Beta 3-B is the big one. It’ll be the first beta build that should start to feel like a game.

First off, there are the major features being enabled in the public beta:

1. Tactical Battles
2. Master Quests
3. Near Final technology tree
4. Near final city improvement list
5. Tons of game play tweaks
6. Lots of bug fixes

This beta will start to show just how much impact the beta community has had on the game.  I’ll be doing a video preview in the next day or so.

Coming up: Tactical Battle Preview

As some of you know, Elemental BETA 3-B is the last public beta prior to the Modding beta (Beta 4). The modding beta will take things into a different direction while the team focuses on polishing, fixing bugs, and adding your requests into the main game in time for both the DVD release version (August 6)  and the Day 0 release version (August 24).

Having done these beta programs over the past 17 years, we’ve gotten a lot better at addressing beta tester concerns after the beta closes. Part of that is obviously the tech – until 2003, we had to do all our communication using public Usenet groups or static web pages. Not an ideal format as you can imagine.

In addition, starting with Galactic Civilizations I (2003) the retail gold and digital gold versions started being different.  This was fairly nice as it gave us an extra couple weeks to add other niceties based on player feedback.

So here are some FAQs we have gotten over the years and I’ll do my best to answer them:

Q: How much will the the released version be different from the last beta version?

A: Historically, a LOT.  Sins of a Solar Empire’s last public beta didn’t have infinite resources for instance.

Q: Why does so much change between the last betas and the release versions?

A: During the final stages of the beta, stability becomes our primary concern. The last beta cycles allow us to catalog the typically massive amount of crash and other stability problems that we then address as the beta closes. Then, with the game stable we get to look closer at all the great ideas people had and start incorporating that in. Tweaking gameplay and such is not time consuming.

Q: What is Stardock’s position of Elemental’s multiplayer?

A: Elemental has multiplayer. To ensure that it is robust, we basically threw money at the problem (i.e. set up servers around the world to just host the game) rather than monkey around with trying to get players to connect with one another.  However, Elemental IS a single player game that happens to have multiplayer.  Out of the box, Elemental’s multiplayer will be essentially skirmish on fixed maps that have been pre-balanced (i.e. not randomly generated). 

Our standing policy continues to be that we won’t sacrifice the single player experience for multiplayer. That is, if we want to have a cool feature in single player that would de-balance multiplayer, we’ll just disable it from multiplayer rather than not have it in the game at all.

Over time, we will gauge the interest in expanding the multiplayer to see how many resources to put on it. 

Q: I want to know more about tactical battles

A: Without putting too fine a point on it, Elemental’s tactical battles are designed to be fairly similar to Master of Magic’s tactical battles. If you liked those, you’ll probably like these.  It’ll be an area getting the most refinement over the next 30 days and beyond since we hope to release mini-game modes that let players just play tactical battles.

On a personal note, I don’t like tactical battles normally. However, I do like MoM’s tactical battles and I do like Elemental’s tactical battles.

What is the most challenging in terms of doing tactical battles “nowadays” is that the bar on visuals is so high now. So we’re having to gather together a lot of animation assets, spell effects, unit moves, etc.  That’s what has made doing tactical battles so lengthy.  Elemental has a lot of monsters and each one has to have its own series of attack, hit, defense, casting, etc. animations. Beta 3B will basically have just a core set of these that will get greatly expanded over the next 2 weeks internally (though I did make a fuss about units “stabbing” with a club).

Q: How come there doesn’t seem to be a lot of worry about stability?

A: I’m going to show my age here. The tools for debugging nowadays are simply insane. In MY day, if we wanted to find a crash, we had to use beeps. We’d ask people for saved games and then try to reproduce it.  We’d measure crash fixes by N per week.

Now, if we get a .dmp file, we can load it up in Visual Studio and see the line of code it crashed in and the call stack.  That’s sick. Now, one person can go through an entire forum of crash dumps and fix them all before lunch (as in literally, before 12:00pm EST).  Modern developers are sissies.

Luckily, I personally try to add as many bugs each week as I can to help even the odds.

Q: How are you dealing with video card stuff?

A: Now this is trickier. There are certain video cards that are giving us fits, especially with advanced lighting. That includes blurred graphics. Corrupted graphics. White textures, etc.

In the old days, I’d email a user having the problem and ask them if I could call them on the phone and go back and forth (hey, we’re one of the few indie developers left).  We couldn’t afford to buy every video card out there.

Luckily, now, nVidia and ATI send us their cards and because of our non-game work, we have a compatibility lab set up which we’re hijacking starting this week to speed up the process.

Q: Where does the AI stand?

A: That’s what I’m working on from here on out. I’ve had to do a bit more on other areas of the game than I had intended but now I’m getting back to it.  My position on AI, however, doesn’t change. If the AI can’t use a feature, it comes out of the game. Period. Sorry.  Modders are certainly free to go nuts but in terms of officially sanctions “stuff” I only let that stuff in if the AI is able to use it.

One of the reasons why the game has changed (improved) so dramatically in the past month is because of the AI. The same frustrations you humans have the AI has double. Economics too slow or research too long? The AI notices it very fast.

Q: Will you keep us informed on what happens after the beta ends?

A: Absolutely. Users would be shocked I think to find out just how much of the forums we read and how many ideas we get that aren’t necessarily directly suggested.  Plus, I have Jason Ocampo (former editor at IGN and Gamespot) and Brian Clair (former editor of Avault) yelling at me every day on the things they don’t like.

One feature that players haven’t gotten to really see yet because they’re mainly applicable in tactical battles only are special abilities.

Special abilities could be likened (and are actually implemented) much like a spell.

For instance, a spider might have an ability where it can poison a unit. A ghoul might be able to send a unit into panic for a turn.

The way it works is that in tactical battles, you will want to click on the various opponents to see what special abilities they have.

The good news for beginners is that early monsters have none. They just have tooth and fang. But as they get more lethal, they start to have increasingly powerful abilities.

For modders, the above screenshot shows how they work. Most of it is self explanatory but let me explain the others:

• Range determines how far away the target has to be be used on them.
• Spell Level is how advanced the caster’s faction must be in arcane knowledge. For monsters, this works out to the monster spawn level.  This way, we can keep bringing in spiders wargs or whatever and allow them to get nastier over time.
• The Spell Class is important. The AI isn’t hard coded on what spells to use. Instead, it will look at whether a spell is offensive or Defensive and whether the target is itself, friends, or EnemyUnits.
• The GameModifier is something modders will become very familiar with because it’s our universal system for changing something in the game.

The whole thing will need to be surrounded by <Spells> </Spells>

So you’d save this in say “MySwellSpell.xml” and put it in my documents\my games\elemental\units

Then you’d make a spell book.

And save this as say MySwellSpellBook.xml.  You could also put this all together in one file too but I like to keep them separate. Then put this into your \my documents\my games\elemental\units directory also.

Now, next time you load the game those spells are in there.

If you want to be really tricky, you can even go to your \my documents\my games\elemental\units directory and open up one of your created sovereigns in there and give him the spell book.

Of course, it won’t do much good until tactical battles.

If you want it to be a strategic spell (one you can cast on the main map you’d need to add that tag:

This is the XML for the summon familiar. 

You could go and take this spell and make your own spell book put it in your my documents\my games\elemental\units directory, add it to your custom sovereign’s xml and in theory be able to summon some new spells.

Here’s some other units you can try it with for fun:

(replace UnitCall’s entry with one of the below)

• Umderdroth
• AirShrill
• Lurk
• Garrote

Note that I haven’t tried this with the public beta build that streams a lot of its content but it should work. If not, you still have gotten some hands on practice for modding.

So how will you share these?

In the modding betas, you will get access to a beta version of Impulse::Reactor that will let you upload and download mods. At first, these mods will be specific to Elemental (maps, units, spells, items, etc.).  But eventually, total conversion mods will be supported too (we just need to come up with a package format for that to give to the Impulse team.

You won’t have to monkey around with anything to get this stuff to work because it just goes into your my documents\my games\elemental directory which is read in.  The names of the files are irrelevant. It only cares about the XML tags.

For anyone who’s interested in modding, be sure to show them this.  I am hoping users are starting to see just how different an animal Elemental is and why Stardock is able to make so many changes to the same so quickly and easily.  90% of our work was on making this kind of thing possible so easily.

Greetings!

Oh how I love this part of the beta.

First off, you guys are doing a wonderful job getting us great feedback. There have been several crashes that even our internal QA team hadn’t found yet. The net effect of the public beta team is that it effectively adds engineering hours available to us because we’re able to find and eliminate bugs quicker than we had originally projected.

Jesse and I were debugging through the ridiculously slow movement issue when you have an army. A N^2 number of calls were being made to update the army list creation which of course is just crazy.

A rather nasty crash that was occurring very regularly was found and eliminated today as well and a hard to find but nasty memory leak was found.

Balance, Polish, Game Play

We’ve gotten so much good feedback in the past week you guys that by the time the game comes out, it’ll seem like a very different (and much better) game than it would have otherwise been.

Let me outline some of the crucial things you guys have helped us consider and re-evaluate:

1. Pacing Pacing Pacing.  This is always a tough thing but it just takes too long to do cool stuff.  We’re going to eliminate the requirement to build a special building in order to train units.  This was a holdover from Galactic Civilizations (it required a shipyard) and Sins of a Solar Empire (shipyard) that really has no purpose in Elemental other than act as a needless speed bump.
2. Acquiring resources. Similarly, forcing a player to snake out to build a resource (OR be forced to spam cities) in order to make use of various resources IS NOT FUN. Instead, players will be able to simply select a resource and choose build if the resource is in their territory.  This not only “gets things moving” but also makes your area of influence matter more (since bigger cities generate a LOT more of it). 
3. Custom Factions.  This is something that I think people will like a lot more in practice than they will like on paper.  Simply put, we want to let people do a lot more customization on RACE creation and faction creation than can realistically be done in the setup of a game. We’d like to see race creation and subsequently, faction creation to be something much more involved and interesting than it currently is.  As a result, we’re moving it to the Workshop area (modding aera).  Thus, you won’t have to create factions in the middle of setting up your game but rather can create them at your own pace outside the game and then use them as you see fit.  This also allows us to make the race creation a lot more custom and less cosmetic (i.e. we can have Elves and Orcs and other templates in the modding that players can then create their own custom technology trees for and their own custom tiles for, etc.).
4. MAGIC. A lot of our time is being focused on streamling the magic system and making things more fun and interesting here.  Basically we want to make sure players can do a lot of magic stuff early on that’s fun and interesting. 
5. Tactical Battles. You guys haven’t gotten to see this part yet but you will this week.  Let me set expectations here: Our tactical battles are very much like Master of Magic except that units have morale and there are terrain bonuses. So if you don’t like Master of Magic, you probably won’t like Elemental’s tactical battles (then again, if you don’t like MoM you probably won’t like Elemental in general).
6. UI UI UI. Too many clicks. As outdated concepts start to go away, we can massively clean up the UI and start making better use of the empire tree and other systems in place to let the game be the focus.

Anyway, I hope some of you are enjoying the beta process as much as we like having you part of it.  If you’ve never been part of a real beta program before, this has probably been quite a trip so far.  You guys are truly part of our team.

Have a good weekend!

Greetings!

Keep those reports coming. We're reading them all. We are particularly paying attention to reports of crashing that include the dump files (the .zip that's in programdata\stardock\elementa..)

https://forums.elementalgame.com/386178

We're getting a lot of awesome feedback. Thank you!

Scott and I take a look at some of the things in Elemental beta 3A that we need to focus on for next week.

This isn’t going to go live until tomorrow probably. This week was a short week for Stardock as we took last Friday and Monday off for the 4th of July Weekend.

Beta 3-A is mainly just a stability pass at Beta 3 which we felt was too buggy, even for a beta.  We put off making the tactical battles public because we still are adding AI and more tactical maps to it so that’ll come in next week in a Beta 3-B. 

Beta 3-B will be the last “game” beta. After that, we’ll close up and start focusing on polishing and focusing on bug testing for the retail CD version of the game as well as making available Beta 4 which will be an off-shoot build to let early modders see what we have in store so that they can get started early.

So what you see below is what we did on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week:

--

************
* Gameplay *
+ Implemented new City Level Upgrade dialog
- Pops up when one of the local player's cities grows a level, and offers them to pick an ability bonus to grant their city
- These bonuses are whatever AbilityBonusOptions of type "City_Level" found in the xml files, I added a file CityLevelUpBonuses.xml with 5 ability bonuses that Brad said he wanted as options
+ Implemented new spell learned dialog
- This includes having spell costs set by a <SpellLevel> tag in their def xml now, having the spell point cap for a player no longer affected by bonuses from techs or buildings or by the sovereign's wisdom (just uses the spell knowledge level now), and adding the ability to research more spell knowledge levels
- I also added an entry for reaching the next spell knowledge level to the spellbook wnd, which double-clicking will either put in the learning queue or remove from the learning queue, depending on if the player is trying to reach it or not
- Added some UI refreshes for learning new spells and moving spells around in the queue, so that it doesn't take a turn for spell research changes to show up in the tray
- Fixed a bug where starting spells given by the faction weren't getting removed from the researchable spells list when the players were initialized, causing them to have all their starting spells listed twice in the spellbook, once under Known and once under Available or Unavailable
+ Monsters respawn over time.
+ Monsters will attack one another if they are of a different species and in their "territory"
+ Monster aggression based on intelligence of monster
+ Monsters of same type will gradually band together into packs
+ Monsters are spawned with a randomized amount of territory that they consider "theirs"
+ Minor Factions are now in
+ Number of Minor factions generated dependent on map size
+ Minor factions get a NON channeling sovereign
+ Minor factions get a guardian unit
+ Minor factions get a recruitment resource nearby
+ Fixed berserk effect to not be infinite
+ Janusk conversations increased
+ Increased number of Imperial conversation types
+ Additional minor faction types implemented
+ New hubs created for certain minor factions
+ Tech tree cleaned up
+ Fixed possible crash in EffectManager.cpp
+ Re-designed the minimum distance calculation such that the game looks at Number of empty landtiles to determine the minimum distance. The more land tiles, the more distance between players.
+ Added a note to the info cards on resources if a given resource just can't be used by that faction.
+ Some clean up to the various improvements
+ Additional NPC units added
+ Lots of new goodie hut, quest, and hubs added
+ Reveal spell effect no longer infite
+ Re-did design of how minor races are spawned. Mostly moved to AI code
+ Re-did how goodie huts are spawned to ensure there is a good amount of them based on number of land tiles
+ Players, by default, spawn with a fertile land tile nearby along with goodie huts nearby
+ Re-designed how resources are spawned so that the number is based on the number of land tiles on the map
+ New world function: GetDistanceInTiles()
+ New world function: FindNearestCityDistance()
+ Used FindNearestCityDistance to determine better spawning locations for things (i.e. away from towns)
+ New world function: GetNumLandTiles() [That's right, we didn't actually have a function that told us how many land tiles we had. We had ones for water, forest, mountains but not land].
+ Fixed it so that goodie huts respect their spawn level when being ...spawend
+ Renamed GetSpawnRatingQuest (and similar functions) to GetWorldSpawnRatingQuest to conform to established naming conventions
+ New CMapdDAta function added FindLandTiles (just counts up number of land tiles and stores it)
+ Eliminated use of ForceTileMargins(which we may regret) as it was resulting in players and AI to spawn in the water.
+ Made necessary changes to unit.cpp to allow monstes to attack one another without wanting to attack all monsters in general
+ New CUnitType function ::GetAllMonsterUniteTypes. Fills a vector with monsters. If a unit does not have a NPCSawnLikelihood that's greater than 0 then it's a monster.
+ Undid the civilized change I had requested (if you choose civilized you get your city again).
+ AI now using relations weights from coreAIDefs.xml to determine how they feel about you.  Still have a few of them to hook up, but most are in.
+ Updating of existing map seeds (removing "Brad" maps)
+ Commented out "IsMobileObject" in  BasicGameObject.cpp. I don't think this works as designed.
+ Level 2 Goodie Huts added
+ Level 3 Goodie Huts added
+ Level 4 Goodie Huts added
+ Several new potions added
+ Clean up of monster goodie huts which were being used often as regular goodie huts.
+ Major cleanup and balancing of monsters
+ New secret spell books added
+ Secret spells to go with secret spell books added (quest items)
+ Starting funds increased to 1000
+ Re-balancing of city levels
+ Several new maps added
+ Several new quests
+ Eliminated randomization of spawn ratings of quests as one goes up. I.e. if a player reaches level 4 quests, level 4 quests are going to be spawned, not rand()%4.
+ Warning system to players added to the Trigger manager
+ Fixed the trigger system to work with our finalized design
+ Added Cloth Armor Helmet, Breastpiece, Armlets, and Greaves
+ Replaced/Removed Stone Walls, Platoon, Batallion, Regiment, Melee Weaponry, Longswords, Battle Hammers, War Hammers, Katanas, Claymores, Master Cutting Weapons, Greatswords, Refined Melee Weaponry, Missile Weaponry, Longbows, Archiving, Higher Education, Caravans, Administration, Taxation, Orchards, Beekeeping, Crystal Mining, Forges, Construction, Quarries, Earth Shard Understanding, Fire Shard Understanding, Air Shard Understanding, Water Shard Understanding, Metal Trading, Crystal Trading, Economic Treaties, Research Treaties, Non-Aggression Pacts, Technology Trading,  Military Trading, Dynasty Building, Master Cutting Weapons, Archers, Guardians, Monuments, Greater Lore Technologies for the Kingdom and Empire
+ Created Barracks, Cutting Weapons, Superior Cutting Weapons, Blunt Weapons, Superior Blunt Weapons, Ranged Weapons, Literacy, Shard Domination, Refined Enchantment, Summoning, Book of Restoration, Resource Trading, Treaties,  Kingdom Swords, Empire Swords, Ranged Weapons, Archery, Specialists, Refined Majesty, Sorcerers, Lore Masters, Refined Enchantment, Summoning Technologies for the Kingdom and Empire
+ Frigate now unlocked with Navies technology
+ Caravans now unlocked through Civics and Bartering technologies
+ added code to hook up AI relations weights for YouKilledMySpouse, MyChildDiedInYourCare, MutualFamily, and MutualGrandChildren
+ You can now use the bow attack on main map to fire at NPCs  (before NPCs were not allowed to be targets)
+ Raze city action now unlocked by the fortification technologies in the kingdom/empire trees
+ Refreshed some of the quest destinations to make them stand out more
+ Fixed issue where Peons were showing up for Kingdom, and Peasants showing up for Fallen
+ Embassy now unlocked through Influencing Technology
+ New Tactical Icons hooked up to Claimed Ogre Camp
*******************
* AI Improvements *
+ AI smarter about where to build new cities
+ AI economic handling improved
+ AI handling of pioneers improved
+ AI much better at expanding
+ Advisors will inform you when better notable locations have become available
+ Monster AI now able to handle spawning of groups of monsters (like a TON of Darklings) rather than individuals only.
+ Fixed idiotic AI bugs.
+ If you have champions, they will begin warning you of world events they know of
+ implemented AI Relations Weight, Treaties Together.
*************
* Bug Fixes *
+ Fixed bug where factions created during the game (like when creating a new faction) wouldn't have the default player abilities values, causing specifically new factions to not have a 0 mana regen ability.
Starting a new game using one of these custom factions would still work, just the first game they were played with would not set the defaults.
+ SetCityConstructionImprovement: does not create decal for improvement being placed
+ Fixed a crash caused by dereferencing null in CWorld::SavePlayer( ) in World_SavingLoading.cpp. It saves all 32 players (whether they are initialized or not), and on uninitialized players, the faction config is NULL, and the function was accessing members without checking to see if it was valid.
+ Fixed a bug in CTerrainGraphic that was causing the fog of war to break on the terrain (it was setting a null texture, rather than the current active fog of war map texture).
+ Fixed problem that was preventing the rotations of world props placed in the map editor from properly being applied to the tile designs when the map is loaded.
+ Fixed bug where new empire factions got no techs, they were setting an invalid tech tree as their tech tree
+ Regarding the bug that causes units to not regenerate their mana, the only time I saw this happen was when creating a new custom faction and immediately continuing on to a game playing as that faction, caused by their mana regen ability not getting set to the default in the player ability xml.  I fixed this on Thursday night right after the build, and haven't seen it happen since, so I'm pretty sure that was the cause of any inability to regen mana the forum users are talking about.  However, if anyone sees this happen again, let me (us) know.
+ From https://forums.elementalgame.com/386332, straightened out the behavior of showing and performing unit actions in an army more to prevent the weird behavior people were seeing when building towns with pioneers in an army
- Now, when you select an army, it shows all of the actions that are available to any subunit in that army, and when you choose to perform one of those actions, it finds the first unit in the army capable of individually doing so and has them perform the action.  If any single subunit is selected, only the actions they can individually perform are shown and they are the unit that performs the action when asked to.
+ If a pioneer builds a city from within an army, the surviving units move off of the new city tile like sovereigns used to do when founding a city
+ When an army has SetPositionTile called on it, it now calls SetPositionTile on all its subunits, too.  This fixes several bugs, such as being able to build a city with an army with a pioneer in it selected but not being able to when selecting the pioneer subunit individually (because it thought it was at an old tile), and having spells like Mass Heal that affect all units at a tile actually affect all the subunits of an army that has moved since it was formed
+ Fixed bug where moveable units list was being used outside of a critical section and caused a crash
+ Fixed bug when casting spells where it would try to attach particles even if spell did not have a projectile particle effect
+ Fixed bug when casting spells where it would try to detach particles even if spell did not have a projectile particle effect
+ Fixed bug where attach effect annotation would sometimes be executed after processing an "OnHit" annotation
+ Fixed MEMORY LEAK: There was a case where animation controllers were not getting cleaned up in some animation queue entries
+ Fixed bug where death flyback would cause the unit to fly back in the wrong direction if it was part of a grou
+  Buildable tiles were not getting properly regenerated after save/load, leading to tiles not being buildable when they should be.
+ Fixed crash on exit from not checking for g_pSectorMapper being NULL
+ CRASH FIX: fixed a NULL pointer crash
+ Fixed blending issues with various animations
+ Fixed ranged attack and cast spell animations so they animate the correct character in a group
+ Fixed bug where switching a unit from one mount to another in a unit scene view window wouldn't refresh the graphics to show the new mount until something else was refreshed
+ Fixed bug in create sovereign screen where switching the gender of the unit type wouldn't set the eyes back to their default, causing men to have female eyes and vice versa until new eyes were picked
+ Fixed a bug that was causing CQuestManager::SpawnQuestLocations( ) to spawn locations at a level higher than the current world quest spawn rating.
******
* UI *
+ Cleaned up the info cards to display the same stats as the details sub-window
+ Made the "cannot cast tactical spells" message only show up in the popup spellbook
+ changed relations sub wnd to display how other races feel about you, not how you feel towards them.
+ The "Improvement" page of the Hiergamenon now shows what tech's are required
+ Allows for clicking on entries in the hiergamenon to launch a new hiergamenon page
+ Event List: Animated effect to draw the eye when a new entry is added
+ Pruned Tech and City spam in the event list
+ Fixed Events in the Event list to fade away quicker (2 turns, not the old default of 6)
+ Got rid of the details action in both the city and unit actions lists
+ In unit item context, single-clicking now equips/unequips and item, instead of double-clicking
+ Fixed Arcane Weaponry and Drain Life spells not using enchantment slots
+ Clicking on "Go to Spellbook" in the new spell level up popup now brings up the spellbook popup instead of the kingdom wnd in spellbook mode
+ When the city level up dialog pops up, the camera moves to the city that is leveling up
+ Fixed typo in arcane lab xml that gave it an invalid tech prereq, so that it was never unlocked
+ Made it so the "Treaties" subject on the diplomacy wnd is available right from the start, by setting the non-agression (safe passage) treaty to have no tech prereqs.  this also inadvertently led me to discover that the treaty was actually requiring techs that no longer existed, so you'd never be able to access it.
**********
* Engine *
+ Faction XML now supports <DefaultCityWallSet> field
+ Added <DefaultCityWallSet> entries for every race  (all default to CityWalls_Fence)
+ Changed "Throttle Frame Rate" option to "Limit Frame Rate"
- This option allows you to set a frame rate limit and the desired number of frames are spread across the 1 sec time frame
- This allows us to scale down how many frames we render to keep graphic cards from overheating
- The default limit is 150 fps
- The option will still sleep during the frame to throttle the frame rate like before
+ Added support for city modifier "SummonRandomGuardian", creates a random creature unit of spawn rating equal to the value of the modifier and stations them in the city, saves the selected unit type as the <StrVal> (which can be used as an override if desired) so that in multiplayer, only the server chooses the unit type and the clients just use the override unit type
+ Added support for "TargetCity" value calculator owner when applying city modifiers
- Because I didn't want to have to make cities inherit from non ref counted IPropertyBucket in order to be used in the value calculator owners, I added support to CElementalGameModifierInstance to just have individual variables for a given value owner set, by keeping a list of custom property buckets that the code can fill with whatever variable value replacements it wants
+ If a player tries to access a quest location with a spawn rating higher than their current quest spawn rating ability, then a message will pop-up saying they are not ready to undertake that quest. The default message can be overridden on a per-quest basis by adding a string with the desired text to the QuestDef XML with the “ReqsNotMetText” tag. As an example, this string has been defined in the Quest_EscoreNobleman1 XML (although, as the spawn rating for the quest is 1, it the player will always be able to accept it).
+ Quests now use the player’s personal quest spawn rating ability, rather than the global spawn rating, to see if they’re able to accept a quest.
+ Set the default values for the NPC, goodie hut and quest ability ratings to 1, so the player can access the lowest-level quests from the start of the game.
+ Fixed an issue that was causing the wrong quests to be placed on the map (it was always choosing a random quest, rather than only when a random quest was specified).
+ If a quest has a preferred quest location defined, but it cannot be found, the game will now randomly select a different quest location.
+ Units no longer need to keep track of what character is ranged unit using an index because this is done in the characer gfx data table now
+ When units are added to an army, the army is set to idle animation status
- This fixes bug where units would play an attack animation again if they hadn't reset their animation status when the unit was added
+ New Animation handling system
- Mounted units now play a better death animation and actually fall off of their mount
- Mounted units can now animate ranged attacks
- Mounted units can now play cast spell animations
- Mixed unit armies now display at least one ranged attack unit if one is present in the army
- When using a ranged attack, only the ranged unit characters will animate firing
- This allows groups of ranged units to attack all at once, or if there are more than one in a group, to fire together
- Mounted units and on foot units animate properly when mixed together in a group
- Mounted units now use a constant for their attachment point rather than a hard-coded string
- Added new bow attack animation file from Auri
- Death Flyback Animation is now hooked up so that all characters will animate flying backward if needed
- Fixed bug where flyback animation would be herky-jerky sometimes
- Fixed bug where mountee units would not detach from the mounted unit unless the combat ranking difference was high enough
- Mounted units always do death flyback animation now
- New CUnit::GetCharacterFromMultiCharacterGraphic function returns the specified character graphic or its mountee (if its a mounted unit)
+ Tile Design Pedestrians now support custom textures
+ When you recruit an NPC unit, it plays the greeting animation so he/she bows and waves
+ City HUD hovers higher now
+ Fixed bug where if city HUD was disabled, and new city was built, the city HUD would appear

Fun with Elemental.

This week we plan to release Elemental BETA 3-A.  This build will primarily be a stability/performance run through of Beta 3. We’re going to hold off adding significant new features until we’re happier with the stability.

The Beta 3 series begins the actual “game phase” of Elemental’s public beta process.  This is where the game starts to come together as an actual game rather than a piece of software.

Beta 3 will include the rough draft of the user manual as well as the game launcher.

I still recommend people to NOT join the beta unless your primary goal is to help mold game play.  At beta 3, we can make game play changes as long as they do not require new assets to be created (art, 3D models, etc.) or new systems to be developed (“Wouldn’t it be great if you could switch into first person mode?).

Here is the v1.0 Spell Book.

Latest Update: 07.05.2010 16:22 EST

 
Click thumbnail to enlarge

The values are still subject to tweaking based on play testing.  In addition to the 90+ spells in the core 11 spell books (10 + the Spell book of Mastery) there are an additional 7 books of magic that are scattered across the world to be found which I won’t get into (but inevitably, once the modders get started they’ll find them). Amongst the lost 7 books of Magic are the Book of Curses, Book of Valor, and the Book of Vengeance.

Most of these spells should be in the Beta 3 build (“they work on my machine!”) but if they’re not checked into the public tree they should be soon.

We plan to release a lot more spells after the game comes out (lest we get shamed by modders) which we’ll add in based on beta tester feedback.