource here is Gildar (gold).

Adventure

There were a lot of resources before everything blew up. More than that, there was a lot of really powerful stuff out there that’s now gone. The purpose of adventure is to give players access to increasingly powerful items and resources that will aid them in their pursuit of one of the 4 objectives. Also leads to the Master Quest. What you are looking to do here is to build a band of powerful champions armed with magical items you have collected.

Warfare/Conquest

Other factions have resources and stuff you want. Take it from them by building armies of increasingly lethal weaponry and defenses of your design. The most important resource here is metal. You need it. Others may have it. Might makes right.

Magic

Besides giving players access to the Spell of Making eventually, the spells you learn can help you achieve any of the 4 objectives when used right. The key resources here are Arcane Knowledge (how fast you learn new spells) and Essence (the maximum amount of mana your casters can hold).

Diplomacy

Sometimes you don’t have the stuff you want and you don’t want to have to conquer everyone. Diplomacy lets you do this.  Diplomatic Capital is the resource here. The more of you get get, the more people love you. Trade others to get more of it and they’ll like you even more or trade it away to get other resources or get others to attack each other so that they’re too busy to get after you.

So there you have the basic game mechanics of Elemental. And on the surface, it’s a pretty straight forward game.  Of course, actually accomplishing your goals in the game is another thing.  And over the course of the next several years, the depth beneath the surface here will increase.

Greetings!

With the mod beta coming up, we prepare to split our code tree into two.  One part will go one to become the RTM version (release to manufacturing version).

PC Game Publishing: Inside the Sausage Factory

For those of you who wonder how the game industry works, here’s a basic run down:

Publishers negotiate with retailers for shelf space. Each year, thousands of games are released and there’s only a small number of slots at retail available. If you’re a big publisher (i.e. Activision or EA for instance) you have considerable flexibility since retailers are very anxious to get the next major franchise sequel.

If you’re one of the last (virtually the very last) independent PC game publishers that handles their own retail, flexibility is diminished somewhat.  It’s the price we pay to make “niche games”. 

Despite what many would have you believe, 3 out of 4 PC game sales occur at retail  with the bulk occurring at just a handful of retailers (Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.). The remaining 25% is via digital distribution (Steam, Impulse, D2D, etc.). 

Therefore, having your game available at retail is absolutely critical and getting your game on the shelf is a lot like preparing to get married.  You have to reserve the date quite a bit in advance because the retail buyers have to choose what games will be on shelves during a given quarter during the previous quarter.  June 30th being the end of last quarter means that this quarter’s titles are set. If you miss your spot after reserving it, it’s a big deal since there is now nothing to take that slot.

Now, in the old days, there was only one “gold” version of a game. This version was sent to manufacturing typically around 10 business days before store availability (they could turn the CD manufacturing around very fast and then assemble the boxes, manuals, etc. very quickly to get it shipped off to retailers 5 days later). 

However, nowadays, we refer to the RTM version and the release version. This sort of thing started a few years ago when digital updates became more common. This has had a significant benefit to gamers but it comes with some caveats as well.  The RTM version meant that the "first” gold date could be moved back which makes manufacturing vastly cheaper.  Of course, it means the RTM version is now 20 days before street date rather than 15 days. The net benefit for consumers is that games have continued to get cheaper when adjusting for inflation partially because manufacturing has gotten cheaper.  I think our boxes are made in Mexico, our CDs in Canada, etc. To be honest, I have no idea where all the various pieces are made but it’s all over the place now.

Now, the RTM version for Stardock has a bit more significance to us because our RTM version does not force the user to update on day 0. That’s because we don’t have any copy protection on our RTM version and don’t assume the player has an Internet connection. Of course, it also means that the RTM version has to be very solid which, during every crunch time results in some headaches.

Hence, one split of the code tree goes on to become the RTM (RTM v1.0) version and the other goes on to be Beta 4 and then eventually the v1.0 version that will be available to digital downloads and anyone who updates.  Obviously, an extra 20 business days can make a big difference and that’s why you should always update your game if you buy it at retail. It’s not just about bugs, often times, there’s just ideas that come up once the team gets “in the zone”.

So there you have it.  While the system isn’t perfect, it does generally deliver to the gamer a pretty good value on their purchase.

Cheers!