CariElf

It's been awhile since I've written a dev journal and we've got some new faces around here, so I'll take the opportunity to introduce myself. I'm Cari Begle, and I'm Stardock's Senior Game Designer and the programming lead on Elemental. I've been working here at Stardock for 10 years. Today I'm going to talk about Multiplayer. I'll start with a quick rundown of the features for the people who haven't tried the beta, and then get into some techie talk for those

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="145" id="2784316"]Yes, but they can cast all of "your" spells as well, in addition to the spells they own themselves. Except that they can only "own" the first 127 spells of the game. Someone thought it would be funny to only use 7 bits for that value.[/quote] Do you have a save game or something that demonstrates this? We use 32 bit integers for pretty much any indexed value, so it's highly unlikely that the spell books would use anythi

In your save game, it looks like somehow one of the AI units got added to the player's unit list twice, so it saved the unit twice, which caused a problem as soon as you loaded it. We're trying to track down the cause now, but there's nothing obvious since we're already doing a check to see if the unit is already in the list.

Did this game start out in 1.07? I got an error from the event system while loading, which would explain your stuck turn. The unit that was having the problem would never get its orders.

We won't start mailing patch CDs until we've stopped updating so frequently. At the moment, it's far more convenient to have Impulse installed.

First go to C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic\screens and clear that out, or C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Stardock if you're on XP. Then before you start Elemental, go to My Documents\My Games\Elemental and open prefs.ini in notepad or some other text editor. Try setting MaxTextureAtlasHeight=1024. Save the file. Then run Elemental. It should take a bit longer to startup because it should be re-generating the textur

Can you please let us know if 1.06 resolves this? Thanks.

Try excluding GDF_Elemental_install.exe from any anti-virus or security programs you have. It does 3 things on install/update: 1) Adds Elemental to the Games explorer if it isn't there already (on XP it adds info the registry so that if you upgrade Elemental will automatically show up in the Games explorer) 2) Clears out and re-creates the texture atlases to make sure that you have the updated textures for the interface 3) Adds firewall exceptions for Elemental (

Can you please post your debug.err using pastebin or a similar service?

Yep, the first two were definitely in the the graphics driver. The third one is a crash that we fixed in the 1.01 patch that went up last night, but you may as well wait for tonight's patch because we still need to find an end of turn crash.

My best guess is that you have a corrupted DirectX install. This could be caused by another game shipping the wrong version of the dll for you OS, or actually modifying the file. So, as a warning, fixing this problem may break one of your other games, but if you're having problems with other steam games, maybe this will fix those as well. It may be just the one file, D3D9_41.dll, so you could start by just deleting that and then trying the directx redist install aga

[quote who="HarveyBernstein" reply="6" id="2724942"]Compatible with saved games?[/quote] Yes, you should be able to load existing save games.

Can both of you please get this tool http://www.dependencywalker.com/ and load elemental.exe with it and then save the report and upload it using dropbox or a similar service? When an application crashes on startup like this, it's usually because it's having trouble loading a particular dll. The dependency walker should help us figure out which one is having trouble.

DoomWaffle, have you tried a clean re-install of Directx? The entry point procedure usually refers to a version mis-match. It's possible that another game on your system installed the D3DX9_41.dll and that it's not the correct version for your OS.

DoomWaffle, Try making a shortcut to GDF_Elemental_Install.exe. Right click on it and choose properties. Left-click in the target field and hit the end key, followed by space. Add the world install. Click the OK button, then run the shortcut as an admin. This will attempt to re-make the texture atlases, which should be saved to C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic\screens. It'll probably give you the error about addi

If you're having problems running Elemental, please provide your debug.err file. It will always be located in My Documents\My Games\Elemental and is recreated each time you run the game, so make sure to grab it immediately after experiencing an issue. You can upload it to pastebin or a similar text hosting service and post the link they provide in your help request thread here on the forums (please don't post

[quote who="bllevinson" reply="46" id="2721551"]Forgive me for coming late to the party, but how am I to know when it is available? I am a beta tester. Do i need to keep checking the forums, will there be an email, or do i just keep looking on impulse for an 8/22 update?[/quote] Frogboy will most likely make a post when it's available, but you can also join us in #elemental on irc.stardock.com. If you don't have a preferred IRC client, click on the community tab in Impulse

[quote who="Raiderredleg" reply="6" id="2720063"]Possible broken street date? The post had pictures of the game.[/quote] It matters whether or not this was an independent action on the part of the employee, the store, or if this is a chain wide problem.

[quote who="Nesrie" reply="84" id="2706226"] Quoting CariElf, reply 83 Quoting Raven X, reply 60 The only thing that Stardock has EVER done to miff me even a little bit was to stop putting out their patches as stand alone downloads. I do Completely Understand this is to help fight piracy and I'm sure it's a wise decision. Many, MANY, other companies have gone this route in the last few years. I don't like it, but as TwoHawks says above me, it's the reality of

[quote who="Raven X" reply="60" id="2701431"]The only thing that Stardock has EVER done to miff me even a little bit was to stop putting out their patches as stand alone downloads. I do Completely Understand this is to help fight piracy and I'm sure it's a wise decision. Many, MANY, other companies have gone this route in the last few years. I don't like it, but as TwoHawks says above me, it's the reality of the situation.[/quote] It was actually also a lot more work for us to make se

Try going to C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic\screens and delete the files there. That should cause the files to be re-created. If you continue to get the error after clearing out those files, it may be that the DXAtlasWin.exe file didn't get updated. Did you get prompted to reboot after updating?

pad152, does it only happen at startup, or does it happen during the game as well?

Update is up with the fix for the road crash and not being able to build improvements in a save game

[quote who="TCores" reply="30" id="2688107"]Are you doing the roads in python or C? Just out of curiosity.[/quote] C++.

We're working on another update with a fix for a road crash (hopefully will fix all the road crashes) and the bug where you can't build improvements after loading a save game.