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Elemental: Interim PRE-day 0 update

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Elemental: Interim PRE-day 0 update

from JoeUser Forums

Tomorrow marks the official release of Elemental.  We will have a “day 0” update available as well.

But for those who are interested in trying out an interim version, we’re gearing up to release one tonight.

Here is what was implemented in the past 12 hours:

  • Lots of new seed maps (particularly for medium and large)
  • Enemy Unit caching modified so that they are released from the game after death (this should address the “game gets slower over time” issue some have reported)
  • In tactical battles, the camera will only move IF the unit is off screen
  • Fixed a crash related to city tiles on DirectX 11 based setups with a game within a game
  • Removed non-terrain based tactical battle bonus modifiers (an interesting idea but unintuitive)
  • There are technologies that will spawn more shards on the map.
  • Fixed tactical heal spell to ensure that it doesn’t do any 0 point healing.
  • Fixed issue that caused failed spells to say “miss”
  • Disabled the use of the L8 texture format to use the A8R8G8B8 format as it was incompatible with certain video cards and causing the game to crash (fog of war issue)
  • Worldly knowledge renamed to “Tech Knowledge” to be consistent with the manual.
  • Fixed a crash related to children being born during a reloaded saved game that could cause a crash on 64-bit machines
  • Fixed a crash related to reference counting on the Dynasty screen that happens on 32-bit Windows XP machines
  • Tactical Battles now support edge scroll
  • Fixed a buffer overrun issue that caused random crashing on SSD SATA drives while saving a game.
  • Cosmetic fix to the object tool in th map editor
  • Fixed a bug that would cause the goodie hut graphics not to be removed when they were no longer relevant.
  • Fixed minimap bug where unhiding and dragging the minimap without first resizing it would cause the map part to get offset from the rest of the minimap window, leaving it blank
  • Fixed bug on loading a game or starting a new game within a game where clicking on a city would leave its resource tab blank until it was clicked on again
  • Improved performance of units joining into an army
  • Hooked up the draggable window showing the list of players who have requested a new turn or not in multiplayer, automatically shows up in multiplayer but does not get filled or ever unhide in single player [NOTE: Multiplayer servers will NOT be enabled until AFTER day 0]
  • Fixed crash related to very very fast machines loading up data.zip before initialization causing data to not be fully enabled which would result in a crash when the object in question was accessed.
  • Ice Bolt spell removed
  • New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage.
  • Sion Unit given special abilities and rebalanced

Only 24 hours until the actual official release of Elemental: War of Magic!

236,237 views 75 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top


Ice Bolt spell removed

New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage.

I take it that this is the prototype for the sort of thing you'll be doing with all the generic magical nukes in the near future?  They could really all use some love.

The campaign really embarrasses itself in this regard in the preorder release...you only get a handful of spells, and three of them are Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and Arcane Arrow, out of which Fireball and Arcane Arrow are 100% identical (including damage, cost, and element) and Lightning Bolt is differentiated only by being Air instead of Fire and costing 3 mana instead of 2 for the exact same effect.  Doesn't really give people who are using it as a tutorial a great first impression of the magic system!  Especially since you're never given shard-claiming technology as far as I could tell, making the lightning one 100% useless.

Of course, that's just the pre-release version, and there's plenty of time to work on spells post-release too.  But for the sake of making a good first first impression in the campaign, I would highly suggest that you make sure that those three spells in particular are distinct from each other (or replace two of them with totally new spells) for the real Day 0 release, if you haven't already.  You don't want "why are three out of my four tactical spells reskins of the exact same thing" to be the first thing people ask when they open their spellbook!

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Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm excited about all of these changes, especially the spell differentiation, but is there any way for end users to mod 'tech research' back into 'worldly research', or is that too deeply embedded into the interface? It seems like a kind of ugly, out-of-setting term and it loses the nice dichotomy of arcane and worldly research. It's kind of a silly thing to complain about, but with all kinds of real problems getting fixed, I think it's only fair that I've got to invent some new ones!  :dur:

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

Sounds cool,

 

To download this particular interim version though, do have to make sure the pre-release button is checked in our impulse screen? or do we not need to worry about that?

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

Very cool :). Quick Question. If I make a new Extra Large map, I.E. I lay out the continent myself, how would I go about adding the "Seeds" in XML so I can make that map selectable at the beginning of a single player game and have the game randomly seed it for me? I'm not particularly worried about balance right now, just getting a custom huge map to show in a single player game with random seeding. We covered part of this in our talk on making Huge Maps before but I was making a blank then that had no seed information.

Great updates, thanks chief :)

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

Please make sure "Show pre-release versions" is not checked. ;)  If there's an update, Impulse will show you via an Updates tab.

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

do we have an ETA on what later tonight is, EST?

 

thanks

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Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

Worldly knowledge renamed to “Tech Knowledge” to be consistent with the manual.

Sigh. The manual was the broken bit, prose-wise.

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

Enemy Unit caching modified so that they are released from the game after death (this should address the “game gets slower over time” issue some have reported)

Not that it matters in the long run, but I'm a bit curious about this.  What was the reason for keeping the enemy units in after death?  Was there going to be some corpse looting or necromancy taking place in the future?

Reply #34 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting DragonRider862, reply 26

quoting post
Ice Bolt spell removed

New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage.



I take it that this is the prototype for the sort of thing you'll be doing with all the generic magical nukes in the near future?  They could really all use some love.

The campaign really embarrasses itself in this regard in the preorder release...you only get a handful of spells, and three of them are Fireball, Lightning Bolt, and Arcane Arrow, out of which Fireball and Arcane Arrow are 100% identical (including damage, cost, and element) and Lightning Bolt is differentiated only by being Air instead of Fire and costing 3 mana instead of 2 for the exact same effect.  Doesn't really give people who are using it as a tutorial a great first impression of the magic system!  Especially since you're never given shard-claiming technology as far as I could tell, making the lightning one 100% useless.

Of course, that's just the pre-release version, and there's plenty of time to work on spells post-release too.  But for the sake of making a good first first impression in the campaign, I would highly suggest that you make sure that those three spells in particular are distinct from each other (or replace two of them with totally new spells) for the real Day 0 release, if you haven't already.  You don't want "why are three out of my four tactical spells reskins of the exact same thing" to be the first thing people ask when they open their spellbook!

 

The book 1 campaign is basically a glorified tutorial.

Reply #35 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Gravedancer, reply 33

quoting postEnemy Unit caching modified so that they are released from the game after death (this should address the “game gets slower over time” issue some have reported)

Not that it matters in the long run, but I'm a bit curious about this.  What was the reason for keeping the enemy units in after death?  Was there going to be some corpse looting or necromancy taking place in the future?

It made logging easier.

Reply #38 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting GW, reply 32

Worldly knowledge renamed to “Tech Knowledge” to be consistent with the manual.


Sigh. The manual was the broken bit, prose-wise.

Well Tech is a much better word than "Worldly", in terms of ingame readability.

Reply #39 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting chadwich, reply 37
Will it update automatically through impulse?

Quoting Yarlen, reply 30
Please make sure "Show pre-release versions" is not checked.  If there's an update, Impulse will show you via an Updates tab.

Reply #42 from Elemental Forums Top

Really having a great time with the game! Thanks muchly! It started off a bit slow for me. During the campaign I was having some weird rubber banding effects while trying to move through the swampy area.  It kind of looked like 3 steps forward 2 steps back for a while. A few times my army stack wandered off in the wrong direction all by themselves!  Some kind of weird pathing issues? Hopefully the loading saved game crashes will be fixed shortly.

I actually like the sandbox much better than the campaign.  Once I started with sandbox it clicked and am having a much better time with it.  It surely will be one of those "one more turn before bedtime" games. 

Now if only you can figure out a way to keep my 21 month old from pushing the pretty blue power button on the front of my machine I will name one of my future children after Frogboy (and not just when they are being bad either!)

 

 

Reply #43 from Elemental Forums Top

Amerian females need their eyes, Frogboy!

Reply #44 from Elemental Forums Top

Hey Frogboy, is it true that no units have different resistances?  ie: ice elemental to cold attacks?

 

If not, is this planned to be implemented?

Reply #45 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Cordsmith, reply 42
Really having a great time with the game! Thanks muchly! It started off a bit slow for me. During the campaign I was having some weird rubber banding effects while trying to move through the swampy area.  It kind of looked like 3 steps forward 2 steps back for a while. A few times my army stack wandered off in the wrong direction all by themselves!  Some kind of weird pathing issues? Hopefully the loading saved game crashes will be fixed shortly.

I actually like the sandbox much better than the campaign.  Once I started with sandbox it clicked and am having a much better time with it.  It surely will be one of those "one more turn before bedtime" games. 

Now if only you can figure out a way to keep my 21 month old from pushing the pretty blue power button on the front of my machine I will name one of my future children after Frogboy (and not just when they are being bad either!)

 

 

 

Going into Bios and making a 4 second delay stopped my 18 month old. i also told Windows 7 to ignore my power button.

Good luck! Wait till crackers get shoved into your CD drive!

 

Reply #46 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Rune_74, reply 44
Hey Frogboy, is it true that no units have different resistances?  ie: ice elemental to cold attacks?

 

If not, is this planned to be implemented?

 

i believe there is simply 'magic' resistance. i could be wrong though.

Reply #47 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Baleurion, reply 38

Quoting GW Swicord, reply 32
Worldly knowledge renamed to “Tech Knowledge” to be consistent with the manual.


Sigh. The manual was the broken bit, prose-wise.

Well Tech is a much better word than "Worldly", in terms of ingame readability.

 

Perhaps, but it's also a much worse word in terms of immersion. Even using "technology" instead of just "tech" would have been better.

Reply #48 from Elemental Forums Top

they're making it sound like midnight EST or so from #elemental 

Reply #49 from Elemental Forums Top

Wait... we can expect something tonight? Cool.

Reply #50 from Elemental Forums Top

I was really hoping that this will be addressed quickly  https://forums.stardock.com/391330   Unable to play at all so far as it stays hung up at the splash screen, and no alt +tab or anything.  I had to power crash 2 times, then gave up.  I am confident you will get it done, just hoping for sooner rather than later.

 

Love GalCiv II, by the way.

 

-ENSAIS