ScottTykoski

In the GC2 days, only your machine would compile the code. Most of the time this takes less than a minute, but when you had to REBUILD (in crunch this could be up to 4 times a day) you were left twiddling your thumbs for 20+ minutes. Incredibuild sends your code to compile on other machines, so building and rebuilding is EXTREMELY fast. Elemental's rebuild time on Incredibuild is 2-4 minutes. A native recompile is up to approx 45 minutes. So yes, very cool, and increasin

Yeah...don't do a rebuild without it :( It's PAINFUL.

[quote]All this sounds nice, but won't it run slower than a more old-fashioned, hard-wired approach?[/quote] You're still looping through a list of stats, only now that list size is variable. I suppose I could see some miniscule hit to performance if you have 100+ extra stats thrown into the game that it has to sort through, but even then it wouldn't be close to the hit you'd get from something graphical in nature (increasing resolution, switching to 8x AA, etc.).

[quote]I've seen Morale thrown around in a thread or two, was it cut as a stat?[/quote] I beleive the current thinking is to have that an army-wide stat, based on various factors (tide of battle, relations, etc.) and only applicable in battle, but it'd be pretty easy to make that a per-unit stat.

[quote]Hey Boogie, I understand nothings set in stone until the game ships, I was just curious if you could share Stardocks current plans for overall unit stats in Elemental? Maybe even what ideas you've all been throwing around?[/quote] Sorry, missed this one :) Right now, for all units, we're looking at... Attack Range (how far the weapon can reach) Armor (Defense) Magic Magic Resistance Hit Points Combat Speed Moves (per Turn

[quote]Hum .. so ... we have "blunt damage". Will armor be able to acts accrodingly ? Like if I have a full plate armor. Will I be able to tell the comp to lessen damage if the armor is an "anti-blunt damge" ?[/quote] That's the plan, but since that gets into the 'battle logic' side of things, I don't have many details. But right now, you can (in XML) assaign 'Blunt Attack' to weapons and 'Blunt Defense' to armor. You can even make a spall, potion, or event that raises either of

[quote]I mean: do we just create a file called battle.py, which will take care of the battle? Or will there be a different system?[/quote] I'll pass that along as those systems are finalized ;)

[quote]To define a comportement fully on xml, it is possible to add even the formulas in XML.[/quote] Yeah, Cari just for equations reading in through XML, so I have a feeling that's how we'll end up incorporating these stat types into the main game...good call :)

[quote]Was DEFIANTLY a clever word choice or a typo?[/quote] I'll give the spell checker credit for that one [e digicons]^_^[/e]

[quote]Actually it sounds like your scheduling foresight was spot on, what with 1.5 days being 36 hours and all.[/quote] Hehe Good point ;) Damn you sleep and family for screwing up my estimations!!!! [e digicons]X([/e]

Wow, what a week. A task that I had assumed would take 1.5 days ended up sucking up around 32 hours. While my lack of scheduling foresight sucks, the time was DEFIANTLY worth it to have this vital feature done right... In previous builds, all unit stat handling was done with a basic array of stats. There was a hard-coded list of what could</e

We're designing pretty much all assets to be colorizable. The artists have gone to great lengths to allow a full palette of skin tones to work well on all unit models :) That will all be in-game, but if you want bright-green people then you'll have to mod it in ;)

[quote]An important question, does this mean no female channelers?[/quote] There will definatly be Female channelers.

Before Elemental, most of us worked on a little title called Galactic Civilizations 2. In this game, you would do spend a significant amount of time conversing with AI players. They would plead, threaten, and barter with you in as intelligent a fashion as we could muster, with much of that 'intelligent' feeling coming from the PAGES of conversation text written. Based on everything from relations to military might, the AI would pop up with dyn

[quote] but when I start building cities (near valuable resources and shards) my nation is strewn out all over the map... Which doesn't scream "fantasy world" to me in the least... [/quote] I have to (humbily) disagree on this point. [e digicons]O:)[/e] Part of our goal is to make a world that 'feels' like a traditional fantasy RPG setting. When you play an rpg, you have some considerable distance to travel between cities (even when those cities are part of the

[quote]You know that part there where you click through the turns real quick? That's normally when I get a crash. If I click through the turns slowly it seems a bit more stable[/quote] That's actually one of the big 'under the covers' change. Before, unit movement was tied to the animations, so if you clicked TURN before all the units were done moving, the data would get de-synched (and all sorts of bad things could happen). We've cleaned it all up considerably, so clicking tu

No build this week...we're getting the Research stuff ironed out (it's CONSIDERABLY more fun and rewarding than the old system) as well as basic code cleanup and economic improvements. When you get Beta1C I'm sure you'll be pleased :)

[quote]Intel integrated graphic cards are crap, they say they support things when they don't [/quote] Even worse is when thei API's return that they support somethign that they don't. Makes it RALLY hard to program a graphics engine when you have DoesCardSupportFeatureX() returning TRUE when it's not really supported. [e digicons]>:([/e] That said, the engine is Shader 2 compatable. We're focusing on the Shader 3 implementations ATM then pack-porting as necessary. I dont k

I certainly agree that 'tools' that can fit into gameplay give the most bang for the buck. In GC2, the ship editor was ENTIRELY in-game, and became a notable in most reviews. If it was purely a 'mod tool', those reviews probably would mentoned it as a side-though...if mentoned at all. That said, we're having a much harder time finding clever ways to include the editors as game-features this time around. A 'spell editor' is great, but if it's an actual 'game feature', there need t

Hmmm...is this a one-time experience, working properly when the game reloads? Or is it like this everye game now? Truly bizarre.

Fixed this (and nermerous other city building oddites) for v0.26 :)

Yeah, we're moving away form pre-designed units (the alpha even had 'workers' to train) and debating the best way to allow more varied customization (aside from 'soldier' designs).

[quote]Is there any limit, of how many techs I will have a choice to choose from? If the system calculated that I can research 3 techs (choose one of those), will it roll for the other techs?[/quote] As of now there is no hard 'limit' to the available breakthroughs. It will roll for each and fill the list accordingly.

We should all probably just wait for it to get implemented before praising/damning it. I feel everyone has their own take on what's being suggested and has started arguing hypotheticals. This research model will give the player considerably more choice and control over the current system, which gives the illusion of choice through a mess of techs and results in passive (boring) payoff.

[quote]One thing on city sizes, is there going to be any need to feed all those people brought in by prestige? Will we need lots of farms dotting the country-side to feed our large populous capital?[/quote] Population limit is determined by the balance between food-per-citizen and city housing (basically it's the lower of the two). So if you're not bringing in enough food, then your population will top out because of it. No starving to worry about (well, unless your trade lines are cu