Elemental all-purpose thread

Mitya · 2010-07-28T08:42:34.000Z

#8 MASSIVE pass on cloth map performance to make sure the game runs on Netbooks.

Lovely! I was starting to get a bit nervous about it working perfectly on my laptop (tac battles drove it to a halt, I know it has yet to be optimized but it still made me nervous), now I can stop worrying.

Island_Dog · 2010-07-28T11:34:42.000Z

Buceph:

I don’t know if this is news here, I haven’t been following this megathread, but I am interested in the game.

On another forum, someone working for Stardock confirmed there will be a demo released after launch.

Like I said, this may only be news to me, but I thought I’d share just in case.

Yes, a demo will be sometime after launch.

Tyjenks · 2010-07-28T11:35:31.000Z

Island Dog:

Yes, a demo will be sometime after launch.

I read that as “after lunch”.

Mrenda · 2010-07-28T11:55:55.000Z

Island Dog:

Yes, a demo will be sometime after launch.

It was your post over on PCGF that I was referring to.

Island_Dog · 2010-07-29T08:16:35.000Z

Tyjenks:

I read that as “after lunch”.

Mmmm…lunch…

Pentadact · 2010-07-29T09:38:48.000Z

Can’t wait to see how the AI is in Beta 4. The notes with 3C said it was currently ‘awful’, but I didn’t see it mentioned much in the Beta 4 preview. Hopefully it’s just a given - I want to get my ass kicked.

KevinC · 2010-07-29T09:59:31.000Z

That brings up an interesting point. How much new “gameplay” stuff, including game design tweaks, AI tweaks, etc are we going to even see in Beta 4? It was said that the Beta 4 branch is going on to become the Day 0 version we all see, but does that mean that we’ll actually see these improvements?

I ask because I know 3C was described as the last “Game” beta and that this one was focused mostly on modding tools.

Jorn_Weines · 2010-07-29T10:35:22.000Z

Looks like Beta 4 is available now (Well, it says “Preparing download…” in Impulse). Also a journal entry on modding.

TurinTur · 2010-07-29T12:13:53.000Z

I was going to check the improved tactical battles… and surprise! they don’t work! I press “Battle!” but it doesn’t do anything.

Sepiche · 2010-07-29T12:18:22.000Z

Naeblis:

I was going to check the improved tactical battles… and surprise! they don’t work! I press “Battle!” but it doesn’t do anything.

Does it do nothing at all, or is it doing an autoresolve?

IIRC there’s an option that sets the minimum number of units that have to be present before it goes to tactical battles instead of autoresolving.

Jarrodhk · 2010-07-29T12:20:59.000Z

Journal entry says there will be another update to add some missing files.

TurinTur · 2010-07-29T12:43:18.000Z

Sepiche:

Does it do nothing at all, or is it doing an autoresolve?

IIRC there’s an option that sets the minimum number of units that have to be present before it goes to tactical battles instead of autoresolving.

Nothing.

I already know about the option of autoresolving threshold, it was a fight with 9 units.

Brad_Wardell · 2010-07-29T16:39:54.000Z

Yea, the tactical maps weren’t included in the first beta update.

Reupadate and it should be fine.

Pentadact · 2010-07-30T00:35:52.000Z

Aw, I’m actually having worse stability issues with the new beta. Before I had a lot of graphical glitches, but it was rare to crash in-game. Now, I can’t seem to get 50 turns without it totally freezing up at the end of a turn, and corrupting my latest autosave (gets stuck on ‘creating world’ when I try to load). I have to do a hard reset to even get back to the OS.

Sepiche · 2010-07-30T07:21:13.000Z

Yeah, I only had a chance to play for a few minutes last night, but I’m pretty disappointed that most of my long standing graphics bugs still aren’t fixed. Among other things, the cloth map still shows up black to me with everything drawn on that black background, and I still have to turn off the lighting option to get the unit card portraits to show up.

The gameplay keeps moving forward at a good pace, but once again it’s the bugs that still remain I’m most concerned about.

Razgon · 2010-07-30T07:25:45.000Z

I’m not really concerned about bugs - those will be ironed out i have no doubt. I’m really more concerned about gameplay and UI at this point, and the fact that the game ships really, really soon.

RepoMan · 2010-07-30T11:12:54.000Z

Less concerns, please! At this point I am going to wait until the reviews are good, whether that is at ship or sometime thereafter. (Yes, I installed it but I never got around to launching it, and now Torchlight’s hooked me.)

Brad_Wardell · 2010-07-30T14:15:17.000Z

Sepiche:

Yeah, I only had a chance to play for a few minutes last night, but I’m pretty disappointed that most of my long standing graphics bugs still aren’t fixed. Among other things, the cloth map still shows up black to me with everything drawn on that black background, and I still have to turn off the lighting option to get the unit card portraits to show up.

The gameplay keeps moving forward at a good pace, but once again it’s the bugs that still remain I’m most concerned about.

Make sure you’re sending in bug reports as that sounds like a graphics card compatibility.

Brad_Wardell · 2010-07-30T14:17:05.000Z

Pentadact:

Aw, I’m actually having worse stability issues with the new beta. Before I had a lot of graphical glitches, but it was rare to crash in-game. Now, I can’t seem to get 50 turns without it totally freezing up at the end of a turn, and corrupting my latest autosave (gets stuck on ‘creating world’ when I try to load). I have to do a hard reset to even get back to the OS.

That’s pretty bad. Yea, please make sure to send any dump files to us (programdata\stardock\elemental). The game should be pretty stable universally at this point.

There is, however, a rather nasty memory leak we’re trying to track down. And I mean like 100 megabytes per turn. Something triggers it and it seems to be user specific which means they’re doing something we didn’t account for or there’s some hardware compatibility issue we didn’t account for. In either case, it needs to be addressed before the game ships.

Mysterio · 2010-07-30T16:11:38.000Z

Brad Wardell:

There is, however, a rather nasty memory leak we’re trying to track down. And I mean like 100 megabytes per turn. Something triggers it and it seems to be user specific which means they’re doing something we didn’t account for or there’s some hardware compatibility issue we didn’t account for. In either case, it needs to be addressed before the game ships.

I played Beta 4 with the Steam overlay last night (added it to my Library as a non-Steam game and launched it from the Library). When I quit the game, after having played for 90 minutes or so, the game closed, yet the Steam overlay said I was still playing the game and the ambient sound effects from the game were still playing. This lasted for over 1 minute while my HD was cranking away (I have 4 GB of system memory under 64-bit Win7). It was very weird, and I’ve never had a game do this.