[quote]Isn't there a way to aggregate all of the Elemental Team twittering into this Team Elemental location? I don't tweet, so I'm speculating here.[/quote] I'm not sure. It would be cool, though.
We lowered the wages of the units to 1 gold per turn. We've been working on the random crashes at startup, but we weren't able to eliminate it entirely. It's a crash while loading the data, but since it doesn't happen in the same spot twice it's not a specific file and so it's much harder to track down. If you get the crash, just try starting Elemental again. If it happens every time, rebooting may help. We didn't get a chance to look at the save
You guys can also follow me (CariElf) on Twitter. :)
[quote]Mine still CTDs after splash screen[/quote] We're working on that. It appears to be related to loading the data. We're going to try changing it to loading all the data in the main thread again, which will be slower, but may fix the crash.
[quote] [sarcasm]P.S. - a female lead game developer? Next thing you'll be telling me Frogboy really does work at Stardock! [/sarcasm] [/quote] One of our newer developers, Raa00, is also female. She's an excellent programmer, and even after only 2 years of college was better than a lot of the graduates I've interviewed for entry level positions. She's going to be graduating in December and then she'll be full time here. And we just hired a femal
It currently requires a minimum resolution of 1024x768 but we're working on the interface code so that we can support netbooks.
[quote]Besides as husband to a gamer and father of two gamer girls, making a female friendly game isn't as simple as putting a female face on a character. My wife still creeps me out because she likes to roleplay male characters. The biggest draw to her is simply non-combat gameplay. My girls, being little girls don't care so much about boy or girl characters but the biggest attraction would be animorphic animal characters.[/quote] It's not that simple, but character custom
In case you didn't know, I'm Cari Begle, Stardock's Senior Game Developer, and I'm a woman. I'm not saying that makes me an authority on what all women want in games, but it gives us somewhat of an edge. 1-3 are definitely planned, although we don't yet know if we're going to have time to make female units (other than the sovereigns) before release. As for 4, I don't think that we've considered that. You'll be finding items that your sovereign can equip, so that wi
If you cannot try the elemental beta because you cannot download the data and would be interested in trying out test builds, please e-mail me at [email protected] .
Currently, Elemental is only making HTTP requests so it's only using ports 80 and 443. If you are using a proxy to connect to the internet, including a program that makes you anonymous to the Internet, you will not currently be able to download the data files. Thanks to Sebos, I was able to determine that the proxy settings were not being automatically detected, and it will simply be a matter of running a proxy config on install to allow it to do so. I've also made a dia
It's way too early to start jumping ship over this. I doubt that it's going to be even necessary to block anyone with low netspeeds. Brad's remark comes from frustration more than anything else, but Elemental is going to be very different than Demigod since it's going to be client/server. Instead of having to send the same message out to 9 other players, you send the message once and the server sends it out to the other players. You're still receiving the same amount of messages,
[quote]We usually use IClassName for interfaces (pure abstract classes).[/quote] Yep, we do that too. I forgot to put interfaces in there. [quote]Second, don't calculate anything in the main program. Have all calculations done with functions. Also, make sure each function is short and don't calculate more than one thing in each. Splitting up the functions like this helps organize the program as you go along, but the most beneficial part of this is that
[quote]Does Stardock use any scripting languages?[/quote] We're integrating support for Python in the Elemental engine. The marketing dev uses Javascript, but I'm not sure if any of the webdevs do. [quote]good stuff. I like how this was put in the elemental journals with what I assume to be Galactic Civilization variables, classes, and functions. I mean ulShipIndex isn't a variable in Elemental, right? how similar is the elemental and GalCiv2 code?[/quote] Yeah,
[quote]The whole article is about creating good code, but nearer the bottom Joel talks specifically about Hugarian notation, it's original intent versus how it typically ends up being used. The original intent looks pretty good.[/quote] We don't go overboard on Hungarian notation. One of the programmers who used to work at Stardock before my time was seriously into it so that if he had a class named classEditFieldsFrame, he used name variables classEditFields
Ron, don't feel too bad. You'll always learn more once you get some practical experience than you did at school. A lot of the issue is just scale; the kind of scale you can get in a school project doesn't usually compare to the kind of scale you work with in a professional environment. Some colleges and universities offer a class called something like "Senior Project" where you have to spend at least a semester working on a large project, sometimes sponsored by a local busin
We've got a new coder starting on Monday and in order to help him out, my co-workers and I have been compiling a list of guidelines about our coding practices. Up until now, I've just sat down with new coders and given them a tour of our codebase and tried to convey our coding practices at that point, but new people always have a lot to remember and having a document to refer to might help. I thought that I'd
Hmm...I love baked apples, but oranges are delicious too...but I'll choose apples. [quote]Honeycrisp apples are teh gold standard.[/quote] Definitely. I eat them occasionally even though I have allergic reactions to uncooked apples. I forget what kind I get from the orchard for baking though. Apple crisp, mmm.
[quote]Cari has a fan club over on the galCiv2 site. I'm very jealous and, as such, will keep her introduction to a minimum. This is Cari. She codes. The end.[/quote] It's OK, no one ever posts on that thread anymore. :(