Frogboy

I 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.

Elemental could literally not be made for a console without drastically changing its design. The fact is, there is just too much stuff to fit into the limitations of a console. The reason why games are "dumbed down" for consoles is because consoles are weak. They're basically 5 year old PCs with decent video cards. I'm interested in making a strategy game that has a lot of depth to it and demonstrates what a game that has been made exclusively for the PC with an e

Given the cost (in terms of $$$) of tossing out the real-time (continuous turns/pixel based combat system) I think I can safely say that we wouldn't have made the change to tile based turn based if we didn't think it was a lot more fun. A game that tries to be all things to all people ends up being nothing to anyone.

[quote who="Campaigner" reply="132" id="2629389"]I'm glad our input improved the game TACTICAL COMBAT I'm not sure how to do it the right way since every TBS is different and thus require different rules, but I firmly believe that the attacker must get the first move. About "my side moves first" vs "speed decides who moves first" I don't know what's best....I'm not gonna pretend that I know what's best. Consider

[quote who="Polynomial" reply="36" id="2629353"] er Steam, which at least a lot of people like. Its fully featured with about everything I expect with the cost of Steam tie in. Now, I don't like Square Enix-GPG anywhere nearly as much as I did with Stardock-GPG, but Supreme Commander 2 just was a better game in terms of technical details and I think a lot of that had to do with Steam as a platform rather than the Raknet shenanigans with the multiplayer code. Stardock sor

[quote who="Polynomial" reply="32" id="2628420"] Quoting Trigeminal, reply 3Ugghhh. I hate steam because it always has to be open with the game. Why do companies use them? Wish SD would get their shit together with impulse and make it more competitive in the few features it lags in so devs could use it and we could have some real competition. I don't care who wins I just don't want the monopoly we are now seeing. First Civ V and now Kings and catles, ugghhhh

My issue with consoles presently is the 512MB limit they have. I can't remember the last game I made with 512MB (maybe in the 90s?). Even Galactic Civilizations I (not II, but I) used up around 700 meg of memory (even if it were somewhat virtual). Elemental, by contrast, I think needs around 128MB of video memory plus around 800MB of memory (real and virtual) and that's a minimum. Now, on a PC, that's trivial. But on a console, we'd be cutting things o

Game runs fine on 64-bit. But we are also working on a 64-bit specific version with larger worlds.

Yea, originally the battles were continous turns, pixel-based ala Baldur's Gate. The problem users pointed out on the forums and we eventually agreed with is that it's kind of bait and switch.

When I get a chance, I'll try to put a side by side comparison.

I don't know what to call this but the marketing people will come up with something I'm sure. Elemental will quietly use lots of cool graphical features to make the game still look good on older hardware. This is a screenshot of Elemental on a low end ATI mobile card. While someone looking at it can tell the difference between this and the glory of the latest hardware, it's surprising subtle to casual users. <a href="https://draginol.stardock.net/images2009/Ele

[quote who="Darkodinplus" reply="10" id="2627733"] Quoting kyogre12, reply 1 Tactical Battles. Tactical battles haven’t been part of the beta but they’ve been heavily discussed. Originally, tactical battles were designed to be RTS. Then Continuous turns. But as time has gone on, it’s become clear that the gameplay that people (and frankly that we enjoyed the most) was more closest to XCom. That is, turn based. Tile based. Moving units to the best spots. And eventua

The Elemental engine is an RTS engine. But when we played through tactical battles it just came back over and over again to discussions on the forums where users were understandably expecting combat to be more along the lines of Master of Magic, Xcom, HOMM, etc. And it just plays better.

[quote who="Demiansky" reply="5" id="2624571"]I think what's critical to making the game feel alive from the beginning is to make a world that persists, grows, and evolves irrelevant of whether the player is in the game or not. At the beginning, the player should only feel as though they can make a very small difference in the world and as they grow more powerful, find themselves acting upon smaller forces in weightier ways. So what do I think this living world will need?&nbs

[quote who="Sir_Linque" reply="6" id="2624575"]During Beta 1 the game hasn't felt remotely like what you described there. [/quote] Really? Now I wish someone had mentioned at some point that beta 1 wasn't supposed to be fun. [e digicons]:|[/e]

I can honestly say that this is the best game I've ever worked on by far. I hadn't realized until recently the ramifications of making a modern, PC-only game in terms of what is possible. Nearly every game made these days licenses its own engine from someone else and that engine is almost always cross-platform. It's not just the performance difference between say a PC and an Xbox 360. In fact, it's not even mainly that. It's MEMORY. That needs to be more of

[quote who="vStyler" reply="54" id="2623420"] Ask yourself that question the next time you are doing free tech support/configuration for grandma and grandpa's PC iPad doesn't need support?[/quote] No. My 3 year old can use it without a problem. Even my mom could use it without bugging me. As is, I get calls from her constantly about this or that for the Thinkpad. Why isn't Bluetooth working right today? Where did the network icon go? My wind

This article is several months old.

[quote who="kona0197" reply="38" id="2622951"]With no flash support I doubt the iPad will overtake Windows.[/quote] Sigh. Why do i even bother to write these if people won't read. It is NOT about the iPad per se. It's about these devices using new, highly specialized OSes that focus on the main things digital consumers do. For the production of content, a Windows based (or Mac or Linux) computer -- a traditional desktop, will be fine.

[quote who="VicenteC" reply="30" id="2622796"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 24 It's a zillion little things like this that slow down the Windows experience. If I just want to quickly check the weather for this weekend on my laptop, I'm going to lose a couple minutes waiting to get it up and going (assuming it reconnects to my WiFi without having to mess with something). By contrast the iPad (and presumably any of these light-OSs like Android and WebOS) I'd just pop it up in se

For our purposes, their idea of active accounts (active in the past 30 days) seems reasonable. When one talks about active accounts, the key question is how many people can a given promotion realistically target.

[quote] Definition of acitive account at Steam is (IIRC): User logged in in last 30 days Account have at least 1 full game (free games dont count AFAIK)[/quote] Do you have a URL to an official source for this?

[quote]As far as being always on, Does anyone actually shut their PC's down these days, I know I don't.[/quote] Most people with laptops put them to sleep (not shut down, just putting the lid down).

[quote who="Pranksterr" reply="22" id="2622795"]However many millions of active users Steam has, bottom line is is that there are loads. Although i have a pretty big library of games on Steam i do think that the PC becoming a closed shop isnt that healthy. The thing is, is that i like good games and i like to not pay that much for them and what money i do spend on them, i like to give to the devs as much as possable and not pick them up 2nd hand. But really what can be done t

[quote who="Rebell44" reply="17" id="2622756"] surpassed 25 million active accounts, up 25% from the prior year. Of the 25 million accounts, over 10 million of those have profiles in the Steam Community. Wrong. ....... surpassed 25 million active accounts, up 25% from the prior year. Of the 25 million accounts, over 10 million of those have profiles in the Steam Community. ........ 10 million is not number of active accounts, but number of active acc