Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
Elemental: Tough love for beta 1B
Let me cut to the bad news right off. Beta 1B isn’t ready to go yet. It needs to be pushed. But for your convenience, I’m going to walk through the problems with the current internal build. Now, before someone who isn’t paying attention closely sends me a flame PM, please read this: I work at Stardock. It’s my job to be critical of the game. The only thing unusual is that I’m airing our internal dirty laundry to the public – but there... [read more]
Dev Journal
No, I work at Stardock – really!
Every so often I get a flame private message from a fan of one of our games telling me to “give Stardock a break” because they see one of my posts as “flaming” Elemental or Demigod or Sins or Galactic Civilizations. Just as a head’s up. I work at Stardock. I’m one of the developers on some of these games or am the product manager. It’s my job to complain about the games and to make them better. Please don’t PM me telling me that I need to be “nicer” about the games. Thanks! [read more]
Dev Journal
Once hooked in, Python is very nice for coding. Where it is NOT nice, so far at least, is the work having to expose new APIs to it. I must be doing something wrong because it seems like there’s a lot of work to expose methods and such. And worse, even once I do that, IDLE (the Python shell I’m using) doesn't seem to have any intellisense for the imported APIs and classes. [read more]
Dev Journal
Elemental Modding: Maps, Continents, Environments and Terrain
Having spent the weekend modding up Elemental I was able to find some weaknesses in our data driven system that I think we need to address sooner rather than later. This technical blog will discuss how worlds are made using the Elemental engine. Maps Map data in XML (e.g. mapsizes.xml) defines: Name of the map type (e.g. “Really big”) Map size in tiles (100,25) A default amount of land vs. water ratio (that can be adjusted by the user) as a % (e.g. 75%... [read more]
Dev Journal
Modding on a Sunday night: Part 2
Our story so far… Modding: Adding resources Modding: General Thoughts Lest you think I’m some sort of shut-in. I really did go outside today. Cider Mill and then played with the kids. So 2 hours spent moving around and the rest of the day in front of the computer. That’s a ratio I can live with. Only 2 broken bones… Adding Technologies Adding technologies to Elemental is still a work in progress because the research screen in Elemental ... [read more]
Dev Journal
Modding on a Sunday night: Part 1
Yesterday I talked about how I added some additional resources into the game. Today I’m going to talk about modding the tech tree. But first, I want to answer some questions I got from yesterday’s article. First, the age old issue of multiplayer came up. If I mod what is on my machine, how does that affect multiplayer? The answer is, it doesn’t. Our solution to this age old issue is, in hindsight, so obvious that I feel shame for our industry (and myself in particular but t... [read more]
Dev Journal
This weekend I’m trying to see how much I can do to the game without having to have access to the source or, for that matter, without having art skills. Right now, for beta testers, there’s not much modding possible because there are is no documentation and the data is streamed from our servers so that we can do real-time updating. Here’s how modding works: First, you have to think of everything in the world in three parts: 1. The data that explains what the thing you ... [read more]