Frogboy Frogboy

Last day in CA

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Last day in CA

from JoeUser Forums

Today’s my last day in California. In the next few days, the previews should start showing up at which point I’ll be free to tell you about the fairly massive changes to the game between Beta 4 (the public build) and Beta 5 (current build) as well as what’s coming up for release.

The high level changes are:

  • The finalized Game UI
    • The finalized Empire Tree (ala Sins of a Solar Empire)
    • Finalized City and Unit UI
    • Finalized Tactical Battle UI
    • Finalized Font Display (i.e. the replacement of the placeholder fonts with the final game fonts)
  • The Finalized Technology Tree
    • Civilization, Warfare techs are fairly similar to what they are now except there’s a few more of them.
    • Adventure allows players to uncover rare resources, world awareness, and a number of other things.
    • Diplomacy uncovers various levels of recruitable units that you can train – i.e. make friends with special races that you can then train at associated settlement.
    • Magic tree lets players magnify the power of their spells if they have the appropriate shard (i.e. Morrigan’s Hammer does N damage normally but if you control an earth shard it does 2N damage, Maelstrom will do 1 tile of harm normally but do N radius out for every air shard you control. Moreover, the Magic tree will allow players to discover the special abilities within their own champions beyond their inherent ones i.e. You’ll be able to see what they are in NPCs as well as your existing ones suddenly discovering theirs).
    • Zillions of other tweaks and refinements.
    • Random House descriptions replacing placeholder text.
  • The Finalized Tactical Battle System
    • Number of Action points a spell takes to cast is based on the caster’s wisdom.
    • Tons of other changes too long to list.
  • The Final Quest and Notification System implemented
    • Basically nearly all the quests and notable locations from the beta are gone, replaced with the final ones we’ve been working on.
  • Hundreds of other game play tweaks and changes.
  • And of course bug fixes galore, especially on memory (this got fixed in beta 5, I was quite concerned on this one, but thanks to users helping us, we were able to track this down to our effects system not deallocating properly and on certain newer ATI cards on 64-bit windows it could lose 100 megabytes per turn).
  • The Campaign which is made entirely with the mod tools.

So in the next week or so the “gold” version will go out to manufacturing and then we’ll spend the subsequent 2 weeks polishing and enhancing for the release version that will go to users and reviewers.

I’ll go into more detail on these things in about a week. In the meantime, I’ll get back to the mods and such when I have a chance.

 

 

 

 

123,033 views 72 replies
Reply #51 from Elemental Forums Top

Nope, but nobody should want the game out of that box, 'cause of the day0 patch. And goodies are nice, but game > goodies.

Reply #52 from Elemental Forums Top

Do the new screenshots feature the new gui?

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #53 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting zigzag, reply 52
Do the new screenshots feature the new gui?
End of zigzag's quote

The latest video posted by Island Dog does. It's from Gamerstrailers. It shows some nice polish on the UI that I can see, particularly in the Sov's status on the lower left hand side. Frogboy's playing on a HUGE map and it looks stable too.

Reply #54 from Elemental Forums Top
Quoting Raven, reply 41

That's it...I want an Elemental Coffee Mug!!!! Ship it Boogie!!!

End of Raven's quote

 

Yeah, me too - I'd wear that mug out.

Reply #55 from Elemental Forums Top

Does that mean we still get to play Beta 5 and you're just not accepting any new beta participants or does that mean even those of us that have played through the earlier betas are out of luck too?

Reply #56 from Elemental Forums Top

Public beta is over, we're not going to be getting any more builds.

Reply #57 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Trojasmic, reply 55
Does that mean we still get to play Beta 5 and you're just not accepting any new beta participants or does that mean even those of us that have played through the earlier betas are out of luck too?
End of Trojasmic's quote

No more builds. However, could we get some more SSes of Improvements/Spells, Brad :}.

Reply #59 from Elemental Forums Top

Our demos come after release and the first updates. That time's better spent on making the real game better.

Reply #60 from Elemental Forums Top

Those boxes look great, all the better to protect my map!  Hey, if you guys are going into the coffee mug business, I'll snag a few, coffee happens to be my favorite vice!

Reply #61 from Elemental Forums Top

And of course bug fixes galore, especially on memory (this got fixed in beta 5, I was quite concerned on this one, but thanks to users helping us, we were able to track this down to our effects system not deallocating properly and on certain newer ATI cards on 64-bit windows it could lose 100 megabytes per turn).


End of quote

Question, you seem to indecat the problem was with ATI cards, any ieads on the issues us NVIDA cards where having with memmory leaks, I havent been playing since I posted in after your request for info on memory leaks, was it found?

Reply #62 from Elemental Forums Top

There was a smaller universal issue related to the havok animations. The ATI/x64 one was much, much bigger.

Reply #63 from Elemental Forums Top

I am so unbelievably excited. I am now confident that the gold version is going to kick some ass! xD

I feel even MORE  compelled to try for an SMT mod now :)

 

Reply #64 from Elemental Forums Top


The Finalized Technology Tree Civilization, Warfare techs are fairly similar to what they are now except there’s a few more of them.
End of quote

You guys said something about rare (grey) techs which you would get acces to occasionally if I remember correctly. Are they still in?

Reply #65 from Elemental Forums Top

I still think that "rare" techs should be gold. Or gold and silver (borders/stripes).

 

Or just have each rare tech with its own wallpapery coloration (perhaps theme-savvy) ... like for a death tech to be black with bone-white decorum, some holy tech to be silver w/ golden borders .. and for some other tech to be deep purple with bright green dots. Or some oblivion tech to be dark brown with blood-red skulls.

Reply #66 from Sins Forums Top

kyro if you are going into the mug business, why not try some BEER mugs about 1 litre in size.

harpo

 

Reply #67 from Elemental Forums Top

BLeh..

Reply #68 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting kryo, reply 62
There was a smaller universal issue related to the havok animations. The ATI/x64 one was much, much bigger.
End of kryo's quote

 

Excelent, so long as it was caught, thanks.

Reply #69 from Elemental Forums Top

So I have absolutely no way of knowing if I'll even be able to start up the game since it hasn't started in multiple betas in a row. I'm going to have to seriously consider just canceling my preorder to be safe.

Reply #70 from Elemental Forums Top

Well I just got Mount and Blade Warbands this weekend. I think that will hold me over until that magical day comes when Elemental finally comes out. But then once Elemental comes out on the 24th poor Mount and Blade will go to the selve to collect dust.

Reply #71 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 34
Just got to hold the final version of the boxes....the LE box is NUTS (5-6 inches WIDE...we could have put in a elemental coffee mug or something), and even the regular box is pretty damn slick.  Very exciting! 
End of BoogieBac's quote

Have a question, which box set will have the novel in it that the campaign is based on?

Reply #72 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Bellack, reply 71



Quoting BoogieBac,
reply 34
Just got to hold the final version of the boxes....the LE box is NUTS (5-6 inches WIDE...we could have put in a elemental coffee mug or something), and even the regular box is pretty damn slick.  Very exciting! 



Have a question, which box set will have the novel in it that the campaign is based on?
End of Bellack's quote

Neither. You have to buy the book seperately.