Ben Yeoh

[quote who="Mistwraithe" reply="147" id="3265537"]Just wanted to post and say thank you very much Tuidjy. Excellent work. I've been down on Stardock for releasing FE too early for a while now and a large part of this is because there are so many small to medium sized bugs, including those you have identified. Each one may not matter on its own but together they led me to not trust the game, even in the last few betas. I really wish Stardock had fixed more of these first, any pi

[quote who="parrottmath" reply="132" id="3264561"]This rounding caused the AI to cheat because it was treating the AI like an expert AI instead of a challenging AI. So, the aggressiveness of the monster should treat each pioneer the same. I think Tuidjy that you should grab his private build and see if it has been fixed. This would be a good test as you can still use your save games here and see if it did fix it. You know re-load and check what's going on with this build, then

[quote who="macattac" reply="43" id="3261826"]Dear Alent, maybe this game is the most sophisticated random number generator ever done, so sophisticated that it makes fun. Who cares about stringence and such stupid concepts as long as it makes fun ?? kesmai[/quote] We care because this game could be even more fun and polished if blatant AI cheating issues like these were addressed earlier in the beta.

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="30" id="3261539"]Without responding to the particulars...why would new players be increasing the difficulty to challenging? The game defaults to Easy. There's two levels below easy. And above challenging, all bets are off. If I could play scary sounds to distract you to help the AI, I would. [/quote] Because we want the AI to play the best game it can with the same set of rules that players have. See, what is a

Random monster placement on maps can mean that you get very strong monsters seeded right next to players' starting locations which the players have no hope of defeating even in a couple of hundred turns. This is usually frustrating, unless the difficulty is turned way down so that the storm dragon next to your starting location is for all intents somewhat catatonic or benign. Frogboy recently said in this thread that this

[quote quoting="post"] So I’m making the monsters move at a different phase than the players so that they do a better job attacking one another. [/quote] This should fix the problem for monsters vs AI. But then will the same problem occur for AI vs AI since presumably all AI players move together in the same phase, no?

[quote who="Tattyhat" reply="80" id="3247297"]If the monsters treated the AI exactly the same way as they do the player, then it would be fine. [/quote] The simple monster AI code as Frogboy explained awhile back is actually unbiased in that respect (if we don't factor in potential issues from having simultaneous turns etc). After all it's just a dice roll modified by world difficulty that determines whether or not a monster is going to attack.</p

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="63" id="3247163"] Regarding the monster AI, this is something I have been addressing. Bear in mind, there really isn't very much "AI" to monsters. It is a very delicate balance between having them be "too tame" and having them be too aggressive. For that reason, I've been making greater use of the world difficulty. [/quote] It isn't so much that monsters are too aggressive or too tame, it's the fact they are perceived

[quote who="Derek Paxton" reply="99" id="3237472"] Trolls can still regen in tactical. Regen has been nerfed because of balance issues (as you guys have noted). Im not done with regen. I'd like to address kiting in another way (turn limit on tactical battles) and then return regen to its old function, but its something I have to play with.[/quote] I don't think having turn limits is an elegant solution to over-kiting, simply because it doesn&

[quote who="Frogboy" reply="20" id="3221676"]I found the article highly useful. Today I spent more time on the perf. Our biggest performance hit remains the outlines on the map (part of the art style). It can be turned off in the display options but we are still trying to find ways to improve the visual performance.[/quote] If the visual outlines are done as a standard post process, then it's expected that the GPU perfomance hit should be relatively consistent (ie, ind

[quote]But of course, I’m the boss so I can post how annoying it is to play the game at 3fps in cloth map mode. [/quote] Can't you selectively compile some modules you aren't debugging in release/with optimizations turned on? For example, compiling the renderer module in release but leaving the AI module in debug. This is one reason why I choose to have modules compiled as self-contained dlls, then I don't have to deal with missing/multiply-defined symbo

Wow. It looks much nicer now then what was shown in your other thread. I didn't expect this big of a difference from WoM even considering that it was a debug/minimal quality build but I'm very glad to be proven wrong. [quote who="HenriHakl" reply="6" id="3015669"]That is pretty nice. I think the "good guys" (including neutral guys) look perfectly acceptable like that. Though the "bad guys" need to man-up more. They just don't fill me with

[quote who="Sir_Linque" reply="39" id="3014961"]Regarding portraits, I don't think anyone would disagree that 2D painted portraits look a lot better, but I believe it would simply be too resource intensive to execute properly.[/quote] Let the devs decide this. I suppose if enough of us feel the current 3D portraits lack quality and the devs themselves think it's justified, I'm sure things can be prioritized accordingly. Besides, if they choose to go the hand-painted 2D rou

[quote who="Heavenfall" reply="28" id="3014726"]The bad part about doing custom painted portraits is when you upgrade them with new gear or buff them with sparkly effects, it doesn't show. I'm with you that painted portraits generally look better, but in a game like Elemental where separate pieces of gear is much more common-place, I prefer it to be real 3d models. I want to see my character evolve, just like I would in a real RPG, and not just see some numbers go up like I would in a

Can anything also be done to give the sovereign/NPC portraits more "awesomeness"? The flavor text is interesting and adds much to the immersion, but then when I look at the character portraits they don't measure up to the epic-ness at all. The rock spider one is okay but the sovereign/NPC portraits honestly look silly. This has been my impression for some time actually but the contrast now between the dorky looking portraits and the high-fantasy drama of the game lore and

[quote who="Winnihym" reply="31" id="2994865"]One of the things to manage growth instead of having the decreasing returns with increasing # cities is to let us set growth by setting additional farmers over the minimum number needed to feed your population and armies. In MOM, this excess went to gold, at a rate of 1 food for 1 gold. Here, it could go to increasing growth. Since small cities won't have a lot of excess food (or will kill their production if they do), it&#39

Balancing small vs large empires is a good thing, but I think that simply reducing the population growth rate with increasing number of cities feels forced and quite unintuitive. After all, I don't know a real-world parallel that reasonably explains this game mechanic and that tends to break immersion for me. How about implementing something like inefficiency or corruption in the form of food and production losses instead? Or perhaps also increase unrest? On a relate

Can we see more interesting labels for the magic proficiency instead of stuff like "Expert"? "Expert" is a bit mundane. It sounds like something you would apply to a person who is good at C++ for example, rather than a guy who is proficient in magic in a fantasy setting. Something like "Adept" or "Archmage" would lend a little more flavor I think.

[quote who="LeeLament" reply="28" id="2772238"]Good to know, much relieved If I have more than a dozen or so strings to test like that I usually put most all the strings in the code into a red-black or AVL tree and then assign them all a unique number as a code, then I can just use switch statements everywhere. The string tests are not repeated over and over again. In some case I use ternary search trees as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_search_tree

If a resolution change does not affect the FPS, then the GPU is clearly not fill-rate limited and probably not bogged down by vertex processing either for this app. It's probably extremely CPU bound. Too many draw calls or blocking read/writes to textures/GPU buffers or heap allocations every frame maybe? Common problems I suppose.. Can't wait for the fix though so that I can play Elemental proper! (I'm a game dev too and bored at work)