Elemental all-purpose thread

[Phydeaux]

Grrr. I picked this up last night after watching you guys go on and on about it for 41 pages. Apparently the 29th was the cutoff date and beta access is closed. :(

Still pretty sure I was buying this anyway, though.

[Benhur]

Is anyone else having graphics slowdown issues? I just got a GTX 460 last week, updated to the latest drivers, and I get bad FPS on a small map, mid game with about 10 cities. Anyone else having these problems? Hopefully it just needs some more tweaking.

[KevinC]

Grrr. I picked this up last night after watching you guys go on and on about it for 41 pages. Apparently the 29th was the cutoff date and beta access is closed. :(

Still pretty sure I was buying this anyway, though.

Don’t feel bad, you really don’t want to play Stardock betas if you’re interested in either A) Fun or B) A representative experience of what the end product will look like. It’s been said many times before, but their betas really and truly are very unfun.

Release is a month away, and since you’re not in a beta, you should be able to cancel the order still if you’re so inclined.

[AaronSofaer]

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.

This is what Valgrind is for! :)

I sic’d my friend Xale on it. He’s good with this kind of thing. He’s already making funny noises.

He says there are so many warnings in the debugging information that it’s hard to read/parse. Semi-snarkily, he says you should fix your warnings so you can actually read the debug output.

Xale also asks what language it’s in. I assume/presume C?

[ShivaX]

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.

Just had the game lock up…

So where are we supposed to send these files to?

[Dan_Theman]

I believe they’re using DropBox now.

[ShivaX]

I believe they’re using DropBox now.

Well that sounds like a lot of work, especially since I have no clue what I’m doing.

[Dan_Theman]

DropBox is a pretty easy to use bit of software. Just think of it as an online storage bin, like a Facebook page with Stardock on your friends list. You just tag something to upload and they look at it. No fuss, no muss (I think I just dated myself with that phrase - ah, well).

[Island_Dog]

Well that sounds like a lot of work, especially since I have no clue what I’m doing.

You just need to grab all the needed files (debug.err, dump files, saved games, etc), place them in a .zip and upload them to Dropbox so they can be easily downloaded and checked out.

The files you need will be in:

Programdata\stardock\elemental
Documents\My Games\Elemental

You can post the link and bug description to the forums here.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/623

:)

[Mysterio]

What’s going to be better than Beta 4? What isn’t changing?

I think it’s pretty well known I don’t like Beta 4. I’m not a troll. I’m the designer. I’ll bullet point my gripes:

[ul]
[li]Casters should not get to cast spells more than 1 per turn.
[/li][li]The UI makes me cry. Clickity click click click. What’s going on?
[/li][li]Goodie huts are boooring.
[/li][li]The spells are booooring.
[/li][li]Tactical combat is boooring.
[/li][li]The spell books are confusing and make me feel violated and I’ve already consulted my attorneys about the issue. (Sorry Stardock, it’s too late already)
[/li][li]The spells are all the same and boring.
[/li][/ul]
These are the kinds of things people can expect to change by release. Technical people can tell you that this stuff is pretty trivial. Making a game is a lot like writing a term player expect that we have to program the word processor prior to actually writing the term paper. After programming the word processor, writing the term paper doesn’t seem so bad.

So we’re all here. Ready to make gaming history! Only 24 days remaining! Of course, bear in mind that Beta 4 and Beta 3C were only 7 days apart. So what I’m saying is that Elemental 1.0 on August 24th is going to be a first person shooter. Enjoy.

Good one, Brad!

[KevinC]

Yea I got a good snicker out of that finishing flourish as well, haha.

Regarding the post content, I’m glad to see that the things I found ‘meh’ are on his list as well. That at least lets me know the devs share the opinion, and it’s not things they felt were finished or fun (i.e. spell similarities, blandness of tactical battles, etc). I mean I expected that, but it’s nice to see confirmation.

Three more weeks to go… between this, Minecraft, Victoria 2 and Civ5, I’m going to be lucky to see the outdoors on occasions other than my commute to and from work.

[abrandt]

.
Three more weeks to go… between this, Minecraft, Victoria 2 and Civ5, I’m going to be lucky to see the outdoors on occasions other than my commute to and from work.

I just wanted to take the time to applaud this list of games. Why don’t I need a 360 or PS3? You just listed well over 100 hours worth of reasons.

[Jarrodhk]

I was really hoping that we’d get a look at special abilities before the release… but I haven’t noticed (doesn’t mean he hasn’t) Brad mention anything about them lately.

That’s the biggest boredom issue with the tactical battles for me right now. Well, that and since almost no one has magic except the sovereigns, magic is overpowered. The giant spiders are disturbing and all, but, no poison means they aren’t really any different than a wolf, or a brigand.

[KevinC]

I was really hoping that we’d get a look at special abilities before the release… but I haven’t noticed (doesn’t mean he hasn’t) Brad mention anything about them lately.

This was posted on July 30th under Farewell Goodie Huts:

Special Abilities

Here’s a sampling of some of the special abilities we’re putting in:

Poison Shot
Tangled Web
Vengeance
Sanctuary
Deadly Bite
Immunity
Blink
Rain of Stone
Flame Strike
Maul
Sprint
Savage Strike
Confusion
Drowning Strike
Crushing Blow
Dominate
Hurricance
Backstab
Tremor
Searing Attack
Agonizing Fear

But if you have your own special abilities you’d like to see, go ahead and post them and explain what they do. Keep in mind, the more convoluted they are, the less likely they are to go in (e.g. Moonlit Dance – if full moon, target unit has a chance of doing a special dance that causes adjacent units to mimic dance draining them of their will to live if they have an intelligence less than 8 but greater than 4).

[Dan_Theman]

Why do I want to see a special ability called “Moonlit Dance” all of a sudden?

[Dejin]

FWIW I do not like the new look of the Elemental webpage. I thought the old one looked pretty good and in any case was much better than the new one. The banner and navigation page link buttons on the new page look rather blurry to my eyes – rather like the difference between the basic lighting and advanced lighting Brad posted earlier in the journals! This makes them a tad harder to read and just rather uncomfortable to look at in general.

[Dave_Markell]

I love the list of special abilities. Brad’s clearly taken the “Elemental needs more magical flavor” comments seriously. Not that I’ve made any–I’ve deliberately avoided the beta to avoid spoiling what I hope is the Christmas-morning feel of release day.

[KevinC]

FWIW I do not like the new look of the Elemental webpage. I thought the old one looked pretty good and in any case was much better than the new one. The banner and navigation page link buttons on the new page look rather blurry to my eyes – rather like the difference between the basic lighting and advanced lighting Brad posted earlier in the journals! This makes them a tad harder to read and just rather uncomfortable to look at in general.

This is the reason I’m glad I’m not an artist/graphical designer, because I really love the new page. It’s slick!

That’s gotta be tough, what’s good for one person is bad for another, and it’s all about personal taste.

[Dejin]

This is the reason I’m glad I’m not an artist/graphical designer, because I really love the new page. It’s slick!

That’s gotta be tough, what’s good for one person is bad for another, and it’s all about personal taste.

True, true. That’s why I added the FWIW (which may very well be nothing). But I figure feedback for Brad is always good. If a bunch of us don’t like it, then it might be worth sharpening up that font. If it’s only me then whatever, he should leave it.

[Razgon]

Man the new color scheme is bad at the forums…and the logo is sitting on top of the top menu as well in IE7 which I use at work… oh well, one less forum to browse.

I still think there is a long way to go, but I have been wrong before, and I really hope the things Brad mentions himself as issues will be resolved by august 24th. After all, I bought the CE version so I hope the game will be great as well ;-)