1.09n - some recent crashes

Same deal here, just crashes over and over. This beta 1.1 is worse by far. This game has not seen one stable release yet. There is no way this thing will be in an acceptable state for 1.1. The engine and the game are plain garbage. I honestly do no think Stardock has the technical knowhow to fix this game.

I will not pass judgment till the official release of 1.1, but I already know they are going to release 1.1 in an unstable state. I have very little confidence that it will be fixed.

thanks Cynjian!  here's hoping that all of your crashes are the same as my crashes so i don't have to post them here.

Actually I believe that they will eventually fix the issues with the game. Besides stability the game is tremendously better that it was at launch and its getting better as the months pass by.

Beta?  A beta version is allowed to have more bugs.  I don't think the final 1.10 will have a huge number of bugs.

Best regards,
Steven.

Well Steven, this game has been Beta past it's official release date so we are starting to enter into uncharted waters here. I do not share your optimism with the game being stable in 1.10. Every patch I check for stability fixes, every time it crashes the same amount. It seems like the same issues are plaguing this game patch after patch.

With this NEW beta I see even more crashing, I can't even really bother myself to boot it up anymore it crashes so much. From the previous version this beta has gotten even worse in terms of stability, to think this will all be fixed with the next 1.10 patch is beyond optimistic,

Like I said I'll give Stardock it's second Beta(after I purchased the game), but after that I am not going to be too kind. We are getting to a point where it is getting absurd. I hope I am wrong and this 1.10 patch is a miracle....but if you have been following game development with developers, like waiitng for a game, you would know that the miracles never happen and usually it's a delay in release or a dissapointing release.

So it would be safer to predict a delayed 1.10 or a unstable bug ridden game in 1.10...the miracle patch is very very unlikely. But I would love to be wrong of course.

There is no guarantee that there will be only one more 1.10 beta patch.   I did not say that I though it would all be hunky-dory with one more beta patch.  I think if 1.10 needed longer it would get more beta patch/es after the next one, before the final 1.10, after all, 1.10 is very important to win people back.  Anyway, it is quite likely that not 100% of all issues will be fixed, but there is a lot riding on a good, stable 1.10 and I think Stardock would go for a longer beta period rather than release a 1.10 that reminded a lot of people of the release.

What I suggest is, rather than you continually being disappointed, give Elemental a break for a while.  It may be better when you come back and it may not.  But there are plenty of other good games that you can play that would not cause angst, and maybe the biggest Elemental problems will be worked out if you wait a few months.

It is possible to be positive and practical at the same time.   But that does not always show in my every post.

Best regards,
Steven.

Outstanding.

I was able to address a few of these.

Basically, there are two big ones caused by the new threading AI.

First, Unit::GetIntelligence() is called by the AI a lot for things like seeing how different creatures should behave (you can tell the wolf has a bad intelligence XML because it will attempt to "talk" to you).

Anyway, that call involves a lot of stuff that gets touched by other threads.  So I've created a new fuctnion called Unit::QueryIntelligence which simply sends the last cached value of intelligence.

The other one in there is related.  It's Unit::GetBattleRank (your combat rating).  This turns out to be a pretty nasty call in terms of what it ends up touching.  So I created a QueryBattleRank which does the same thing as above -- last cached value.  Big performance boost too.

While I was in there, I redid how GetBattleRank works because the AI really relies on Combat Rating meaning something and in the current public build, it's not terribly useful as a predictor of who will win a battle.  I changed it so that it looks at the combat rating of individuals in an army differently so that it doesn't simply add them up.  I.e. 1000 peons will still get smoted by 1 dragon so the combat rating should reflect this.

Cheers!  Glad they were helpful.  

I will sort of miss the talking wolf though

I was trying to decide what might help in the combat rating category, but I'm glad your light years ahead on that.  

I'll try to compile any crashes  I get on the b.109 as well

Yea, this stuff is extremely helpful. The data in there will actually take us to the line of code (with stack) on where it crashed.

It's really amazing.  When I started programming, I had to use beeps to try to figure out what was causing a problem.  It's all come so far over the years.