5701

You know how to scroll up, don’t you, Tel? You just put your fingertip and mousewheel together and… roll.

5702

Scroll up to what? That’s Brad’s only post in that thread. The OP is just a player with some suggestions of what a city screen needs. Am I to understand that the OP’s suggestion “a spreadsheet-like overview with all the vital stats as columns” is being implemented exactly as he posted?

What vital stats? What sorting capabilites will it have?

There’s a lot of questions there that “it’s in for v1.09” doesn’t really answer.

5703

I love how the people hired back went from “Second Dev Team” as they were laid off to “Original Elemental Team” as they’re supposedly hired back.

5704

Are you talking about this?

If so, I don’t see what the issue is. There’s no longer a second development team working on another title, but they’ve been hired back to help with Elemental. What’s the problem with the statement?

5705

I assume you’re being sarcastic, which is fine and all, but that’s actually nice of Brad to finally put his money where his mouth is an make amends with his ex-team for his own fuckup.

I imagine they’re back in at a lower salary, but hell, it’s infinitely better than nothing.

5706

Can he actually pay them a lower salary? ;P

5707

Sure. What my link and short post were meant to convey was that there is a city overview screen forthcoming. This is news in itself. Yes, it leaves many questions open. I expect we’ll learn more shortly if they’re able to deliver v1.09 this week as Wardell earlier mentioned.

I linked to the minimal Wardell post because the OP is not news, it’s just one of the myriad user suggestions in the Elemental forum. Wardell’s comment was the crunchy nut in the middle of this admittedly stalish confection.

5708

I just want you to know there’s at least one person on this forum who got that one. Well played.

 -Tom
5709

Yup, that was some obscure reference. Probably something only a comic book nerd like Tom would get…

5710

I think I needed to hear that one delivered to get it. Nice.

5711

One of my favorite movies.

5712

strange thing is - i’d completely replaced the original line with the Steve Martin piss-take - thanks for reminding me that memory is a feckless child

5713

A screen capture of the new city list window.

5714

Wardell explains what he means when he says he doesn’t enjoy game design.

More importantly, he does a pretty astute-seeming analysis of the things that went awry in the development of Elemental.

5715

Wardell ruminates (shortly) on the future design direction of military units.

5716

Who knew that making games was such an ordeal!? Before Brad Wardell came along, we all assumed that it was easier than, say, assembling widgets in a factory or digging diamonds in a mine. We were wrong, of course. It’s actually quite difficult and unpleasant!

Forget about every good game you’ve played in your life. Fact is, game design is DAMN HARD. Maybe even impossible. Certainly unpleasant. Computer games would be fun and they’d work on your system, if not for those butthole operating system and hardware limitations. How can anyone get around such limitations? They can’t, I say! All those times they did, it was witchcraft or you were just deluded by bribed reviews in the gaming press! Before anything can happen, ya gotta be able to zoom in on the blacksmith or transfer mods over the developer-provided platform. Everything else is just FLUFF. Trivial crap that could totally be added in 5 minutes playing with the XML.

Maybe the perfect game design that Brad had in his head – Before those WHORES who actually implemented it on the computer got ahold of it, could be released to folks like me, who gamemaster games on the kitchen table. We can incorporate them into our tabletop campaigns, and experience what we’ve been missing out in Elemental. After all the problems with elemental are the result of Brad having to “compromise his original vision”, so I, for one, wanna hear em. In my imagination, this stuff runs smooth as butter.

In all seriousness, I LOL’d when Brad acted like a perfect game wouldn’t really be marketable, and that his “conflict of interest” as both designer and publisher was part of what kept Elemental from shiny happy success. Don’t you have to try and fail before proclaiming that the world isn’t ready for your genius? Not in the computer game development industry, apparently! You can blame your paid subordinates!!

Also, again with the discussion of how the gaming press reviewed Calciv II!? Give me a break. Galciv II got easy treatment and bonus points from the gaming press because it was developed by an “indie” with a small budget. If Valve would have followed up Half Life 2 with Galciv II, they would have been savaged by the press and run out of the industry.

You’re playing with the big kids now, Froggy. If you can’t bring it, then maybe you should start a BBS and distribute your apps as shareware.

5717

Heh, its always funny reading such stuff.
It’s like, when any given game has graphics issues or something, it’s always blamed on the drivers.

Sure, they have something to do with it, but just telling people to update their graphics card drivers (which doesn’t really solve the problem oftentimes) is a joke when the other half a dozen games I bought in a similar timeframe work brilliantly out of the box with any driver version.
I know there are usually quite a few driver issues, and they can be a bitch, but if others make their game work regardless but yours crashes to the desktop, it’s all your fault, not that of the driver provider.
Same thing is true for external libs.

I don’t have any game development experience, but I’ve done plenty of app development, and I used quite a few external libs over the years - they all have their own set of problems, and their own set of bugs to boot.
But it’s your (in those cases my) job to work around bugs and limitations and make the boat float regardless.

Also, dropping (or making massive changes to) a core feature of your game because the external lib of your choice doesn’t support it is … a bit lame.
I thought it was lame when that UFO remake on the Q2 engine did drop destructible environments because, somewhere pretty far along in development - they realized the engine actually doesn’t support it, but at least that’s a free fanmade thingy, not something they ask $50 for.
In any event, choosing the right tool(s) for the job is also part of the deal - if you didn’t chose the right tool and now cannot get it to work, well, you didn’t do your job properly.

Ah well, now that Civ5 is out, who cares about Elemental any longer?
Edit: Jarmo, this last part was actually a bit sarcastic, because … well, as it turns out Civ5 actually comes with its own set of flaws. (I only got my copy yesterday, so I cannot say too much about it yet.)

rezaf

5718

The people who find the subject matter of Civilization too mundane but would still like to virtually conquer the world? The Bavmordas instead of the Lukashenkos?

5719

Well, I just learned something.

?

5720

Link?

edit: Nevermind - found it…

that has to be wrong - but…I guess not - strange I never heard of it