The game really needs more time I agree. It is a good beta but not ready for release yet unless some major changes/fixes happen within the next 2 weeks.

 

I say good luck, and I hope that you have plenty of sales to reflect the great amount of effort that you put into this project, as well as honoring your commitment to excellence towards your customers.  The level of fun and quality of the game that I'm getting out of FE exceeds my expectations, especially those of a year or two ago -- by quite a bit.  I've had a lot of fun in the beta of FE, and have likely played it more than any of the other released 4x's that have come out in the last few years.

I can still see plenty of little things and balances that would make the game better, but I know there's more patches before the release, and the game's not about to be abandoned after.  A part of me wants to urge you to get it to an even more "perfect" state to have the best reviews possible . .but at some point it has to be released.  The balance passes have already made the game shine a lot more.

Again, congrats at getting to this point!  You've made a game I feel like I could recommend to friends, which is the highest praise I could give.

Jam3 -- While I agree there *might* be a core issue with how elemental makes decision; I do not agree it is related to this phrase: --- I think even further at the root of this problem was the mutli-threading deisgn philosophy. I think it was a great idea but anyone who has written any IPC (inter-process communications) code can tell you the signaling is incredibly complex, If you ever learned C and got really turned around by semaphores this is essentially whats going on but instead of multiple processes its a single process with mutliple threads, same signaling problems. I applaud them for really going for broke with multi-threading and designing an engine from scratch, I just wish they had time to get it to its potential. -- As someone who has written 30,000 line programs heavily threaded with synchronization points - it is not that complicated if layered correctly. Also I think you are assuming this is elemental issue and I would leave it to the developer to comment in that regards. - There *might* be an issue with the underlying model (simultaneous turn) but that is a *different* issue than the actual method of implementation and I think they should be dis-entangled to avoid causing confusion. - As a player I find the issue minor (though it appears that it can lead to a certain 'be fast' exploitation). I believe that the model could be changed slightly if the developers feel this is a core problem without changing the threaded nature of the program.

Yep I have worked on VPN software also heavily IPC intensive, although I happen to think any type of internal or external signaling between threads/processes gets incredibly complex and is definitely more time intensive. I didn't mean to imply the decision was wrong or they should change it, I actually agree with it, but they are kind of alone from the perspective of the number of game companies that make truly multi-threaded games and I think it is tied to the turn based/simultaneous movement. I am just saying they need more time and they need to fix the underlying problem which might mean digging through some pretty deep layers of signaling code.

 

And of course I am making assumptions I am not the type of person to preface everything with "in my opinion" and other obvious statements, never claimed to know anything about the source code or what exactly their doing, I can however judge the results and make educated guesses. And what I am looking at with the AI looks directly related to the "turn" system which I can't even put an exact name on because it doesn;t match any turn system I can think of its definetly a hybrid of a couple of methods. They could even get it to work with enough effort.

Unit movement isn't threaded btw.

As of which version, Frogboy?  I have seen, in .982 Altar place three outposts within a 3x3 square, and it certainly looked simultaneous to me.  If it had not been, they would have realized that there was an outpost close by.

Also in .982 I have seen an enemy (I think it was neutral, but may have been AI) move on the new turn to get out of range of my army.

Simultaneous doesn't mean threaded. 

The AI is threaded and the underlying world engine is threaded.  But the drawing is not in order to synchronize movement and animation together.

Whatever is going on under the hood it is definetly interesting and unique my hat is off to you guys for even attempting to really integrate multithreading more into the game. I would love to hear some elaboration on how ai is threaded but the unit movement isn't, I would think unit movement would be an integral component of the ai itself. I really hope you can nail all this down before release.

 

Yeah I don't know if wires are getting crossed in the wording but this is the type of thing I was thinking about when I thought it was related to multi-threading the ai's actual decision to move, not the movement render itself. It seems like the seperate pioneers all have their own "brain" (ai thread) and those "brains" are not communicating with one another.

 

If any of you have any interest and want to geek out on this stuff I would start here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutex

Ironically, if I could make the movement (actual in game movement, not the destination decision making) multithreaded it would be much easier.  I'm a lot more comfortable dealing with threads than I am with gameloops.

Are u guys using anything other than pure xml for data access like maybe SQLite, I would think and good lightweight rdbms could kinda sit on top of the single and multhreaded space and add a kind of faux shared memory space and handle locking and provide the atomicity it appears is needed.

 

Sorry if I am way off base with all of this.

Wow, you stayed up pretty late, Frogboy!  I hope you have a good sleep.

So after the release how long will it be before the Boat/sea update comes out (if it does?) And what is the time table for full blown (single player game but with other humans with no gimping of the single player expereance) come out?

There's boats in the campaign

 

yea, I wanted to get the monster thing nailed down before the last public update. I'm still up. 

Thats cool, I am familiar with the "... I just need to finish this last bit... (6 hours later)... This laaast little bit!"

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Yes! Hopefully this means I can do something with mods. 

Sorry, hardcoded boats with hidden graphics

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Do we get to play the campaign before release? You are going to be mostly judged on how fun the campaign is by reviewers. To not have it thoroughly tested could be a huge problem. Yes, I want to play with the boats!

 

Seconded.

Looking forward to the campaign here as well.

To be honest I think I'm done with vanilla FE sandbox after all this beta testing.

Haha I know how you feel

I should have a limiter on these kind of things, I start out playing a game 24/7 for 3 weeks, and then I'm done

It will come back once in a while, for certain with some of the mods I have seen.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Dear Stardock:

 

You sons of bitches, I am officially experiencing the "one more turn" syndrome.  Curse/thank you.

Wait, I thought we were all supposed to get cancer and have our computers reformatted! Something's not right here...

Same here.... grrr I almost skipped class to play, almost.

Honestly, the user interface does not represent the game's mechanics very well at all; which is a pity because the game itself is brilliant.  Unfortunately, I believe this will be the number one issue amongst reviewers; and that at least a few weeks repairing the UI from the perspective of a new player are needed for the game to be truly launch worthy.  You only get one first impression, and this is Elemental's second.

It's scary how much potential this game has.