Greetings!
First, thank you everyone who in previous journal entries who have submitted questions to be answered. Anything that reduces my work load makes me happy. Frankly, eating and breathing on my own is a continuing resentment.
So let’s dive right in:
Q: Does the Gamestop acqusition of Impulse affect the free expansions to the Elemental universe customers of War of Magic were promised?
A: Not in the slightest. Stardock Entertainment is a separate business (Stardock Entertainment, Inc.) from Impulse (Impulse, Inc.).
Q: Where does War of Magic stand?
A: We’re still working on v1.2 of it. Without getting too technical, the memory issues that the game has boil down to what is called heap fragmentation. Sins of a Solar Empire pre-allocates its memory and then dishes it out from there. Elemental: War of Magic grows and shrinks in real-time. Over time, memory becomes fragmented and eventually a block can’t be allocated. There are differences between Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 on how this is handled as well as very different effects based on how much memory is on a given video card and the driver model in question. Suffice to say, that’s why v1.2 is taking awhile is that we really want to do it right.
Q: What happens to War of Magic after v1.2?
A: v1.3 is being developed concurrently with v1.2. That’s because v1.3 is pure features so v1.2’s delays don’t affect that. It just means that v1.3 will come out a lot closer after v1.2 than originally planned.
Q: If Fallen Enchantress is in development, why continue with War of Magic?
A: There’s a lot of mundane reasons. But when the beta program for Fallen Enchantress starts, users are going to quickly realize that Fallen Enchantress isn’t an expansion pack. It’s like like Dark Avatar was to GalCiv II. It’s radically different. The second reason is that War of Magic has a lot of potential to continue into the future on its own track. The third reason is just because we like working on it. Our games are labors of love.
Q: When will Fallen Enchantress be done?
A: We don’t have a set complete time. The full team is working on FE right now other than myself and my mini team which is working on v1.2/v1.3. We are not going to have an early public beta of Fallen Enchantress. Its beta will come out largely feature complete. So right now, it’s likely to be a Fall 2011 thing but it could be later. The requirement for Fallen Enchantress is it won’t be released until we are certain it be an overwhelmingly positive experience for our customers. To that end, we have eliminated as many conflicts to that objective such as sacrificing a retail date for it.
Q: Are the hardware requirements for Fallen Enchantress going to be the same as War of Magic?
A: Fallen Enchantress will use Pixel Shader 3 instead of Pixel Shader 2. One of the reasons for this is because Pixel Shader 2 drastically restricted the amount of environmental texturing we could do (i.e. brown brown brown) in Elemental: War of Magic. In Fallen Enchantress, we want the world to be visually much more enchanting and interesting and not be restricted by a hardware requirement (the current pixel shader version is v5.0 to put things in perspective). DirectX 9c is still the standard used here.
Q: Any news on the modding front?
A: Yes. Jon Shafer and I have been working on the mini-campaigns for Elemental: Destiny’s Embers. And so as we work on those we uncover weaknesses in the modding tools that we have been trying to get addressed which in turn should make modding even easier in the future.
Not to get off track, but...really???
I've seen a dev (Brad, actually) post approximately once in the last six months on the modding forums, and it had absolutely nothing to do with features or anything to help modders in any way.
Can we have a race of little people who ride ponies. I love that shit! Gnomes on ponies! Or giant Foxes...Gnomes on Giant Foxes would be even better than ponies!
Make that a new nation for FE. The Titan, Lord Xia, rules over a nation of a small fallen race, known as Gnomes! And they ride mother fucking giant Foxes!
And how about the ability to make a created faction of non-white humans? I see black champions walking around, there has to be enough black people to form a city somewhere.
And is FE or WoM going to have Fallen Champions at some time?
Also, can we make it so everyone can use every peice of armor, gear and weapons. How bout it.
Oh, and I still want ponies. War ponies, riding ponies, and my little ponies.
.
For your first point, I haven't seen that myself. All I've seen is them asking what we'd like changed, and then doing very, very little. So my concern is that when it becomes time to choose and pick, they are choosing the "wrong" things (ie stuff we aren't interested in). As for what features have been implemented, I think I sum it all up when I say that all they've done is 1) put modding in its own folder, 2) the spellresourcecost tag, 3) making it possible to not random-place objects on custom maps and 4) flipping a minus-sign to a positive sign, fixing health leeching attacks (in 1.2).
My point is this, if you are trying to conceive the idea that they are involved in the modding community, you are not wrong - they do talk to us, mostly on IRC, and give us a lot of information that should have been in some form of documentation. If you are trying to conceive the idea that they have worked with us to implement new changes, that would be almost completely wrong.
Secondly, I want to play a AAA fantasy strategy game (or mid-market, whatever). As interesting as mods can be, they will rarely ever equal the greatness of a great underlying game. I can only think of one mod that truly equaled the greatness of the game it was built on and its developer is working for Stardock on E:FE which further supports the idea that E:FE should get the lion's share of resources (and not modding E:WOM) if we want to see a great fantasy strategy game anytime in our future.
For your second point, I'm not asking for more resources to be placed on modding. It is very clear what priority modding has had after elemental was released - almost none. I'm asking that, now that resources are being placed in modding, that they be done in areas the modding community have asked for.
If there have been 0 campaigns released or even approaching alpha/beta done by the community, maybe it shouldn't be something they should focus on.
Yea, don't fuck up the launch of FE, becasue then we might not get more Elemental games, and I want more.[/quote][quote who="Lord Xia" reply="8" id="2917942"]
Lol...ever the diplomat
No.
Just because you can play E:WOM doesn't mean you will be able to play FE.
From your question it sounds like you don't understand what PixelShaders are. It's a graphictechnology that allows cool stuff basically
Here's an explanation: http://www.gpureview.com/pixel-shader-version-article-390.html
Just get a Nvidia MSI TwinFrozr II GTX 560
OR ATI Radeon HD 6950
The MSI Twinfrozr II GTX 560 is the best bang for the buck you'll ever find. Atleast it was two months ago, in Sweden
Here's my concern:
I paid $50 six months ago for a mediocre game.
The way development is going now, in six more months, hopefully I will get a good (or better) game which is similar (but not the same) as the game I originally purchased. So right now I own a mediocre game and a chance at getting a better game. Right now you have happy devs, but unhappy gamers and unhappy modders. (I speak in general terms here, not speaking for anyone specifically.)
If Stardock had applied all of it's vast resources into making WoM a better game, I am 100% certain that by now we would be playing a good (or better) game, the gamers would be happy, the devs would be happy, and the modders would be happy.
The fact that Brad and co. want to make things better is a noble and righteous cause, and I believe they will do it. I'm just feeling like my investment into his vacation home (or whatever) is not turning out so well for me.
I second the motion of gnomes on foxes.
The nVidia GTX 460 is not the greatest, but it is the best buy in terms of power and lifespen for the money you spend.
Graphics cards that support Pixel Shader 3 also support Pixel Shader 2, but not the other way around.
Gnomes on foxes, halflings on ponies, and quarterlings (because why merely settle for just halflings?) on squirles.
It would be nice to seem some non-white folks, though.
And making Fallen Champions and making gear properly wearable is a no-brainer that quite honestly should have happened before launch.
I'll defer to you on the level of modding support that you've seen to this point in WOM. I'm not a modder and have only lurked around the WOM modding community out of curiosity. You certainly have more knowledge of the subject than I do.
I also have no problem with what you are asking for the allocation of modding resources. My second point was not referencing your thoughts on modding resources. It was referencing mqpiffle's complaint that they are allocating resources towards a second stand-alone game at all. I think the idea that the majority of resources should have gone into improving E:WOM modding as opposed to E:FE is crazy. The idea that Stardock should sacrifice/delay a new game to appease modders (because it would NOT have made everyone happy, as mqpiffle said) is insane no matter how you look at it. That was my second point, which I stand by.
Well, they don't "Have" to be gnomes per se. In the book, there were these beautiful, magical nature Fallen, in this special valley or cave, my memory fails me...but the Gnomes could be Fallen like them. They could be little nature, magicy nice fallen on Giant mother fucking Foxes!
Or at least some freaking little goblins and shit. Darklings on Wolves! Comre on, you got Trogs on wolves, and Darlings, make a nation of Darklings on some mother fing wolves!
Be better as Gnomes on Foxes though...
Fascinating stuff.
Definitely fits in with my view of you as a person, and as a businessman. I honestly hope you'll consider teaching part time in an MBA program somewhere when you retire, because you've gone from strength to strength on the kind of values that make for an excellent company in any industry: hard work, personal involvement with customers, strong marketing, honesty and honest (and public!) assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the company as a whole and its products in particular.
That level of accountability and dedication is what drew me to Stardock, and no doubt keeps a lot of people interested even in the face of mediocre launches like WOM.
Plus, it's really friggin rare for a company to pass on a strong income stream because they're not happy with how it's distracting them from a core business. Very much a "wat?" moment.
Lord Xia, you can mod in gnomes as it stands now.
Really cool ! I'm in a hurry and not in a hurry at the same time for FE... Why? Because I want them to take their time to make an amazing game and not another WoM ! [e digicons]:'([/e]
I don't know GameStop but I'm looking at current Impulse featured titles: SHIFT2 - US&C, DARKSPORE - US&C, SIMS-MED - US&C (!) What The Gnome it's all about?
I just hope it's just sad sad EA with their sad sad different release dates in different regions (and sad sad EA STORE with sad sad localized versions). It's sad. Apart of it I don't see any changes in Impulse - good or bad.
I know I can mod in gnomes as it is now. I've actually modded in Goblins and Gnomes already. You can mod a nation of black people too. But, I hate the response to things to be "make a mod". The game should be made with a certain level of interesting nations, people and races already. And having the option to go into the game files and being able to change skin colors or height is nice, but not as nice as simply having the option in the faction creator to change skin color and height.
... no doubt there's a reason he keeps bees.
Also, I just thought of something to bitch about, so I'm going to
Some of the races in the game, "Men", "Trogg", "Mancers" etc.. have a lot of clothing options, while others have very little. But what I'm bitching about it the incredible amount of time it took to design those clothing options that are almost never actually seen in the game vs how little was done for Armor and how that is all we see. How about just a t-shirt and jeans (or the post-apocalyptic medieval world version) for every race and work on different and unique armors for each race? That would be cool for FE.
Yeah! Hopefully you take a look at the community mod request post. I know that there is a campaign section on the mod download page but don't think it is actually supported at all. Will we get tools to build our own campaigns? That would be cool.
My personnel pet peeve is that quests are very very hard to code right now, to the point that 99% of modders avoid them. Quests are a part of elemental that could really use more variety, and the game would benefit hugely if it was easy for modders to create quests. A quest editor would be ideal.
As wary as I still am about the Gamestop deal *proceeds to beat the badly beat dead horse* I am very excited to hear this news, Brad.
I like the Stardock games very much and would hate to see them soured to making games from our backlash about Gamestop. Keep it up guys, I'm looking forward to Fallen Enhantress (and Rebellion)
Thank you.
New FAQ Question: Will FE have a story-driven single-player campaign and, if so, in which ways will this differ from the WOM's campaign?
A: ?
New FAQ Question: Will there be a comprehensive manual for FE and, if so, in which ways will this differ from the WOM's manual?
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
