Elemental – coding coding coding

from JoeUser Forums

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Lots going on this week.  I’m scheduled to fly out on Monday on a media tour to start showing off Elemental in preparation for its anticipated release date late Summer.

Here are some of the things being worked on in preparation for beta 2.

  1. Memory use.  We’re consolidating our mapping of how every byte of memory is used in the game. 
  2. Performance. We’re setting things up so that we can begin handing over builds to the full QA lab for compatibility testing.  Will the game work on a Netbook? Does the game scale up on the latest/greatest ATI/nVidia cards?
  3. Stability. What are the problem areas? They’re almost always due to something not releasing a pointer or not checking the validity of an object. But the text matrices have to be made and handed over to QA.
  4. Balance. Yes. Beta 2 begins the phase where it’s supposed to be “a game”.  The AI won’t be very strong in beta 2 since that’s the area I’m responsible for and I have only recently begun coding it. But it should be much further along than in beta 1.
  5. Asset integration. This is where we start plugging in screens, units, and other features that were unit tested but not in the main code branch (i.e. they weren’t in “the game” per se). There are still features that won’t be in beta 2 (most notably tactical battles) but things will seem night and day different than beta 1.
  6. Sound Sound Sound. A lot of time has been put into getting the sound effects and musical score elements into the game.
  7. Map Editor / Campaign. The two are tied closely together. It is our intention to make the campaign in such a way that a modder could create their own campaigns and share with the community. So we’re having to make sure we’re not hard coding things into our campaign.
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Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The more I play games, the more I think music and sound are the most important part for immersion in a game. Even before visuals.

Will there be "contextual" sounds and music ? Like you have lost a huge battle and your ennemies start taking your cities oe after another and the music score change for a dark composition.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting DD-brandon_varn, reply 1
Sweet.

 

The End.

I think we can all echo these sentiments. Good luck on the media tour I guess too.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Nice!...can't wait for Beta2. :pout:

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Nice weather there in Plymouth. Also 8 CPUs with 25.7 GHz and 12 GB Ram. :O

 

Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top

Balance. Yes.

Excellent.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

kochujang: One of the big debates over here...CVS has been our version control choice for years, but SVN is looking to be our next tool of choice once Elemental hits the shelves.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

What the hell is draginol? www.draginol.com/

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Good stuff! I am starting to think that there is a surprise in the works over the way the tactical battles will be handled for it is being kept out for now (Surprise us "Frogboy" with some new awesomeness like you did with the spell editor). 

Off topic of sorts but... I been wanting to pre order but noticed the warning that I will not be charged until I actually get the game. I can be like an absentminded professor and well I rather just order when I can be charged so I do not forget about it. With that said will there be a pre announcement when beta is open for new players again so that I may order then? or will I be to late to get into beta if I do not order now?

Reply #14 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting PyroMancer2k, reply 5
Also 8 CPUs with 25.7 GHz and 12 GB Ram. 

There are actually 4 CPUs. It's a Quad Core. 4 Physical CPU's, but each of those is a "Dual Core", so it shows as 2. When he opens his Task Manager and goes to the "Performance" Tab, he will see 8 Boxes where it says "CPU Usage History" and "Physical Memory Usage History". Still though, unless the Frogster has some kind of Ultra-Mega-Super-Custom Built Machine, you're seeing a Quad Core. 4 CPU's.

To the Non-Tech oriented person, it does appear to be 8 CPU's though. It's a common mistake, no worries.

Reply #15 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting TheProgress, reply 11
What the hell is draginol? www.draginol.com/

 

Frogboy's evil twin ;)

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting astrath, reply 15



Quoting TheProgress,
reply 11
What the hell is draginol? www.draginol.com/


 

Frogboy's evil twin

That implies a non-evil twin. }:) }:)

Reply #17 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Raven, reply 14
Quoting PyroMancer2k, reply 5Also 8 CPUs with 25.7 GHz and 12 GB Ram. 

There are actually 4 CPUs. It's a Quad Core. 4 Physical CPU's, but each of those is a "Dual Core", so it shows as 2. When he opens his Task Manager and goes to the "Performance" Tab, he will see 8 Boxes where it says "CPU Usage History" and "Physical Memory Usage History". Still though, unless the Frogster has some kind of Ultra-Mega-Super-Custom Built Machine, you're seeing a Quad Core. 4 CPU's.

To the Non-Tech oriented person, it does appear to be 8 CPU's though. It's a common mistake, no worries.

Actually, it's just incredibuild- a tool for distributed compilation. He's building on 8 machines.

Reply #18 from Elemental Forums Top

.... YES! Bring FOURTH BETA! BETA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :moo:

Reply #19 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting TarponCrest, reply 12
Good stuff! I am starting to think that there is a surprise in the works over the way the tactical battles will be handled for it is being kept out for now (Surprise us "Frogboy" with some new awesomeness like you did with the spell editor). 

Off topic of sorts but... I been wanting to pre order but noticed the warning that I will not be charged until I actually get the game. I can be like an absentminded professor and well I rather just order when I can be charged so I do not forget about it. With that said will there be a pre announcement when beta is open for new players again so that I may order then? or will I be to late to get into beta if I do not order now?

 

If you order now, you'll be charged when you get into beta, not when the game releases. Being absent-minded, you might miss the beta opening if you don't pre-order, it isn't usually open all that long. It is possible though to order and be charged right away, if you stay on top of when the next beta drops.

Reply #20 from Elemental Forums Top

Map Editor / Campaign. The two are tied closely together. It is our intention to make the campaign in such a way that a modder could create their own campaigns and share with the community. So we’re having to make sure we’re not hard coding things into our campaign. 

That's good, I'm looking forward to see many great custom campaigns :thumbsup:

Reply #21 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 10
kochujang: One of the big debates over here...CVS has been our version control choice for years, but SVN is looking to be our next tool of choice once Elemental hits the shelves.

Since you're switching off CVS so late in the version control ballgame, you should really just skip straight to git.  Branching on svn is way more painful than git, and testing local features and merging in remote branches painlessly has made my development much, much more efficient.

I know if I still had to use CVS, I would be running git locally regardless just to maintain my sanity. 

Reply #22 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Gilith, reply 17



Quoting Raven X,
reply 14
Quoting PyroMancer2k, reply 5Also 8 CPUs with 25.7 GHz and 12 GB Ram. 

There are actually 4 CPUs. It's a Quad Core. 4 Physical CPU's, but each of those is a "Dual Core", so it shows as 2. When he opens his Task Manager and goes to the "Performance" Tab, he will see 8 Boxes where it says "CPU Usage History" and "Physical Memory Usage History". Still though, unless the Frogster has some kind of Ultra-Mega-Super-Custom Built Machine, you're seeing a Quad Core. 4 CPU's.

To the Non-Tech oriented person, it does appear to be 8 CPU's though. It's a common mistake, no worries.



Actually, it's just incredibuild- a tool for distributed compilation. He's building on 8 machines.

Ahh, that would be why I couldn't find a task manager in the picture. I wondered where he was even seeing 8 "cores" and just assumed that's what he was seeing...lol.

Reply #23 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting teflonrabbit, reply 21

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 10kochujang: One of the big debates over here...CVS has been our version control choice for years, but SVN is looking to be our next tool of choice once Elemental hits the shelves.

Since you're switching off CVS so late in the version control ballgame, you should really just skip straight to git.  Branching on svn is way more painful than git, and testing local features and merging in remote branches painlessly has made my development much, much more efficient.

I know if I still had to use CVS, I would be running git locally regardless just to maintain my sanity. 

 

Seconded.  You can use git as a frontend to most centralized version control systems (and if you have halfway decent programmers, odds are that some of them are already doing that and you just don't know), but if you're going to be changing systems *anyway*, cut out the middleman.

 

Incidentally, the thing about branches in git is not just that they're easy, it's that they're so easy that you end up using them as a core part of your work, instead of a weird thing that only Bob the repository guru knows how to manage.  One of those "difference in degree becomes a difference in kind" things.  In CVS or Subversion you would never create a branch just to commit two patches (unless they were really, really important patches); in git, you often would.

Reply #24 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting lambdaman, reply 23

Seconded.  You can use git as a frontend to most centralized version control systems (and if you have halfway decent programmers, odds are that some of them are already doing that and you just don't know), but if you're going to be changing systems *anyway*, cut out the middleman.

I actually use git as a centralized version control system for my work as well, where one machine keeps the "canonical" copy, and we push and pull branches to that location.

Reply #25 from Elemental Forums Top

I was mostly focused on how the temperature thing in the top left corner said 51 and high of 78! Hell, the low here is 78 ;[