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!