Frogboy

[quote who="TCores" reply="7" id="2637441"]It sounds like "what's in" and "what's for post-release," has started to get nailed down. Can you let us know what things have slipped to post release besides flying combat monsters?[/quote] I wouldn't count on flying combat monsters any time soon (they're not something that slipped, we just never envisioned having a world with flying horses or whatever). But I'll definitely let you know of things that are going to be put i

[quote who="cephalo" reply="34" id="2637352"] Quoting Anomander, reply 32Noooooooooooooooo lets leave the clutter out! I want great forest expanses, plains and mountains. Not a Fantasy theme park! Uh, maybe I'm just projecting my own preferences, but I think most of us definately want the fantasy theme park! I think that part of the map emptiness comes from the fact that terrain types don't really exist. You have mountain, forest and open land. With more terra

Probably won't be in at release but we'll definitely put it on our list. :)

[quote who="dsk2293" reply="61" id="2636492"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 57The graphics style is something we very much like. Obviously not everyone will agree but those screenshots are pretty representative of what the final game will look like. But can't you just up the LOD a bit on the highest settings? I can live with the "style", but I'm having a hard time with the undetailed big patches of grass I see in screenshots like this. Why can't it be more like in t

The graphics style is something we very much like. Obviously not everyone will agree but those screenshots are pretty representative of what the final game will look like.

Starcraft 2.

[quote who="Lord Cobol" reply="26" id="2635792"]"the 2 GB limit for 32 bits Windows?" Actually 4gb total. So 2gb is the effective limit for system ram only if you have a 2gb graphics card. Example: I'm currently 3gb system and 512mb graphics. Works fine. Plan to buy a new rig for Elemental, but wait for it to come out and then ask lots of questions before I decide what to spend my $ on.[/quote] If you have Windows, it's 2GB. The OS reserv

[quote]Engines have supported view-distances and detail-scaling for over 7 years now; What is "Kumquat" doing differently from these past engines?[/quote] If you can think of an engine that has the ability to selectively remove sub-objects from a model on the fly like shown in the screenshots let me know.

[quote who="OMG_Splitshadow" reply="59" id="2635478"] The AI in our games is only as good as I am. This really isn't true. I hear this all the time from programmers. You're programming AI that can do a mind boggling amount calculations per second. AI can be very good in TBS games given enough time. Also, if you're programming the game, you should know all the tricks and what is most effective, so you *can* make it much better. People can ma

[quote who="the_neurologist" reply="15" id="2635445"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 14 Quoting harpo99999, reply 13will there be a 64 bit version? if yes, then I am going to go and rob some banks harpo Yes but not necessarily at release day. Will we be able to upgrade our game for free to 64-bit, assuming the 64-bit version is released later?[/quote] Yes.

[quote who="harpo99999" reply="13" id="2635403"]will there be a 64 bit version? if yes, then I am going to go and rob some banks harpo [/quote] Yes but not necessarily at release day.

[quote who="Ephafn" reply="8" id="2635355"] Because Kumquat is a PC-only graphics engine, it can make a different set of trade offs than the traditional cross-platform engine. Namely, it can assume players have a considerable amount of memory (1 gigabyte is the minimum total system memory to play a Kumquat based game – very little on a PC but twice what a current generation console has). Thus, a given game object can be made up of many sub-objects (which use more memory) but can b

[quote who="Strumpetplaya" reply="8" id="2635322"]Are these people, such as Viy and Myriam, randomly generated each game?[/quote] No. Which NPCs are in a given game is randomly decided but we don't randomly generate them. Each character appears in the Hiergamenon.

[quote who="kyogre12" reply="2" id="2635300"]Is a +2 bonus to research big or small? How many research points per turn is a lot? Assuming +2 is small, will there be NPC's that give bigger bonuses later in the game?[/quote] You'll just have to play. :)

There are certain technologies that are extremely rare (gray techs) or can only be learned from NPCs. Most people won't encounter all the techs in the game for months of playing (and really, probably years since we plan to keep adding more techs after release with updates and not tell anyone).

As the XML makes clear (I think anyway) the AI doesn't cheat at Normal or Challenging. At below that, the human player gets bonuses and above that the AI gets bonuses. My job is to make the AI at Normal or Challenging as intelligent as I can.

In Elemental, in my testing of pre-beta 2, there's a real question of whether you necessarily need to build a city right away because the NPCs are pretty important.

[quote]Its funny how these devs are like oh ya you can run this game on a netbook. But on a console where you can play games with graphics 10xs better than Elementals and has realistic physics and shadowing, that 512mb ram wont work... ok.[/quote] It comes down to three things: RAM RAM RAM. Consoles can produce great graphics, great performance and great physics because they have very specialized processors that handle that. But they can't store

[quote who="TCores" reply="10" id="2632479"] So these things in the tile aren't just animations but are "real" monsters/units that can interact with things outside of their tile?[/quote] The tile can be whatever you want it to be. I can either use a pre-defined tile ("This is an ogre") or I can create my own custom tile (seen here) and then I use XML to describe what happens (is it a creature, what kind of creature is it, how strong it is). I can also apply tr

[quote who="TatertotEatalot" reply="2" id="2632412"]I'm hoping for expansions. This looks really cool though.[/quote] Yea, the expansions we would do for Elemental would be well beyond new "content". There's a lot of directions we can take but we'll wait to see what customers want us to focus our time on before making any definite plans. I don't want to overhype here but in my 15+ years of game development, I've never worked on anythin

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="3" id="2632421"] quoting post There will be plenty of expansion packs for Elemental in the years ahead. Hmm Beta 4 around July... that's quite near in time.[/quote] Yea, it's largely a (ack) marketing things since the modding tools were the first thing actually finished (i.e. they're how we put content into the game and have been for the past two years).

[quote who="TCores" reply="1" id="2632409"]Two questions: Will you be doing expansions or microexpansions? Is the same tile editor we've seen screenshots of for editing city-built tiles? I see you're able to drop in critters straight into the tile: can you set animations for them, can you give them waypoints? Are they actual units or just animated additions? Are they scriptable? [/quote] 1. No micro expansions this time. Only full blown ex

[quote who="Climber" reply="267" id="2632241"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 251I can say post release I'm interested in putting in WEGO and letting people try out the RTS system we put in too. Regardless, I want to write a free Myth-like mod for fun. Thank you! the +1 karma worked on Frogboy too! I've no idea what I've posted at page 9 is called WE-GO; I did played MOO2 ( what a shame, lol). Is there a chance that a heavily turn-based-ish WEGO sys