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.

 

 

 

 

123,028 views 72 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Nice! :thumbsup:

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Sweeeeeet :) Can't freaking wait!!!

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top

I want to know what these mainstream fools actually think of it...

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

P.S. Hey Brad, you didn't forget to give Morgan my phone number did you?

hehe

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

The end of the line is almost upon us. Hope I get more free time to play Elemental after launch.

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Wintersong, reply 24
I hope that the Empire Tree is called Kingdom Tree when I'm playing as such. Just saying.

Any news about super duper edition with "The Book" included? Anything that saves me from another extra shipping from the USA would be most welcome. Specially if it really has "extra stuff" for buying "The Book".
End of Wintersong's quote

Hi Wintersong,

On the uk amazon site it is listed and I managed to order it but they have since updated the page to say currently unavailable. It may be that the book gets a local release as it's published by Del Rey Books, I'll let you know if my pre-order gets processed or canceled as soon as I get confirmation.

Amazon uk link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Elemental-Destinys-Embers-Brad-Wardell/dp/0345517865/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1281010918&sr=1-3

Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

Love the idea for expanding the Diplomacy tree! Very neat :-). Most excited to see the changes. Any chances of some sshots of the new UI? :) :P. Also... to repeat everybody else... any chance of us seeing Beta 5? Pretty please? After all the good work the community has done? :-) :P :P

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

Cant wait for release!!!

Reply #34 from Elemental Forums Top

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!  :D

Reply #35 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

 

Ok see now you have done it... where can i buy a Elemental:War of Magic  coffee mug damn it.. If ya don't have them yet get on the stick.

:w00t:

Reply #36 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

Pic or it didn't happen? :P

Reply #37 from Elemental Forums Top

Pic or it didn't happen?
End of quote
  Where's the trust gone, Anny?!  :(   Oh, and yeah, still lots of UI stuff to come!!!

Reply #38 from Elemental Forums Top

:D I was just trying to get a picture of the boxes ;)

Reply #39 from Elemental Forums Top

UI! WHERE!? :grin: O:)

Reply #40 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting SpaghettiMon, reply 11
As much as I would like beta 5, I think that one reason we won't is that they would have to waste time to diverge the code tree and make a build for us. I think Beta for us is pretty much over, but I could be wrong.
End of SpaghettiMon's quote

I don't see how it would be a waste of time when the beta testers could help make the day 0 patch more polished. 

Reply #41 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

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

Reply #42 from Elemental Forums Top

The public beta phase is over. We're on to release. :)

Reply #43 from Elemental Forums Top

bah i missed beta by 2 days so those of you playing beta :P :)

Reply #45 from Elemental Forums Top

Lot of great news, particularly glad to hear about:

-Spell cast speed determined by wisdom: very nice, sounds like two problems just got fixed at once (lack of use for wisdom+too many spells per combat turn), if the balance works out right.

-Spell power scaling with shards you control, yes yes! Suggested this once or twice myself (as did many others I'm sure, just glad to see it happen).

-Recruiting new races through diplomacy - awesome, practical benefits to diplomacy! Now if you can buy them over with diplomatic capital, or use DC to train the units, it'll be even better, but either way can't wait to see how this plays out.

 

Question for Stardockians, now that the 'public beta phase' is over - how much influence did the beta testers have on all these great Beta 4 -> 5 changes? I know I recognize several tester recommendations on the list, curious how much more of our feedback is included amongst the "too many changes to list."

Reply #46 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 44
ANNATAR!!! Here's you friggin proof.. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6311359/Mobile%20Photo%20Aug%205%2C%202010%204%2027%2033%20PM.jpg

..I'm holding the LE edition. I'm swimming in your jealousy  
End of BoogieBac's quote

RELEASE THE SKATHS.

Reply #47 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 44
ANNATAR!!! Here's you friggin proof.. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6311359/Mobile%20Photo%20Aug%205%2C%202010%204%2027%2033%20PM.jpg

..I'm holding the LE edition. I'm swimming in your jealousy  
End of BoogieBac's quote

Not just his jealousy. You're swimming in mine too:P

Reply #48 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting leeboy26, reply 46

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 44ANNATAR!!! Here's you friggin proof.. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6311359/Mobile%20Photo%20Aug%205%2C%202010%204%2027%2033%20PM.jpg

..I'm holding the LE edition. I'm swimming in your jealousy  


RELEASE THE SKATHS.
End of leeboy26's quote

Heh. I like your style!

Reply #49 from Elemental Forums Top

What jealousy? I preordered the LE! :P Thanks for the pic, Boogie :)

Reply #50 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Annatar11, reply 49
What jealousy? I preordered the LE! Thanks for the pic, Boogie
End of Annatar11's quote

But do you have it in your hands yet? I don't think even you are that good:P (I pre-ordered the LE, too).