Journals
Dev Journal
Designing units in Elemental discussion
Some of you in the beta are probably starting to recognize the influence you now have and why we had the beta be so primitive – so that your ideas can really REALLY go into the game. So let’s talk about how units should be designed in the game. Here’s how it works: Players design their own units. It’s not like Civilization and such where you have knights or warriors. You start out with a person. The key traits of that person involve their attack (how many HP damage... [read more]
Dev Journal
This next week we’ve got a ton of things to do. Most of what we’re working on doesn’t show up in the game. In no particular order, here are some things on the high priority list: 1. Gotta expose the AI to Python. Need that so that I can start doing serious surgery on the AI without constantly having to recompile and re-run the game. 2. Nail down what resources we want to have in the game. I keep thinking that it’s better to have more resources than fewer. ... [read more]
Dev Journal
Beta 1A of Elemental has arrived (or will in a few minutes). It’s still incredibly primitive but a lot has gone on under the covers thanks to feedback from the beta testers from the initial beta. First, a lot of bugs got fixed. There’s still a lot more to go at least but the CPU frying issue, the hard disk corruption issue, and of course the video card overheating problems have been mostly taken care of so we are pretty sure that the odds of the game physically damaging your comp... [read more]
Dev Journal
One of my pet peeves on games has to do with how long it takes to get the game loading. For Elemental Beta 1A (tomorrow) I’m working on adding /fastload as one of the command line parameters. This skips things like DirectX detection (only for people whose systems are already perfect with Elemental as it doesn’t print out the user’s hardware info in debug.err). It’s amazing how much “stuff” we have to load. That’s because even though we’re not displaying the “full game” during the ... [read more]
News
October 1 deadline to get into the beta
The deadline to get into Elemental Beta 1 ends October 1st. But lest you think this is a call to join the beta, let me warn you, the beta is a land of horror and agony. Even now, most of the beta testers are requiring long-term psychiatric care to continue functioning. But if you are a true masochist, you can pre-order now and get into the beta as we are putting together the game mechanics and help mold the final game. [read more]
Dev Journal
Hey Everyone! Version 0.23 (aka 'The Beta1 Update') is now available on Impulse. We highly suggest those with major graphical errors on the main map give this a go. As for the major issues not listed as fixed... Saved Games: We're currently narrowing down the major issues with loading a saved game. These will be ironed out by next Thursday (Beta 1a). Crashs on Startup: This build won't do anything for people who can't get into the title screen. We have some leads on how the prob... [read more]
News
Shacknews Interview with Brad Wardell on Elemental
Shacknews.com has a fantastic, and very informative interview with Stardock CEO, Brad Wardell, on the upcoming PC game Elemental: War of Magic . “Shack: [laughs] We should cover Elemental before we get into that. Now, there aren't many companies that are still making these kinds of games anymore. Do you take a conservative approach in figuring out whether your audience can support a game like this, or do you just make what you think is fun and go from there? Brad Wardell: ... [read more]