First.

In all seriousness though. 1.2 looks very good, I am gonna set out the beta version for the live one this time though. As my main problem lately has just been being bored while playing the game. I am really looking forward to your work on FE though. I have high hopes for that expansion. And my other free one too. But this one in particular sounds good so far.

One word.

Rivers....

Lol Tydorius. Love it

Thanks Derek for sharing these insights. Always great to read.

Or you could use the old construction axiom of: Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick two.

I like the Chinese food thing. That's good stuff!

Glad I could help. The original was actually adapted from the good cheap fast, but since in database work I was being paid hourly and they were more worried about time since that encompassed both cost and time, that was how it ended up being.

And since Stardock has already stated that EWOM will likely end up as a loss when they've finally made full amends and repairations, then time is the bigger issue.

That and it was an excuse to try influencing Stardock's thought process. They'll never think of Chinese the same way again! Bwahaha!

Wait, does that mean that when I finish college and apply at Stardock I can put the Chinese pyramid on my resume?

Resources, time, and money all fall generally under the same category. I know I'm replying a lot here but I chugged a monster and I have another twenty minutes before I leave for work.

But time is not an issue for the company - They'll spend years on this project if they can, but it's an issue for us. For all Brad is concerned, they could just sit behind closed doors for a year and then spit out a single massive update that gives us everything we want. But we wouldn't sit around waiting for it. So they do these incremental updates.

Money wise, with the bad launch in 2010, Brad has still increased the size of the initial team and stated that this would be viewed as a loss, but they are making every effort to repair their reputation. So money isn't their primary concern. Thankfully the company isn't like a lot of other small game companies where each singular project has the potential to kill the company (Hellgate London, anyone?) - They do other projects that generate their main revenue.

Resource wise, they've brought in several big names in the industry over the last two months, which to me shows a commitment to stop juggling hats amongst the people they already have, to use Brad's analogy, and to make sure each role is filled by people who are specialized in that spot.

I think Elemental is well on its way. With another major patch coming out to polish things up, once the beta issues are out of the way, it seems like their next logical move is going to be to flesh out the world now that it seems to be getting stable.

I suspect that if a good chinese buffet come sinto being, the world may end. According to the Mayans it happens in 2012.

ROFL

Too funny!

Such a good question.

I have played dwarf fortress a bit, I'm ashamed to say that I can't get beyond the ascii graphics to what looks like an incredible game beyond.  But I know what you are talking about.

The rules of design ambition vs execution are true for both games.  Are true for all games (and all projects for that matter).  Dwarf fortresses most obvious place where it sacrificed features is in the graphics engine.  If you wanted beautifully rendered environments, if you wanted to see see those custom halls, if you wanted realistic animation and movement from all the creatures in the world, if you wanted to see the lighting changes from the sun setting behind the mountains.  Well, those would all be design decisions with significant implementation costs.

So its not that Dwarf Fortress isn't faced with the same project realities as everyone else.  It is a project with an ambitious design that has opted to focus in a particular area.  That design is well executed (they have done an amazing job) and they have focused on creating a complex environment.  But I promise you as they considered their design they thought through the same impact on implementation as I did above.

The other thing that is interesting about Dwarf Fortress is that it has been in development for 9 years.  That's a lot of time.

Also people underestimate how much polish costs.  It seems like the heart of the game should take 80% of your time and polish is the last 10-20%.  It's much much higher.  Some people need polish, and some people don't.  So for some all the time spent on polish may seem like a waste.

I think of that when I consider the 1.1 patch (heavy on features) and the 1.2 patch (heavy on polish).  Now 1.1 was in development for a lot longer, so its definitely the more impacting patch.  But in general some people will love 1.1, because it added features and not care much for 1.2 (if you already know where everything is improving the UI may not mean much).  Others may have been frustrated with the things 1.1 added when their were still issues like those addressed by 1.2 in the game.

3d graphics are also a huge consideration.  I often wonder if the move to 3d was good or bad for gaming.  I don't know the real numbers but I expect that an artist could make 25-50 2d monsters in the time it takes to create 1 3d monster.  Talk about implementation considerations from design decisions, the decision to go to 3d is a huge one.

Add up all your preferences as a gamer, how much do graphics matter, how much complexity can you tolerate, what systems are to simple to interest you, do you like flavor or is it worthless (we are working hard to get more flavor into Elemental, but that isn't important to some gamers), and a hundred different criteria and you will have the game that is perfect for you.  For some Dwarf Fortress falls at their personal sweet spot.  For others other criteria are more important (I need to make a "choose your dream game" survey where you fill these things out and it tells you where you fall).

I've only been working on Elemental for 3 months, so I'm the wrong person to ask about comparing its development cycle to anything.  So I can't comment on that part.  Only that in creating FE I had to consider all the features I wanted to add vs their implementation costs.  As well as if they were fun, if they were something the player would want to be focusing on, do they resonate with the rest of the game or do they distract from it, etc.  These are the same things the folks making Dwarf Fortress have to consider.

I often think that 3D is actually more efficient than 2D (provided you want animation). Yes there is a trade-off between 3D and 2D depending upon the amount of animation but when you consider that a large portion of a model's animation comes from its skeleton, then it's easy to see that animating in 3D often takes less time than having to manually draw out every frame of a 2D animation. Then you can take skins into account, where its becomes possible to very quickly create variations of a 3D model instead of having to manually re-color each frame of a 2D animation. And lastly, instead of producing huge sprite sheets that eat through memory, 3D animations are very light on the data side of things.

Honestly, in a game like Elemental, 3D is not as important a decision. I can understand 3D in games like Total War and RTS games - Anything where battles are performed in a realalistic manner and physics are involved.

Also, in very large games like Oblivion, I can understand the move because it's easier to duplicate a hundred trees with variation than to draw each individual one. Look at Baldur's Gate for example. Each background was meticulously drawn to produce a beautiful game world. But I'm sure it took hours for such a large game.

And in order to modify those games, you'd basically have to be an artist to produce anything worth playing.

Then you move to Neverwinter Nights, which was done in 3D. It is a large game as well, but is done in a tileset style that allows for extreme modability.
Then you have games like Torchlight vs. the original Diablo games. Height adds more fun and depth to the games, and depending on the game the added realism is very worth it.

So in turn based games, it's not nearly as important, but anything done in real time, I'd say it's extremely important if you're wanting anything realalistic.
Though since Elemental is in 3D, I have to ask: Would it be possible to create chunks of land that float so that the map is layered? I've yet to see a game that does something like that.

Floating citadels, flying units. Or underworld cities. I can't imagine the possibilities of having a multi-dimensional map.

Floating islands, an underworld, and even other dimensions.

With a 3D engine already in place I wonder if it'd be that hard to add a Z dimension to the map.

And if Fallen Enchantress is going to have a campaign focused around an Enchantress gone bad, it'd be an epic final battle.

Imagine a tactical battle map fought on chunks of floating rock bridged to eachother.

Or even a floating city that's mobile and can move a single space per turn.

I know, this is a bad place to be suggesting such things after the implementation talk, but still.

That's a prepackaged version of the game with a graphical tileset, some of the tougher/more annoying options (aquifers, economy) turned off, and some utilities to help out with areas of the game that don't have a powerful UI yet.

You could also get a version with just a tileset if you'd like. Here's a link for that: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=2431

If you haven't played DF to the point of FUN, you are not a PC gamer. I don't care what you did or who you are. You have merely fiddled.

Why can't you just take the time you need and instead cut down on the postsupport?