ckessel

Given it sounds like Elemental is going beta at the same time as the Penny Arcade Expo and I'm sure several of us will be at PAX, maybe Stardock could host a special 30-60 minute "Welcome to the beta" at PAX? It'd be interesting to get a hands on presentation and feel for what Stardock is looking to accomplish with the first beta and what they hope to get from active beta participants. Any Alpha folks could share a little wisdom about what they've found already, tricks to get the most out of

Are nipples a key component to channeling ability?

What version of Python is going to be used? I'm setting up my IDE for python support and need to download the appropriate interpreter...

[quote]I'm primarily concerned with how the game will look on an upper class system. The design has shown steady signs of improvement just based on the newer screenshots. [/quote] The problem is that Stardock can't be primarily concerned with how it will look on an upper class system. That's just not the money portion of the sales curve. It'll be nice if it looks good and I'm sure from a professional viewpoint they'll do what they can to achieve that, but from an ROI point of view it'

Aw man, I think I just ruined part of my keyboard from drooling... I'm like a kid at Christmas who can't get to sleep the night before. I can hardly wait. Unfortunately, it's a multi month wait rather than one sleepless night :)

[quote]If you guess it right, you deserve 2 Karma.[e digicons]:omg:[/e] [/quote] Heh, you'll bring up the game on the alpha screen and the Kingdom calendar when you found your first city will say: smarlsday the eleventy-blueth of Grenmach in the year 3206 time: 320:22 That's be pretty damn funny.

[quote]It's really two seperate problems, not just one major one. The first being that 4th Edition as a ruleset is incredibly ' dumbed-down '. [/quote] Well, IMO it's all been downhill since the days of Men and Magic, Monsters and Treasures, Blackmoor, Eldrich Witchery, etc... And I'm only partially kidding.

Somehow this seems so appropriate :) I have to admit the twitter updates leave me feeling a bit envious. Here I'm writing rather dull code watching updates from TeamElemental and thinking that looks like a lot more fun to code...

[quote who="red1939" reply="1" id="2264712"]Frogboy, you stated that before the actual implementation of behavior of AI, the game should learn basing on the actions taken by humans. I wonder how it will be done. Basically: will you use some AI algorithms to determine best solutions, or you will do it by yourself? That said I would like to ask, what is your opinion on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) being incorporated into the game (ie. the AI)? I was thinking about implementing it into a stra

That's funny because I believe wide_names are preferred over camelCase in the Python community [e digicons]:)[/e] That seems to be the case for function names, though classes are mixed case. However, it also says to essentially stick with whatever style the project you're on is using. Given Elemental is coming from a C++ background, that'd be the camel case convention. http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-

Simply awesome stuff. The ability to dig into the AI scripts and actually use my developer skills as part of the alpha/beta is a big reason I'm really interested in being part of the alpha/beta.

Sounds like a good way to get a little early exercising of the network code for those so inclined.

Is there some way to get twitter to send it's updates to my IM client? I hate cell phones.

[quote]Do you mean the actual battle calc? What annoys me is when I smash through dozens of units over and over again (In any game like this), and then one of those dozens gets a lucky hit in for massive damage. Had it happen in GalCiv2 where a standard stack I had killed dozens of times attacked, the enemy ships consistently dealing 0 damage, and then one of them randomly does 50 damage, one-shotting one of my ships.[/quote] Yep, that's a inherent problem in the 1-roll, winner takes

[quote who="psychoak" reply="18" id="2257317"]This is why auto-resolve is gay. In a game with tactical combat, people whine about how auto-resolve will suck. To make it not suck, you make it complicated. Then the people, that don't want tactical combat to begin, with complain about how it's too complicated to use the auto resolve. Then you make it simple by taking all the complicated stuff out, and they bitch about how it uses a spell, or doesn't

duh

[quote]Another thing to consider - in MoM the channeler could often cast powerful and decisive spells during Tactical Combat, whether he was physically present or not. How can you not have at least a tactical option in a game like this - I assume auto resolve is going to remove the capability of the channeler to cast during combat, or if not how would a channeler cast spells during an autoresolve battle? [e digicons] Not to beat a dying horse, but again, look at D

[quote] I actually like Dominions tactical combat. You can give some reasonably interesting pre-battle orders and set up your units on the field as you like ahead of time, but then the game handles the battle itself. It gives me a General's level input for battle planning, but avoids the AI difficulties with detailed tactial battles.[/quote] I had a thought extending the Dominions track and tying in with a Leadership skill. Maybe have a Domions like system, but you can pause

Tactical combat is always a tough issue in 4x game development. It's typically a losing proposition for game difficulty. At best, the AI is good and there's no advantage to the human player between auto-resolve and tactical. At worst, the AI is crap and using it gives the player way too much advantage. When the AI is crap, to have a good game you often have to fall back on letting auto-resolve handle it to keep the game balance. The only reason to have tactical combat is because

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="9" id="2251115"] Yes, but who says they have to be YOUR people who die? You could always use the bodies of your enemies for the undead army as their punishment for being evil! (your good! duh! And anyone who says otherwise is obviously evil....) See? Easy to do! But how do you kill the evil people if you're against using your own living people to do it? It has to start somewhere! Besides, necromancy in itself is t

Boy, mittens must have really been pissed off if he was willing to take a job in Utah... [e digicons];P[/e]

It'd have to be something akin to Civ 4's Fall from Heaven mod, serious modding. Each fury isn't just one dimensional either. Water furies are strong healers, but they also can shape shift. Fire furies don't just shoot flame, they can enrage enemies. Also, furies have weaknesses. Air furies are badly wounded by salt, earth furies are useless in air or water. Wood furies are uber accurate bowmen and trackers, but don't have any particular super human powers. Earth furies are insanely strong, b

Your comment on Mass Effect 2 is amusing, saying the PC port was terrible. Mass Effect 2's port has often been reviewed as a fantastic port of console game, adding value rather than removing it.

Jim Butcher writes a fantasy series called Codex Alera or probably more commonly known as his Fury series since most books have Fury in the title (Captain's Fury, Academs Fury, etc). The fantasy world is pretty unique with none of the usual elf/dwarf type races. The two major fantasy races are essentially a hive-mind bug type creature and gigantic werewolf like creatures, in addition to the Human "Alerans". The magic is particularly unique where most Alerans have a "fury" which is the

[quote]the team looked smaller than I expected[/quote] Looks pretty good sized to me. I've worked on a lot of commercial apps and teams are rarely more than 10 developers plus an equivalent amount of QA, techpubs, network admin guru, etc. So, 20 folks overall. There are efficiencies in a tight team and when you get larger than the team you see above, the amount of work required just to facilitate meetings and communication goes way up.