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Elemental – coding coding coding

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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.
70,251 views 35 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

@BoogieBac

Cool! :)

We had the same debate 2 years ago at my office, and now we never look back. One thing that still amazes me is how blazing fast tagging and branching in SVN is compared to CVS, especially for big projects.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

-- No text --

Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting vieuxchat, reply 2
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.

Well music is not important in the game because after all I can ply my own but unit and backround sound effects are important. If you have to scrap the music to add better backround and unit/spell effects for sound feel free to do it.

 

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

You may mute the music, but some games really shine if you let it on : planescape torment without music ? No way.

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Bellack, reply 28

Well music is not important in the game because after all I can ply my own but unit and backround sound effects are important. If you have to scrap the music to add better backround and unit/spell effects for sound feel free to do it.

Hmmm Watching Apocalypse Now with Hannah Montana as soundtrack... The Lords of the Rings with Blade's soundtrack... Oh, the possibilities!

Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top

Quoting Wintersong, reply 30

Quoting Bellack, reply 28
Well music is not important in the game because after all I can ply my own but unit and backround sound effects are important. If you have to scrap the music to add better backround and unit/spell effects for sound feel free to do it.
Hmmm Watching Apocalypse Now with Hannah Montana as soundtrack... The Lords of the Rings with Blade's soundtrack... Oh, the possibilities!

What Wintersong (why do you have a cat in a box as an avatar?) is trying to say is that "music is very important. Your wrong. STFU GTFO and RTFM."

I think.

Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Aractain, reply 31


why do you have a cat in a box as an avatar?

 

Cougar crossing ??  :)

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Leo, reply 32

Quoting Aractain, reply 31

why do you have a cat in a box as an avatar?


 

Cougar crossing ?? 

 

LOL Wintersong you truly know how to keep things fun, interesting and informative at the same time... to funny what is next Frogboy crossing? lol

Reply #35 from Elemental Forums Top

I prefer Git / Mercurial (I use Mercurial, but I gather they are very similar) to SVN, which I use at work. The advantages:

 * Merges usually work better.

 * Local commits mean you talk to the server less often. Less network IO going on means many operations are faster.

 * Local commits mean you can commit in smaller chunks, since you don't have to worry about breaking the trunk build until you actually push. Admittedly you can do the same sort of thing in SVN using patches, but those aren't very convenient.

So, if you are going for a big changeover then I agree with the poster who suggested skipping SVN and going straight for one of those.

Also, friendly tutorial: http://hginit.com/