Journals

Dev Journal

Spells & Magic

The beta group has had an immense amount of influence already on the course of the game’s development.  One example of this has been in the way we’ve been thinking of implementing magic in the game.  Often times, users don’t necessarily make specific suggestions but instead get us thinking on a different track than we previously were. With Magic, originally players had 5 different types of mana – life/death, earth, fire, water, air. Controlling a shard would, each ... [read more]

Dev Journal

Understanding The Fallen, Elemental, and Middle Earth

If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan…or more specifically, a Tolkien fan, much of this is known to you.  However, if you do not know the true history of Middle Earth, some of this may be shocking. The will of Illuvatar In Middle Earth, there are only two natural sentient races in the world. Men and Elves. Everyone else, EVERYONE else, is unnatural. In Elemental, those unnatural races are called The Fallen.  In Middle Earth, they are given different names: Dwarves, Orcs, dragons, and yes, even our beloved hobbits. Of all sentient creatures, the first made were dwarves. But they were not sentient first. It’s a long story but dwarves were made by one of the Valar (similar in scope to a Mithrilar in our universe). The elves were the first “natural” sentient race brought into the world. And much of the sorrow that later came to the world of Middle Earth was because of the uncertainty about when and where the second natural race would come from – men. One of the Valar, called Morgoth, took natural creatures of the world (including elves) and using his arts created (or bred) orcs and dragons and other unspeakable things. Even some lesser Maiar (Gandalf, Sauron, and Saruman were Maiar – they’re equivalent in scope to Dred’nir and Elas’nir in our universe – see Twilight of the Arnor ) got twisted by Morgoth – Balrogs. [read more]

Dev Journal

Ugly children

So this week the dynasties got in.  To skip to the good part, your sovereign gets married and has children. Eventually, those children grow up and you can then arrange marriages with them with other sovereigns. Your children, in turn, will have children of their own.  And that’s where things got interesting…or more specifically: ugly. For today’s code review, we were looking at the algorithms being used to produce off-spring.  We don’t want them to be just random but rather h... [read more]

Dev Journal

Tiny coincidences

Many of you have played Age of Wonders. It’s a fantastic series of games.  I was noticing today that our lead composer (both on Galactic Civilizations II and on Elemental) is the same lead composer from Age of Wonders. [read more]

Dev Journal

The importance of optimization

When I was a kid, the Amiga could multiask on 512K of memory and run some pretty darn good games. My Commodore 64 was a blast to play and required less memory than a typical modern icon image. Today, we live in an age where the resolutions are so large, the textures do detailed that we need lots of memory.  I think most people recognize this. But one thing we really tend to focus a lot of attention on is performance.  Readability in code is important but so is performanc... [read more]

Dev Journal

Elemental: The MUST HAVE 2010 TBS requirements

As reported elsewhere , Elemental will not be released next month but is tentatively scheduled for 3rd quarter 2010. Those of you who have been reading these journals of course have known that since last Fall but we had neglected to change the update on the store page. So that we can refer to this journal entry later, we are not committing to any particular date. “When it’s done” is basically our time schedule.  That doesn’t mean we’ll wait until every feature we can possibly ima... [read more]