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[Tormy]

I'm hoping that even if the game itself falls flat the mods for it will make the purchase worthwhile.

You bet. Take a look at Civ 4. and mods like FfH II. Decent mods & modding in general is keeping the community active. Now -as we know- Elemental will be much more modding friendly compared to Civ 4. So, what is the conclusion?
I think that the hardest part will be creating 3D units/buildings/whatever in Elemental, but I am not worried. The community will be huge imo, so lot of talented 3d modellers and artists will be active hopefully.. 

[Sean Mirrsen]

If you're interested for some reason, and have not seen this yet, here is a short (1 minute) video of a basic presentation of the game from the GDC 2009. No combat or anything, just showing the engine at work.

[Sowelu]

How do you get it from that page?

[Sean Mirrsen]

If you can get to the page, there's an array of resolution sizes to the right of the image representing the video. Clicking the resolution size allows you to watch the video in-browser with the selected resolution, clicking the file size (if it's not black or red) allows to download it.

[Tormy]

If you're interested for some reason, and have not seen this yet, here is a short (1 minute) video of a basic presentation of the game from the GDC 2009. No combat or anything, just showing the engine at work.

Wow, thanks for the link Sean, the engine will be pretty awesome! 

*edit*
I've found it on youtube also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YpGL6v8fkY

[Tormy]

The World of Elemental
http://forums.elementalgame.com/343697

The continent of Cartagia was broken into two at the climax of the titanic war between “the powers” in what became known as the cataclysm. From this we now have what the inhabitants simply refer to as “the west” and “the east”.

When the world was broken, all was laid waste and much lore was lost. In the time that became known as the “War of Magic”, we saw Channelers begin to return and carve out kingdoms.

During the War of Magic, the world was again largely split between the Kingdom of Altar in the west and the Empire of Magnar in the east. The near millennium migration of Men going westward and Fallen going eastward made the War of Magic largely unavoidable.

Once the Henge had been crossed, it was only a matter of time before both races would strive for dominion over the whole of Cartagia. This is told in more detail Elemental: War of Magic

[Tormy]

Elemental & Civilization 4
http://forums.elementalgame.com/345012

Those of you who know me and the GalCiv team (who are now all on Elemental) know we’re huuuuge Civilization IV fans. If you don’t have Civilization IV, I’m not saying you’re a bad person for not having it.  But I’m not saying you’re not a bad person either.  Though, wait until it shows up on Impulse next month before buying it if you haven’t already.

Anyway, at GDC, Soren Johnson (designer of Civ IV), myself, and Paul “Mormegil” Boyer) had a long lunch together and talked about the challenges we’ve been having in Elemental random map generation.

One of the big challenges we’ve been having has to do with rivers and roads – how do you make them look good in a randomly generated map?  Soren was nice enough to walk us through some of the algorithms they used in Civ IV since they ran into the exact same problem. It’s a real pain in the butt.

We also talked about the challenges of doing big maps.  This is where Civ and Elemental are fairly different largely because of the differences in the engine being used.

In Elemental, the strategic zoom feature lets us have much bigger maps since it’s very easy for people to manage much larger areas because the Elemental map turns into a cloth map where players can instruct units and cities and the like from afar.

Another advantage Elemental’s engine has is technology.  That is, the hardware is just a lot faster which means we can easily create a lot more “stuff” that players can automate without it slowing performance.

One result of that is world size.  In Civilization 4, the largest default map size “Huge” is 104x64 tiles. There are custom maps bigger (138x96 for instance).  But in Elemental, the map size is 224x160.  To give you an idea of that:



And that’s on the 32-bit version of the game.  Assuming Intel gets us a 64-bit Havoc, the 64-bit version of Elemental could be even bigger.

Of course, we also have map sizes that are ridiculously small too (one called “wee” even). 

Having a big map, of course, is pointless if you don’t have the UI and automation in to keep micromanagement from being a pain and of course, like I mentioned, you have to have hardware fast enough to be able to navigate quickly and seamlessly through such a map (A Civilization V would no doubt have maps on the same scale as Elemental for instance).

[Tormy]

Tentative Elemental Development Schedule
http://forums.elementalgame.com/345203

For those of you who have been through the development of a Stardock developed or published game, much of this will be familiar.  For those of you aren’t, welcome!

Early next year we plan to release a new turn-based PC strategy game called Elemental.  Our games typically have 3 betas and then a private “gamma” and then release.  We use the beta to mean truly unfinished, not feature complete but playable (we also use the term “alpha” for truly unfinished but not playable before we move into beta).

Beta 1 is typically the engine test. Beta 2 is the connectivity/multiplayer test. And beta 3 is the balance/fun test. Gamma is where it’s done but we’re doing final bug testing on it.

For Elemental, we want to add a 4th beta that’s earlier than we normally start betas. The reason for this is because we plan to do some pretty radical stuff with Elemental from a game mechanics point of view. Some of these ideas may look good on paper but not be remotely practical.  So for Elemental, we’re going to add a beta 0.

Here is the tentative schedule:

Beta 0: June 2009. 
This won’t be fun and will only play on the cloth map.
The idea being, if the game is fun, it should still be fun without fancy graphics. Finishing Spring and over the Summer, we’ll be trying out all kinds of game mechanics, listening to people in the beta (anyone who pre-orders has the option to participate in the beta) to see what ideas they might have, etc.  It’s a lot cheaper to implement an idea or concept when we only have to represent it with icons on a cloth map.

Beta 1: August 2009.
This is the engine test where we insert the actual graphics engine. The cloth map will still be there for zooming out but now you’ll be able to really play in the world and we’ll start to build onto this.  The game still won’t be fun at this stage but you’ll be able to give feedback on the look, UI, and other game engine stuff.

Beta 2: October 2009.
This is the multiplayer test. It still won’t likely be very fun but you’ll be able to suffer with friends on-line. Elemental’s multiplayer model is client-server (which is the opposite of Demigod which is peer-to-peer). In Elemental’s case, Impulse will host the actual games which means that (in theory) there should be no such thing as “connection issues”. If you can connect to a web page, you should be able to play people on-line in Elemental. 

It will be at this stage when we decide whether Elemental will make its ship date.  We have February 2010 or August 2010 set aside for Elemental based on player feedback (we prefer February but we don’t want to feel rushed).  Right now, we’re running slightly ahead of schedule.

One nice thing about Beta 2 is that the multiplayer features we’re adding into Elemental will also be made available in updates to Demigod for multiplayer users and anything else that uses Impulse Reactor (our development platform).

Beta 3: December 2009.
This is when the game better start getting to be fun. This is where we balance things, etc.

Gamma: January 2010.
This is often called a “release candidate” by other developers but these are private builds where we think everything works but expect there to be some last minute bugs that need to be fixed.

Release: Mid-February 2010.

[IndonesiaWarMinister]

If only I have the money to pre-order this...

This is a masterpiece. Really.

[Little]

Beautiful timing. My birthday is late Feb 

[Sowelu]

Elemental’s multiplayer model is client-server (which is the opposite of Demigod which is peer-to-peer). In Elemental’s case, Impulse will host the actual games which means that (in theory) there should be no such thing as “connection issues”. If you can connect to a web page, you should be able to play people on-line in Elemental.

:suspicious:

I'd damn well better be able to host and let people connect to IP if I want to.  Otherwise, my multiplayer game I bought only lasts as long as they decide to run their servers.  I don't have faith in that lasting more than half a decade.  Hell I've seen services like that go down in less than a YEAR; mind it was smaller companies, but still.

[Tormy]

Gamespot preview [& Brad Wardell mini-interview]: http://gdc.gamespot.com/story/6207014/

----

Why does Elemental need a cool looking world?
http://forums.elementalgame.com/345359

We mentioned in a previous entry that Beta 0 of Elemental will be able to be played on a cloth map.  Now to be clear, not all of the game elements will be able to be handled so abstractly. But enough will be that the basic game could be played on the cloth map.
But some users have emailed me asking why even bother having the zoom in map? And the answer is that a game, in our opinion anyway, is greater than the sum of its parts.  What we hope to make special about Elemental is that each game is YOUR world.

What do we mean by that? Well, at the cloth map level, you’ll be able to label the world as you see fit. Give deserts and swamps and forests names. It’s purely cosmetic but it’s about making the world yours.
When you zoom in, you’ll be able to see the effect you’re having on the world.  At the start of the game, the world is dead. You (and your competitors) are bringing it back to life after the Cataclysm. And how that world evolves depends on your actions.

The way we explain Elemental to some people is to ask if they’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons. If they say yes, then we tell them that Elemental is the world you played D&D in except instead of being a party of adventures, you’re the sovereign of the kingdom that those adventurers were playing in – but the world is still just as rich and interesting as it was before. And to convey that, we have to let players get in close to see and care about that world.

[Little]

Nvm.

[Tormy]

Little, it's not new, I've posted about this already. 

[Tormy]

Elemental: Modding & Single Player
http://forums.elementalgame.com/349782

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

While a lot of Stardock’s development team has been interfacing with Gas Powered Games to continue to improve Demigod, the Elemental team continues forward.

Now a couple of things about Elemental that should be made clear:

Elemental will be a single-player focused game.  It will have multiplayer but most of the development time will be spent on single player.
Elemental will have a story-based campaign. While Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod do not have story-based campaigns, it’s important to bear in mind that Stardock doesn’t develop those games. Galactic Civilizations II and its expansions all have story based campaigns.
I don’t like traditional story-based campaigns.  I.e. we are not going to do a scripted campaign but instead tell the story through the campaign game that will play a little bit like Defender of the Crown (incidentally, designed by my friend Kellyn Beeck, VP of BizDev at Gas Powered Games).
Now, with those 3 points out of the way, let’s talk about modding.

In Elemental, we are building an engine that we are then “modding” into Elemental. The idea is that if we approach the game in that way, the game will, over time, become flexible enough so that players can mod it into all kinds of different land-based, turn-based games.  If we get our way, a modder could take Elemental and make RISK, or a Lords of Conquest game or all kinds of other things like that.

For those of you not familiar with modding let’s break this down into its elemental (no pun intended) parts:

You have asset creation. That is, the ability to make things you can see in the game.
You have item creation. That would be spells, armor, weapons, etc.
You have resource creation. That would be everything from iron ore to magical gems to wood.
You have gameplay scripting. We are using Python and that is where the rules of the game itself are modded.
You have the AI scripting.  Again, using Python, that is where the AI behavior is modded.
For items 1, 2, and 3 you will have the built in modding tools (early version pictured above). What you see above is where the modder can create a particular tile in the game. Maybe it’s a dungeon. Maybe it’s a going to be a city improvement. Maybe it’s ruins on the map.  Who knows.

The plan is that players will be able to save these creations and post them to share with other players.  When these creations are saved, they can choose what “mod” they go with.  Elemental (for instance) would be the default choice that your creation could be used with.  But if someone made a different game mod, they could save it there as well.  That way, a mod could continue to be improved over time by the community.  Players would continue to use the bestiary (you’ll see that late Summer) to choose which mods they want to make available for themselves. 

For items 4 and 5, how flexible this will be will largely depend on time.  Since I code the AI in Stardock games, I’ll have to be careful to make C++ APIs in the game that are fairly generic that I can then call from python scripts. I don’t know Python right now so there will be a learning curve.  Users will be able to mod the scripts as they see fit for single player.  In multiplayer, the scripts will come from our servers in order to make sure everyone is playing the same game (it avoids all that desync pain you see in games when someone has modded something and forgotten). 

So that’s the direction we’re going.  Now, bear in mind here, what I’m outlining here is what are goal is. These aren’t “promises” because as with anything, economic reality may come into play.  But so far, things are going pretty well.