Frogboy

[quote who="Lord Reliant" reply="40" id="3242416"]Brad, I assume there are plans to continue updating FE with free patches (ala GalCiv 2) even after the 1.0 release, right?[/quote] Oh yea. And I'll add that FE isn't released yet. There's still a lot of polish, balance, and fixing going on to make it better. The Thursday build (tomorrow) is significantly faster, smoother and, imo, much better balanced. Also, it incorporates pioneer improveme

I spent part of the evening seeing if I could optimize graphics performance. I think you'll notice a difference. I'll be interested in finding out if it helped your PC.

From hell's heart I stab at thee! [e digicons]:frogboy:[/e]

I'll kill you all! (next week on Kotaku: Stardock CEO threatens customers with violence)

I don't want to give away too much other stuff. But monster intelligence matters too in how they behave.

Monsters don't target outposts or improvements. (I'm giving away my secrets!) Those get destroyed due to them being on the way. Anyway, it's 11pm and I'm putting in asynchronous AI movement.

[quote who="Alstein" reply="20" id="3241949"]I never got the need to rush on non-retail projects due to how Stardock handles pre-release. The folks who are upset and want the game, are already playing it for the most part. [/quote] Well said. The main limiting factor is just people wanting to start working on other stuff. I'd love to polish indefinitely. But at some point, it's time to let the baby go. I don't think we're there yet. &

[quote who="jgiombet" reply="14" id="3241893"]Hmm we'll guild wars 2 has a lot going on too, lots of peeps with different armor and weapons.......I get 60fps in that game @1080p....... [/quote] How many peeps are on screen at once? How many cities are you seeing at once. I've never had more than a handful of units on screen at once in GW2. It's apples and oranges. At the end of the day, if you have a 4 year old video card, it's going to b

[quote who="bbr91" reply="12" id="3241544"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 11The #1 performance thing you can do though is turn OFF the outlines. They suck up a lot rendering time. On my machine, I get around 10fps (which is meaningless to go from 50fps to 60fps but still). This is true, outlines do affect performance noticeably. Regarding your other suggestion, I did run FE at 1600x900 (as opposed to the desktop resolution of 1920x1080) and there's lik

[quote who="Trojasmic" reply="15" id="3241886"] quoting post Even now, I can’t promise you a specific release date. I’ll wait for Thursday’s build, talk to the QA team, get together with Derek and others and pick a date. Derek and QA Team please hold strong. Don't let Brad persuade you into releasing a buggy game. I know. I know. Developers don't write any bugs. Just trust us on this one. We'r

[quote who="parrottmath" reply="76" id="3241709"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 63And from the logs, I can tell you, for a fact, that the monsters kill a lot more AI units per game than humans per game. Every saved game we get shows this. The monsters do far more harm to AI players than human players in the bigger scheme of things. Out of curiousity is this because of the AI players attacking the monsters or is it because the monsters attack the AI? My most recent game, I noticed an

Short Answer: Wizards Longer answer: Need a different award for the arena.

The theory is that it's related to simultaneous turns. That is, the monsters move at the same time the players do and monsters are only allowed to move 1 tile per turn (not sure if anyone noticed that before). So they tend to end up where the AI unit was previously. Whereas, a human, being slower, wouldn't get their unit out of the way in time. So even if I explicitly target an AI unit, the monster might have trouble getting him. What I'd have to do is, cheat and hav

What I'm seeing in your reports is not that the video cards are bad but rather the resolutuion they're being pushed at is too high. Here is what *I* would do if I were you. I'd lower my resolution to something like 1280x768 and play that way. Lower your desktop resolution if that helps (FE, by default, runs at your desktop resolution). It's kind of like Battlefield 3. I have a monster machine but if I run it at 2560x1440, bad things happen for me.

World difficulty only affects monster aggressiveness and their toughness.

If it shows grain in the tile, it should be settleable (is that even a word?)

[quote who="Alstein" reply="135" id="3240992"]Gotta remember we're harsher critics than game reviewers. I think Brad will be giving out some bonuses when the reviews come in, if the bugs get ironed out and balance tweaked a bit. [/quote] Like all Stardock games, bonuses occur at a meta critic average of 80 or better. Hence, we are striving for a meta score of 79. Our review guides have several types of pr

That might be an interesting thing to look at. Simultaneous turns. Every (including people) move at the same time in FE. But you humans move a lot slower. So, as a practical matter, the AI units move first. I'm going to have to think about that for a bit.

The world difficulty determines the rand()% odds of the monsters attacking someone. You could lower the world difficulty and that would change the rand()%. The code is basically this: EnemyUnit = AIGetClosestEnemy(radiustoscan); if EnemyUnit && rand()%WorldDifficultyInverse == 0 THEN attack(EnemyUnit) I agree with have a problem because as long as we have the *perception* that the AI is getting a pass, then it is irrelevant whether it's gett

The monsters don't treat AI units any differently from your units. I know it sucks when you get killed by a monster but the AI gets killed plenty as well just like there are times where your pioneer will walk safely by a monster. They are not picking on the human. If you saw the code you'd laugh. There's not a lot to it. A couple random rolls and a get closest enemy unit. Unless I put in code to explicitly target AI units, we're always goi

In theory, it should. But it's almost always running very low on mana. It's something I've been working on.

What type of city is it?

[quote who="jimehau" reply="96" id="3240157"]I'm hearing a lot of talk about "balance" here and I'm not sure it's really THAT important. Sure, if some things stand out as ridiculously overpowered they might need some tweaking. But what if you made a game that was perfectly balanced? Just have one race, one unit type, one resource, symmetrical static maps, no random elements. So well balanced! But BORING. I saw Dominions 3 mentioned before and I played the hel

[quote who="parrottmath" reply="94" id="3240097"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 93i had already emailed that over when it first went up. This is what makes me happy about this process and game. The fact that the CEO is willing to peruse these forums and partake with the community and get this game working great. I look forward to see what changes are made this next week.[/quote] ;) I stalk pretty much every thread on the forums.

I go for knowledge unless I"m trying a rush strategy in which case I go for leather working.