Let's talk about kumquat, and a few other things

and I'm not referring to fruit

After seeing the molyneux-esque development and release, and playing the game myself, I started to wonder what happened between some of the dev journals, the actual development and some of the reasoning behind different decisions.

First and foremost is the Kumquat graphics engine, now I'm not sure what it features, how it runs or the like (I'd love to know however, graphics are a big interest of mine) but it seems to me that it has been at the forefront of some of the most crippling bugs the game has experienced. What I'm wondering is, did anyone consider looking into OGRE (Torchlight used it)? It's an established, open source engine available on the MIT license. Not only would this have cut development costs/time in the graphics area, but it has already been extensively tested on a broad range of machines meaning it's stable across numerous hardware configurations. Since it's open source the sub-model culling method could be introduced fairly easily, and from what I understand the latest release uses the size of an object on screen to determine LOD rather than the typical distance from camera.

Another thing is, what happened to the lighting? There was this thread a while back, and I can't help but notice things have gone... backwards. Are you guys still planning to use lighting at all or are we going to be stuck with the civ style blanket light? Another point here is particle effects and custom tiles, could we place our own lights on these? As for the world map and such, a simple day/night cycle would be rather nice. Lighting is a major element of polishing and for a magic based game to not have cool lighting and lighting effects is really lax.

APIs are another point, and I've already posted elsewhere asking what APIs will be available to the unwashed masses. Now I understand the benefits of using python and for most purposes it's fine since it would only be called occasionally. However, and as I mentioned in that post, I'm keen to modify elements of the game that a python interface would be completely unsuitable for (e.g. the tactical battle system). My native tongue is C++, english being my second language after that, and I know that C/C++ would do the jobs too dirty for python.

Speaking of which, how modular is the Kumquat engine itself? Can pieces simply be plugged in at will? If not, modularity would be something worth aiming for, for numerous reasons, notably the ease with which different parts of the code could be tested and new ideas implemented.

This also brings me to the tactical battles, which are something of a pain point currently. I don't understand what the logic was behind the move from continuous battles with thousands of units to a turn based system that features tens of units and is incredibly underwhelming. It seems that it was no steps forward and ten years worth of steps back, from the dev journals it was said that this was to improve player control over the battles, however I have to ask, what about tactical pausing? Similar to the system used by Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate to name a few. This would have given the player just as much control as the turn based system gives, while still retaining a truly epic feeling, right now it seems more like Elemental:scuffle of Magic rather than Elemental: WAR of Magic.

Another thing I've noticed is the use of the Miles sound system, a rather expensive investment for a game that suffers from extremely poor sound design. As a comparison, the Unreal Engine utilises OpenAL, a free system which has been proven by the games that use it to be just as capable as any paid system. Speaking of free, when there are resources such as the free sound project, there is very little excuse for such atrocious sound work.

Fiachna out.

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Let's talk about Kumquat first. If I recall correctly, Kumquat was designed originally for another game, Society, an MMOG that was being developed and talked about since GC2 was released 4 years ago. If I recall correctly, the custom tile design was a major selling point (it was developed due to GC2's ship design popularity). Somewhere along the way, they decided that they could also use it to develop Elemental. I'm not 100% sure on the decisions behind it, but I assume it was because Society wasn't anywhere ready as a game. Still, they had the framework in place and wanted to put it to use. Now, you might argue that the engine was flawed and not quite ready at release, but I don't think it caused any significant development cost/time since it was available already. If anything, it was because they thought Kumquat was SO ready that probably caused them the major headaches at Elemental's release. Besides, the custom tile design was put to great use and probably saved them a lot of time overall.

As for lighting... I'm not sure how capable Kumquat is at this on a technical standpoint. However, on a gameplay standpoint, this doesn't seem too essential. Elemental is played in turns, which represents weeks, or maybe even months (depending on speed setting). A daylight cycle, while nice, makes very little sense. As for custom lighting in tiles, this makes the tiles much more complex than needed, and will only end up making creating custom tiles too hard for many people. More importantly, it also brings a host of performance issues, like how to scale back the lighting effect when you zoom out and see thousand of tiles. It would be virtually impossible to pull any sort of decent frame rate on a typical rig with thousands of custom lights. This, I suspect, is the major reason why lighting is so simplistic.

For API and modular abilities, I have no comment. Although it would be nice...

On another hand, tactical combat is completely different from those pausable continuous battlescapes that you seem to desire. Tactical combat focuses on making informed decisions and strategies, it emphasizes thinking ahead and predicting an enemy's movement, that's why it plays out in turns (like a game of chess). Where as pausable combat emphasizes paying attention and reaction. There's nothing wrong with either, but one is definitely not a "step backward" of the other. You simply like one more than another, and someone else will be the opposite, it's just a matter of taste. As for the scope (number of people involved), this is also a matter of taste. Elemental simply wants to emphasize the importance of a person. You might love how you are able to fight and kill thousands, another person respects that one person is important and valuable. If it makes you feel better imagine that each "person" represents 100 or 1000 people.

I have no experience with sounds. I think Elemental sounds fine, but more because I usually turn the sound WAAAAAY down. When you play a game for many hours, sounds, no matter how great, becomes extremely annoying more than anything else.

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I think I was misunderstood in the first paragraph, a tile system you mention is seperate from a graphics engine, OGRE itself is just a graphics engine, everything else could still be plugged into it.

Also on lighting I would have to say that I disagree there, gameplay is enhanced by lighting in the same way that it is enhanced by shaders, it helps to improve the immersion, as for number of lights, this wouldn't be much of a performance issue since they are generally all batched together, where it would become a performance issue would be if multiple lights affected the same objects (UE3 only allows one light source to affect an object at any one time for instance). When all objects are only affected by their nearest light source everything can be batched together, meaning the performance difference is almost nothing.

Also with tactical combat, by continuous combat I was meaning similar to that of the Total War series, in which there is as much thinking ahead and predicting an enemy's movement as there is in turn based, probably more since movement isn't defined to distinct tiles. Turn based systems are simply tactical pausing systems with forced pausing at set intervals. As for numbers however, you're correct in that aspect, however as for imagining each person represents x people, it kills the immersion. Whilst it wouldn't be so much a problem if everything ran at the cloth map level, where units are represented by icons, when the units are distinctly a single person, with associated animations and combat mechanics it simply doesn't gel with the old brain.

Also with the sounds, sound quality is fine, however I know that the Miles sound system costs $4000 per title per platform, whereas openAL is free, full stop, the sums do themselves. What I meant by the sound design is the general lack of sound effects, be it the generic monster sounds that are shared by almost everything, the human units that sound like they were ripped right out of the first Age of Empires or the uninspiring and oft grating music (seriously, instrument packs, I was already sick of hearing that generic string synth in the mid 90s). There are games out there with fantastic sound design that I could listen to for hours (Ground Control II being the one that springs first to mind).

Hopefully that helps to clarify my earlier post

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I didn't mean to suggest that the tile system was part of the engine. Rather, I was simply trying to point out that they had the engine and pieces for it in place before Elemental went into development. To me, it would seem stranger to go out and use a new engine when you had one of your own (that you thought was ready).

As for lighting, as someone with some experience with 3D rendering, I'm sure it could improve immersion and feel for a game. However, when it comes to Elemental, I find myself playing in cloth map mode like 70% of the time (it was the same with GC2 actually). I have a pretty good rig (quad core i7, 8 gig ram, ATI 5870) so I don't have the frame rate issues that others have reported, so I certainly don't HAVE to. As such, I don't see lighting as a big deal overall, I hope you can understand.

As for the tactical combat and turn base vs continuous. I'm not sure you can make that argument that it's the same with forced pauses. While it might certain seem like that in some respect, the emphasis is still different IMO. Take for example the usage of special skills with limited use, in turn base you are given time to survey the field, plan and use them when they are most effective, where as in a continuous model you tend to use them whenever they seem needed. I'm not saying that continuous is bad, but the balancing and feel is just different. Still, it's a bit of a moot point since I doubt that it would be changeable at this stage, that kind of thing has to be decided at the design stage. The only thing we can hope for is for Elemental to improve its current system (because it has a quite a way to go).

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The continuous system is partially there and could be developed and implemented by a group of modders. There are a few here that have expressed interest in making it work. I for one enjoy long thought out decisions at every turn and would not really like to rushed by a continuous feature.

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