This week Elemental Beta is to begin. It will go out to all users who have pre-ordered it. For the rest of September, new users will be able to pre-order and join in as well and then it will be closed (people can still pre-order but they won’t get access until we roll out Beta 2.
ALL REPORTS can go here: Elemental BETA forum.
BETA 1
BETA 2
BETA 3
BETA 4
BETA 5
GAMMA
RELEASE
Betas will also include additions and enhancements to previously released milestones (i.e. additional game modes, additions to multiplayer options, additional single player quests, more single player game options, etc.).
On October 1st, we will have BETA 1A which will implement some of the “game” features that we took out of beta 1 along with a lot of features that we’ve been focusing on since PAX (computer AI, economic AI, research tree stuff, etc.).
The entire BETA 1 (and BETA 2) series will only play on the cloth map (seen above). The cloth map mode will remain the standard game experience for the Elemental beta until the Beta testers (AND Stardock) decide the game is sufficiently fun without having to rely on next-generation graphics. This will take as long as it takes.
Good luck!
Is it possible to join the beta on later stages (like demigod)?
@tesb:
yep
at every beta release (beta 1, 2, 3, etc) they usually let all the previous pre-orders and any pre-orders that are made for the following ~week to have access to the beta. you'll need to tick the 'show pre-release downlads' in impulse settings to see them though.
this has been my experience at least, so although not gospel, pretty confident that's how it'll be.
Part of the goal with Beta 1 will be to make the game run on extremely low end hardware. I.e. Netbook-level hardware.
The oldest computer i've got access to is an athlon 2200+ with ati 9600 256mb and 1 gb of memory. Not sure if they sell any devices which such a low grade setup anymore. (cpu is about 10 years old)
I've got a convertible tablet/laptop thingy, and i'm especially curious how well the game will run in power save mode (with the GPU running on minimal capacity). It would be great for those annoyingly long trips by train.
Do we need impulse etc to run the beta, it would be verry convenient if we could run it from an usb stick (or by copying it from the usb stick to the HDD, so we don't need to download it all over again). Increased mobility of the software increases the devices we could test it on. (over the weekend i'll probably have access to 9 different systems, don't feel like downloading it 9 times me thinks)
it's like you want me to take public transport.
use "the download and archive" option in Impulse, put the archive file on an USB stick. You restore after that from the archive, without needing to download the game again.
a note on that. you can only use the archive made at time of download. if you use an archive you made from the installation it won't have all the files needed to install on a different OS. e.g. and archived installation from XP won't be able to be installed on a vista machine.
saying that i've never had much luck with this feature though. admitedly once because of the above and once for some obscure reason i never fully investigated.
Is there going to be a way to keep archives of all the old builds of Elemental as new ones are released? It would be awesome to go back in a year and play a match of beta 1 Elemental, not to mention how much can be learned from having the resources to so intimately monitor the progression of a game.
you can set the archive folder in the settings. don't know what happens when you create another archive. hopefully it appends a date and or number on to the end of the file name.
otherwise it should be easy enough to move/rename archives you wish to keep to another folder.
As long i don't play it simultaneosly i can i install the beta on all my pc's?
I've one old desktop, one mildly old laptop and one new laptop with good graphics performance.
Stardock sends over one of their necromancers to separate the skeleton and soul of the beta tester from the body. The now merged skeleton and soul is then given specific amounts of death magic to remain animated. The necromancer arrives unannounced and first time beta testers will sometimes fight back thus zombies are usually used to surround the house. Once the necromancer has finished, the beta tester now an animated skeleton gains an average of 8 extra hours of time for beta testing since there's no need to sleep, eat, etc., etc., . The rest of the body is carefully frozen in such a method the body is not harmed nor aged. Once the beta testing is finished Stardock returns the gamer back to original body... Stardock does not reveal the steps for this second phase to protect the intellectual property rights of this beta testing strategy.
For the most part this has worked amazing for Stardock except I heard two individuals received different bodies. Also there's been a few overweight females which refused to return to their original bodies... thus zombies had to be used again to restrain them.
Assumeing I can scrape up the money to buy before beta entry closes I PLAN on being the most active beta tester you've got. Because of certain health issues I won't go into I don't have much of a life right now so all I can do pretty much is sit on my rear and play computer games. Go ahead and send me that NDA now if you want
LoL loved that Jedi, good stuff brother.
hm, now that I have seen the "cloth map" I have but one comment on it... can we keep it ? (maybe as an option hidden somewhere) Just like it
It is said that it WILL be in the game .. when you'll zoom out at max you'll get the cloth map.
Not only that. In the videos from PAX you can see that there is an option to set the "distance" for the switch from fancy 3D to cloth map. In another video Brad said that you'll be able to play on cloth-map only on low-end systems (so the distance can be zero, one can assume).
Yep, and the game is really playable in this state. The more I play, the more I get acustomed to that cloth map. And i've changed two files : the fog of war (made it darker) and the ocean (made it blue). And the visual feeling is just awesome Even with those maps that aren't really diverse.
Could we get this thread stickied please?
There's a stickied copy in the beta forums.
Thanks Tridus!
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