CariElf

Fixing the Zone of Control (Influence) in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

The Zone of control (ZOC) code has always been a bit odd since it was written for GalCiv2, with weird little bubbles, twists, etc. But it mostly worked in GC2, and I didn't have time to give it a lot of love when porting it to the new engine. The code to update the ZOC is also fairly inefficient, which is why it only updates at the end of a turn. The ZOC expands based on the influence of the city and the player's influence ability. It works by specifying

Reply to Save games stored to cloud? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

We have the technology already but it's currently only implemented for Multiplayer. You could actually create a multiplayer game with only AI players, but you wouldn't have quests or tactical battles. It would mostly require some UI changes in game, but we'd also have to consider how many saves we'd let you have stored in the cloud, etc. It's not on the schedule right now, but I'll ask about it getting on the schedule.

Reply to UI Modding - Desktop X builder in WOM Mods Elemental Forums

Is the image width greater than 1024 or is the size of the object > 1024? I don't think that the screen code likes textures with widths > 1024, but objects can use tiling or stretching to achieve a width of greater than 1024. Also, this code: Object.Left = (Object.Parent.Object.Width / 2) - (Object.Width / 2) centers the object in the parent object because the object's hotspot is always the upper left hand corner of it's bounding r

Reply to [1.09E] campaign crash {fixed arrow miss} in WOM Support Elemental Forums

It crashed in the rendering code, which is usually either an out of memory error or a driver error, so I don't think it was specifically a campaign problem. I've got the battle guys looking into why archers are missing. You're not using any mods, are you?

Reply to Elemental: v1.09E Changelog in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="Vorell" reply="23" id="2798241"]When I go to multiplayer all the text is missing, I can mouse over and get the info, but can't see it without doing so.[/quote] Can you please put up your debug.err with pastebin or something??

Reply to Elemental: v1.09E Changelog in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="Vhorthex" reply="14" id="2797913"]When will coop Multiplayer be enabled? (2 Humans Vs AI) I'd love to participate to give feedback for the MP version, but I'm not the least inclined of playing a versus game. I'd hope that since Frogboy himself said that it would be the most enjoyable way of playing it, that you'd make it available. All the feedback that will be given if from versus games, I think Coop needs to be given some attention as well. No? R

Reply to [Bug} 1.09E Load Mod Maps in War of Magic Elemental Forums

This is the same bug as the one reported by Franciscus in the change log thread. We'll post a fix tomorrow.

Reply to Elemental: v1.09E Changelog in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="Franciscus" reply="10" id="2797864"] quoting post (...) + When you load a map from the world setup screen, it now updates the world size spinner (...) This is not working for the war of magic and the destiny's ember's maps. Not only their size is not showing, but when loaded they do not update the world size spinner (eg, it remains the last selected size) and even sometimes selecting one of these 2 maps results in a CTD - thi

Reply to About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="Flexscan123" reply="50" id="2797288"]We have been playing MULTI GAME several times by 4 or 5 ppl. 1.09b is more better than 1.08b. BTW, we may not often notice that a turn has already begun. We'd like to see message "Turn xxx start" in every turn. [/quote] We've also added a turn start message.

Reply to About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

We've added in options to turn off the timer entirely and a slider to increase the turn time. They're currently only on the options screen under game options, but we'll probably be adding a multiplayer options screen to access off the world setup screen at some point.

Reply to Mouse problem in WOM Multiplayer Elemental Forums

Did you try switching to hardware mouse in the options?

Reply to About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="Iytzchizck" reply="26" id="2785955"]Will custom sovereigns and custom factions be added into multiplayer at some point? The customization features are such an integral part of this game, it's really a shame if they were to be left out of multiplayer![/quote] Yes. [quote who="zigzag" reply="32" id="2786769"]Carielf, what's the point (in terms of amount of gamestate information) at which you have to ditch something like a client-server model and implement a simultane

Reply to About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="1SuperG" reply="16" id="2785673"]Since you brought up pain... This 10 second timer thing either needs to be per game adjustable or needs to go all together. If another player simply wants to hit "Next Turn" and I'm trying to stage several events, I'm hosed if I can't make everything happen in 9 seconds. Also, I got locked up in my game where I couldn't end a turn at all. I could click on all sorts of things, but I could NOT progress the turn. 20 minutes

Reply to About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="impinc" reply="13" id="2785578"]I'm confused. Why play an online match 1 vs AI? I consider multi-player to be when more than one human is playing the game. It just seems like a weird option. Is the AI going to be different? [/quote] Currently, multiplayer games are the only ranked games, so 1 v AI allows players to try out multiplayer and gain ranking without having to jump into an all human game immediately, much like League of Legends has you play test games before

Reply to About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

[quote who="Nikitosina" reply="1" id="2785229"]Thanks for the lection of old client-server technology. Why don't you run dedicated multiplayer server like battle.net but smaller? Give me your thoughts about this.[/quote] We are using dedicated servers. All players connect to one of our servers, and the first one to connect to the server is designated the host. [quote who="SmilingSpectre" reply="3" id="2785240"] quoting postNow, since turns are simultaneous, it's pos

About multiplayer in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

It's been awhile since I've written a dev journal and we've got some new faces around here, so I'll take the opportunity to introduce myself. I'm Cari Begle, and I'm Stardock's Senior Game Designer and the programming lead on Elemental. I've been working here at Stardock for 10 years. Today I'm going to talk about Multiplayer. I'll start with a quick rundown of the features for the people who haven't tried the beta, and then get into some techie talk for those

Reply to Global Mana Pool Design Revealed in War of Magic Elemental Forums

[quote who="Robert Hentschke" reply="145" id="2784316"]Yes, but they can cast all of "your" spells as well, in addition to the spells they own themselves. Except that they can only "own" the first 127 spells of the game. Someone thought it would be funny to only use 7 bits for that value.[/quote] Do you have a save game or something that demonstrates this? We use 32 bit integers for pretty much any indexed value, so it's highly unlikely that the spell books would use anythi

Reply to CAN'T END TURN!!! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

In your save game, it looks like somehow one of the AI units got added to the player's unit list twice, so it saved the unit twice, which caused a problem as soon as you loaded it. We're trying to track down the cause now, but there's nothing obvious since we're already doing a check to see if the unit is already in the list.

Reply to CAN'T END TURN!!! in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Did this game start out in 1.07? I got an error from the event system while loading, which would explain your stuck turn. The unit that was having the problem would never get its orders.

Reply to Patches in WOM Support Elemental Forums

We won't start mailing patch CDs until we've stopped updating so frequently. At the moment, it's far more convenient to have Impulse installed.

Reply to [Bug/Graphics] No background or buttons in menu in WOM Support Elemental Forums

First go to C:\ProgramData\Stardock\Elemental - War of Magic\screens and clear that out, or C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Stardock if you're on XP. Then before you start Elemental, go to My Documents\My Games\Elemental and open prefs.ini in notepad or some other text editor. Try setting MaxTextureAtlasHeight=1024. Save the file. Then run Elemental. It should take a bit longer to startup because it should be re-generating the textur

Reply to [Bug/Graphics] No background or buttons in menu in WOM Support Elemental Forums

Can you please let us know if 1.06 resolves this? Thanks.

Reply to Installs Game Definition files stopped responding error??? in WOM Support Elemental Forums

Try excluding GDF_Elemental_install.exe from any anti-virus or security programs you have. It does 3 things on install/update: 1) Adds Elemental to the Games explorer if it isn't there already (on XP it adds info the registry so that if you upgrade Elemental will automatically show up in the Games explorer) 2) Clears out and re-creates the texture atlases to make sure that you have the updated textures for the interface 3) Adds firewall exceptions for Elemental (

Reply to Installs Game Definition files stopped responding error??? in WOM Support Elemental Forums

Can you please post your debug.err using pastebin or a similar service?

Reply to Repeated Crashes - Debug and Crash Files In Post in WOM Support Elemental Forums

Yep, the first two were definitely in the the graphics driver. The third one is a crash that we fixed in the 1.01 patch that went up last night, but you may as well wait for tonight's patch because we still need to find an end of turn crash.