pre-alpha/beta feedback: screenshot comments

Shut up landis, we don't care about your realism crap.

You can make alcohol and hallucinogenic drugs from bits o' cactus. From your post, I'm pretty sure you already know this though.

 btw, I had to give karma to anyone willing to do a research paper to make a point. I like the cacti myself, I am from northern Utah and the place I grew up had lots of prickly pear cactus (I spent some time as a youth pulling quills out of my feet, and one time my hands and kness when I fell into one.

I do agree with you landi that it gives a southwestern U.S. flavor to whole thing. I am not sure if you are just needing some scrub added around the base or don't like the cacti at all.

Those cactus looks like earthling ones but are not the same. There. Mystery solved. Next week: "Space Cows. Why and where?"

(in any case, educative/informative post, landisaurus... )

Come ON, Landi. It's MAGIC. If Zorkon the Wise wants immortal Siguaros in his deasert, then he can just MAKE them.

In any event, thanks to the above Westerns, most anyone who will actually be PLAYING this game will have heard of the plant. (Street children in Burma might not, but will they REALLY be downloading American TBSs?)

Although, as a nitpicker, I do appreciate your throroughness.

Landisaurus, you clearly have too much time.

Go outside. Breathe. Throw some balls. Go swim.
Just do something!

Edit: Don't listen to him! It's just a clever ruse to generate karma!

well, I agree you can use the "magic plants" excuse...  (though, for space plants in supreme commander I want to know how african unbrella trees evolved to inhabit the same landscape as saguaro forests)

Well, if those Zorkon the wise's immortal saguaros, that would at least mean he put them there.  Which would be actually really cool, because it means Zorkon the wise decided he was channeling some obscure landscape features.

Being that it was the center of what appeared to be unfertile land (the stuff  the channelers are slowly removing) I figured that it was to represent unfertile land.   Naturually, if is not grass and other plants, sandy/dusty desert is the natural result.

However, if that is land that has already been converted to fertile land, and not the heart of post-cataclysm wasteland as it appears, then I'd be extremely happy to see that devs already considered the idea of extremely hot/dry but still fertile environments.  (in which case they should still have plants, but kudos for the idea.  Fertile land should not only be lush temperate green fields, it should also include rainforests, underwater-forests and reefs, and artic wildlife)

Edit:  @Luckmann: I do have too much time on my hands.  I was supposed to start my 1st day at THQ today, so I quit my old part-time job, but the project upon which I was to work had some delays so I don't start for another week. -also, the local pool is closed-  I honestly wasn't trying to get karma, though I'm glad somebody decided to give me some.  I draw pictures to try to get karma, which has yielded very little karma dispite the time I put into it.

I wouldn't call this a "research paper" because I actually didn't do much research.  I pulled most of it off the top of my head, and then did minor research on places around the web to ensure I wasn't speaking out of my ass.   I can do this because I DO go outside once in a while.  As a child I came down to AZ  to visit my grandparents and cousin (who has that masters degree in ecology I mentioned) in Tuscon and I loved going to the saguaro national park.  And now today that I live in pheonix area, I often take girls on  "dates" to the desert museam about 2 hours south of here

Well, that and the casti appear to be encircling a dungeon or aritfact, so it's also possible that we are dealing with the great Cavern of the Cactus..... or that essence revitalization results in irregular plant growth.

Uhh Yeah, I don't care if they put some cacti in, I expect there to be dragons and dudes that can shoot fire from their hands, so a few extra bits of fauna isn't going to hurt my feeling.  What would be nice is if the cacti was not bigger then the giant destroyed castle that is closer to the point of view then the cacti.  I mean, that cacti must be growing on a elemental shard or something, its epic!

Maybe because its not zoomed in all the way you can't see the smaller plants at the base of the cacti?

a cavern of cactus...  huh, that is interesting idea.   

on the terms of "magic cactus" that can grow without its required supporting plants, saguaro do grow to be crazy tall.  There is at least one that grew over 13 meters tall (it was about 45 feet tall) and has lived over 200 years or something like that.   And it isn't even magically enhanced  (at least not that I'm aware) O.o  So a magically enhanced one could be...   over 25 meters tall!  

That being said... a 45 foot tall cactus would likely tower over those... 10 foot castle walls?   Its much thicker than our super cactus, but thats where the magic comes in  

seriously though, it should blend it a bit more with a blanket of plants that one would expect to see at its base if "zoom" was an excuse.  

When I looked at the first picture in your post, Landi, I thought that was going to be your point - that 50 foot-tall cacti, especially in ruined land, is not OK. And that I completely agree with. However, I don't care if saguaro cacti only survive in one tiny part of the game. If they called the cacti Saguaro and included a biological description and summary of necessary environmental conditions for them to grow in-game, then I might be a bit annoyed to see them growing like weeds in every desert I see. But as it stands, this is a fantasy game, with fantasy people, fantasy animals, and fantasy plants. If some of those fantasy plants happen to look like Saguaro cacti, so be it.

I still like your point about having a difference between fertile/unfertile and terrain type. It'd be really cool if there were unfertile and fertile varieties of every terrain type, so you don't necessarily turn vast field of sand dunes into lush grassland.

Oh, and:

The scientific definition of a desert is an area that receives on average less than 250 millimeters of rainfall each year. So... they are not misnamed deserts, they are definitely deserts. In fact, most deserts are not covered in those stereotypical sand dunes we always see - they are often rocky, and they are often covered with low, hardy vegetation. I have been in many deserts like this, and let me tell you they feel very deserty - they might not get crazy sand storms like in the Sahara or parts of the Gobi, but they dry you out into a prune very quickly. The Gobi is often portrayed as Land of the Sand Dunes, but in fact only about 3% of it is covered in those big, sweeping dunes.

I just want to point out that technically, Antarctica is a desert as well, because it doesn't get any rain.

tundras like antartica are totally called deserts.   If you search "cold desert" its one of the 1st places that comes up.

they are misnamed "deserts"  because the term suggests that it is "desert" and the term "desertification" describes when land is being converted into the stereotypical sandy-dune type places.  So like the Arizona deserts suffer from "desertification".  Yes there is a definition of "desert" that fits Arizona... that is why its called a desert, but the word itself is missleading.  There is more than one definition to it.

(another misnamed thing would include the mississippi...   it should be the missouri river from St. Louis south, its just explorers found the mississippi and labeled it as such on all the maps down to New Orleans long before they explored west of it to discover the missouri is actually longer)

Well, one thing I wanted to point out is... normal cacti don't really look like that (when I say normal, I mean cacti not found in the Americas).  They look more like Agave with many bodies coming from a single source:

or just bizzar

But we usually think of American cactus.

They are not misnamed 'deserts.' The word desert comes from the latin for "abandoned place" and up until recently (last century or so) did not have the ubiquitous connotation of hot, sandy places. The word was used to just mean an unpopulated area until it was given a scientific definition - and then somehow deserts became popularly understood just to be the hot kind.

The only thing wrong here is the common misconception that deserts have to be hot, dry and sandy.

You do have a point about the saguaro cactus being the first things many people probably think of when they see "cactus" despite its rarity anywhere outside a tiny portion of the US... Although personally I usually think of the prickly pear kind. I think prickly pear cacti look cooler, too - Stardock should put some of those in! A variety of cactus types would be pretty cool, especially if different types of desert had different types of cacti!

When I think of cacti, I think of prickly pear.  A bitch of a cactus they are, those little hair like spines will bury themselves in anything.  You can't even use gloves around them, all you do is find the spines later instead of immediately...

    The scientific definition of a desert is an area that receives on average less than 250 millimeters of rainfall each year.

There is no real reason to discuss or express opinion. Any area that fits that criteria is a desert.  It is only that simple for that definition.  There are more descriptors that an area can qualify for, but no matter what else is also is, it is still a desert.

But as for the public vote on the cacti... my vote is don't care.  We use symbols all the time that are not 100% accurate to represent something simply and still be easily recognizable.  And based on the screen shot;  I say there is not enough information represented to make a case on either side.

Elemental: Even the Cacti are given consideration.

When I knew about this game and its frontstory (Gal Civ's), I was thinking that appart from the presence of air, water and all those "common" details, humans would be the only classical thing and just because of story. Ecosystem? I was expecting an alien one to reflect that it was not Earth in a universe where Earth actually exists (still needing evolution and all that). So I didn't expect horses. Yet we have horses. And I see no one complaining about it.

It would be a worthy debate about when some games create truly unique/new non-earthling props and when, more usually, earthling props are used.

that is exactly my point.  It isn't unpopulated or abandoned.  A "desert" able to support cactus has to be VERY populated, and in the case of the desert that holds saguaro, more populated than most temperate forests (going on a number of different species per area rather than pure density of seperate entities, 'cause you can't compete with grass).   "desertification" turns areas into sandy-unpopulated areas, and happens no matter what temerature it is.  Sand and dust is a natural by-product of loss of plant life.  If all the plants in an area start dying, the land naturally converts to desert (see dust-bowl).   It has nothing to do with temperature.   Cacti don't live in "abandoned places", wich is what the screenshot seems to suggest.  The above pictures of African Cacti exist in "prairies" (savanas) by their standards. 

when explorers were traveling westword they had already named the plains a "prairie" and so when they hit real deserts (or just prairies that appeared to have less life than the midwest) they called it a desert.  So the southwest was blindly labeled "desert" because it looked less life-ful than the "prairies" of the midwest, when in fact most of them were more.  If you compare to African prairies, most american "deserts" are freaking gardens.  And I'm not even talking about the Sonoran desert, much of the great basin (thats Nevada) and...  chibihaun? something like that (Texas and new mexico) are only "deserts" by record of rainfall.  The latin word "abandoned place" does not describe places where cacti grow, so they are misnamed.

Point of case:   "This does not work" refers to the association of cacti to "abandoned place" deserts.  Most hot and dry North America "deserts" are misnamed, and Stardock should not make the mistake of including cacti in unfertile deserts.

If Stardock is going to have places where cacti grow, they should be hot-fertile lands (and if flat, they should be called prairies or savanas, even though that is now what fits common American usage of the term).   And they should most certainly include prickly pear or beaver tail looking cacti.  

Its true...   Mars still has some landforms we are not sure entirely certain how formed.    In the case of my supreme commander rant, my problem is African Unbrella trees evolved the way they did because they don't live where saguaro cactus...   honestly I guess though, its only reasonable to just throw random species from around the world together if you're going to base it on earth life at all.  At the same time, if you're going to have something that LOOKS like earth life, then one can only assume it evolved in a similar way.

Horses?   you mean like pink space ponies?    My theory is that they were earth horses that developed some means of flight.   The pink color is a result of limited breeding pool (only a few escaped earth and were able to find life outside the Sol - solar system).

The one in the video and the ones where the Dragon is having fun in a battle don't seem very pinkish, spaceish or poneish. Maybe they still need to be "tainted" by essence, then follow the route of the Drath (aka leave the planet) and end in some far away system with some kind of freaks that can only talk about The Unity.

oh those horses!  (sorry, I don't know where my mind is)

don't forget worves, spiders, and... bears?    how exactly DID all those survive?   I kinda assumed the "world of Elemental" was just something like alternate reality earth considering the life-forms found on it.   The cataclysm would have messed up the plates creating new continents.   New creatures such as the "yeti" or whatever could be explained as a result of the cataclysm as well, the combination of unchanneled magical energies ripping apart a world + the suddenly empty niches in the newly reconstructed ecosystems.  Sudden evolutionary changes are common with major disastors that would create new environmental factors to which creatures must adapt.

Master of Magic had it right... the world of arcanas looked more or less like earth, however the alternate looked alien and held all the truely inhuman races.

Considering that the "Big Guy Who Lives Forever" is a human from Earth and that his creations are somehow images of himself, I could understand that they arrived to a non-human world and using Dark Energy, they recreated life that was familiar to them even if it didn't still exist in Earth and it was not native to Altaria. That could make sense (The Dread Lords knew lots of things). And has room for variations that resemble earthlings but that aren't exactly the same if Stardock says so.

From that point of view, earthling props in Altaria makes quite a lot of sense. Quite a lot. Just hoping that many alien things are there too. maybe dragons are Altarian origin but somehow their "echoes" reached Earth early history or something.

Man, a pity we cannot beta test Elemental's story.   I feel useless.

To bad this isn't earth game. It's a fantasy game and anything can grow anywhere in abundance in a fantasy world. I can't believe the OP wasted all that time for NOTHING as nobody but a geek moron would even care what castus they put in the game and where.

I just hope the cacti are flora, not fauna!