Hotfix, Stability Pass and More - Not Compatable with Old Saves!!
Published on August 26, 2010 By ScottTykoski In Elemental Dev Journals

Hey guys!

Got a fancy new build coming your way tonight. The big fix we wanted to get out there was for the "white screen" that happened in tactical battles on certain setups (this should also fix memory issues those players may have encountered).

We're testing this internally now and we'll let you know when its public. In the meantime, here's the changelong of various additions and bugfixes...

10:08pm - Just finish testing the major bullet points...giving it one last look over (a be triple sure when the boss isn't around) then we'll start the mirror uploading.

11:10pm - It's out!  Stop reading this post and go update!!!!     

---------------------------------------------------------
----------- Elemental v1.06 Change Log  ------------
---------------------------------------------------------

**********************
* Gameplay / Balance *

+ Cost of weapons increased in terms of gold and materials
+ Monster leveling tops out earlier so that there aren’t crazy powerful monsters late game
+ Training time increased for the more sophisticated weapons
+ AI will focus more on training soldiers rather than building up their cities if under threat
+ General AI improvements
+ AI smarter about training units in cities based on their current resource situation
+ AI more effective at determining who to go to war with
+ By default, the AI opponents added in the Choose Opponents window get difficulty set based on the World Difficulty
+ Campaign: Markinn now gives tactical HASTE spell instead of strategic SUMMON ROCK GIANT spell
+ Campaign: city leveup bonuses for TECH KNOWLEDGE and ARCANE KNOWLEDGE now suppressed in campaign
+ AI sov's are now using an HP adjustment multiplier based on AI difficulty settings

***********
* Battles *
+ Hooked up the projectile follow camera code to obey the Auto-Move Camera in Tactical option.
+ Adding message boxes to explain why spell casting fails.
+ Fix to repick targets in autoresolve when a counterattack kills the attacker.
+ Fix to make targeting picking more intelligent (to be sure it doesn't pick invalid targets).
+ Auto selection of the next unit in tactical battles should no longer occur if the game option for not auto selecting is turned on.
+ Tactical action cost modifiers for everything except for movement (which can have buffs) should now be 1.
+ The tactical action cost of special abilities is now 2.
+ All tactical actions use up to their cost, except for spells which require at least 2 action points.
+ When a tactical battle closes it now sets the cursor to be an arrow.

******
* UI *
+ Fixed Map Notifiers only placed for resources your faction can eventually tap (ex. won’t tell kingdoms about wargs)
+ Trade Equipment Wnd tweaks so that summoned creatures show up in the scene views better.
+ Hooked up new entries for the actions list, vitals list, and other basic image entries in main game wnd contexts to act more like buttons (highlight and have a click down state) to indicate that they are clickable

*************
* Bug Fixes *

+ Fixed the infamous "white screen" in tactical battles that occurred on a very specific hardware/driver/OS configuration.

+ Fixed a problem that would cause the particle effects to disappear after alt-tabbing out of the game when running in full-screen.
+ Fixed a DirectX warning in Tile Highlight Graphic
+ fixed uninitalized UNIT pointer in AIMessageBox (caused a debugger crash, probably fixes random crashes users have witnessed)
+ Fixed bug where linked pioneer improvements were getting the multiplier bonuses from their linked cities twice
+ Changed around the values grabbed for some resource breakdowns so that they match getting rid of this double bonus
+ You can no longer build pioneer improvements on resources outside of your ZOC, even if they are adjacent to a city, to prevent them from getting destroyed if they can't get absorbed in time
+ Adjacent pioneer improvements to cities now get absorbed into the city the very next turn, instead of 2 turns after they became adjacent
+ Fixed bug where custom empire factions designed in the faction designer wouldn't have a valid tech tree
+ Custom factions now get the appropriate wall set, and change their name to "Kingdom of" or "Empire of" appropriately
+ Fixed a bug in the faction designer that caused the race spinner to not match the actual race being displayed
+ Shortened the text in the caravan info cards to make it less likely that text entries will overflow to the next line down, and got rid of some old text that doesn't mean anything to how caravans work anymore, and got rid of some hardcoded strings, and moved the hardcoded quote to the different caravan/trader unit types
+ CMapGenerator no longer generates race starting position for tactical battles, since they aren’t used in that mode and were causing debug messages to flood output as the random land tile buffer isn’t getting filled after the first tactical battle map is created.
+ Campaign: Fixed oddity where reloading a save would reblock the pass between New pariden and Gilden.

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

** Hotfix Update **

We've released a 1.06 hotfix - despite our intentions were to have 1.06 be more supportive of 1.05 saved games, things didn't work as planned and we were seeing a lot of oddities throughout the forums.

The hotfix will force the player to start with the new data, ensuring validity of key components (read: less crashy).

Enjoy!


Comments (Page 10)
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on Aug 27, 2010

Xilaros

Quoting TofuES, reply 131People in Australia can't update their games, don't make me apply diplomatic pressure.

 

Aah, well that explains why I can't update then!

 

I'm in Aus and I have?

on Aug 27, 2010

BoogieBac
OK, have an update concerning the saved games.

We had put some code in there to try and get v1.05 to work in 1.06, but (despite a friendly warning dialog) there just seem to be too many problems with backwards compatability. We'll be putting out a hotfix that will require fresh games, but in the long-run it'll result in a better playthrough (people having all sorts of weird turn-button issues and such currently).

We'll be IRC as the new exe is staged!

I'm not sure I understand here.

I've updated to 1.06.

It's a pity not being able to use properly my savegames, but it's ok.

Only thing I want to know is: can I start a new game now (in Italy it's "playing time" now ), or it's better that I wait for this hotfix (approximate ETA?). What I mean is: if I start a new game now, I will be able to use it after updating to the hotfix? If yes, I will get all the hotfix improvement in it?

Thanks for your info!

on Aug 27, 2010

cammangno74: Better to wait for the hotfix for a fresh game   Shouldn't be too much longer (2:05am here, so well past playing time in the states)  

on Aug 27, 2010

BoogieBac
cammangno74: Better to wait for the hotfix for a fresh game   Shouldn't be too much longer (2:05am here, so well past playing time in the states)  

First of all, great job!  I am really enjoying this game!  I feel for the people having problems but I have encountered none so far.  Everything seems smooth as silk.

Having said that, can you tell us what the hotfix does?  Is it something I could avoid getting till the next major patch?  I would like to keep playing my current game. ( I am playing 1.06 right now )

Thanks

on Aug 27, 2010

BoogieBac
cammangno74: Better to wait for the hotfix for a fresh game   Shouldn't be too much longer (2:05am here, so well past playing time in the states)  

 

Thanks for the quick reply! 

Impulse just shaw me an update from 1.06.18 to 1.06.19. Is it the hotfix we were speaking about?

on Aug 27, 2010

my update keeps getting stuck at about 60.4 %. any ideas why??

on Aug 27, 2010

Why is the cost for special abilities hardcoded? Each ability should have it's own cost depending on its effects. This will help modders creating new units wich several abilities...

on Aug 27, 2010


NOTE: This version is not totally compatible with Saved games from previous versions. YMMV.

It's very nice to see bugs fixed, but I really wish you guys could take backwards save compatibility seriously.  You're not in beta anymore.

I don't really mean to sound angry, I just want to help you guys.  The players who frequent this forum and reply to your posts are abnormally forgiving.  Please take a moment to think about how this makes you look to an "average" buyer of Elemental.  Elemental, where each game is a grand story being played out:

  1. Player is having hours of fun with creating a sovereign and crafting a mighty empire under the constant threat of two neighboring nations.  Things are about to get interesting now, as he has allied with one of the nations and they are about to move to crush the third.  He has created magnificent knights in shining armour, an army of archers, and his royal princess has been out hunting spiders for training until she is a total kick-ass battlemage.
  2. Player calls it a day (or late night), saves the game and goes to bed.
  3. Next day: Update?  Cool, that might get rid of my turn button lockup and disappearing sounds.
  4. It's broke? My game! Cinaera the battlemage is gone. My nation is gone. My story is half-told.
  5. Roll a D6.  1 - "Allright, I'll start over.", 2-4 - "Should I even bother starting a new game? ", 5-6 - Angry rant about Elemental on blog or some game community forum somewhere, where several potential buyers get a bad impression of the game.

But apart from that: Good job with all the fixed bugs. 

on Aug 27, 2010

Aryaxon
my update keeps getting stuck at about 60.4 %. any ideas why??

I'm seeing the same issue, the Impulse error log file shows a 504 error (Gateway Timeout)... I guess everyone is trying to get the update at the same time??

Anyway it's better than the 48% I was stuck at before

on Aug 27, 2010

I'm only slightly worried that the rise in price/cost of weapons is going to make the early game very, very, very tedious and boring.

on Aug 27, 2010

v1.06.019 is up!

Aryaxon: Try canceling the install and restarting it...perhaps it got confused with the hotfix being staged at the same time?

neroir: The battle guys are giving the spell/special abilities format another pass to address several concerns, and I beleive the Action Pts cost will be an optional paramater that people can play with...and if not, I will ask them to add it

brillantgrapefruit: Yeah, we really tried to get those 1.05 saves working through to this patch, but the compatability code was having nothing of it. We'll give said code a look over and get it more bulletproof.

OK, off to bed...words aren't coming out of my brain correctly anymore.

on Aug 27, 2010

I Have AMD Phenom X4 955, 4GB and GeForce GTX 260 and all performance is great! 

on Aug 27, 2010

BoogieBac
v1.06.019 is up!

Aryaxon: Try canceling the install and restarting it...perhaps it got confused with the hotfix being staged at the same time?
 

 

Yeah, haven't done that 10 fucking times.

on Aug 27, 2010

If there's nothing in the changelog about it guys you can safely assume we're still working on the issue

 

So no fix for out of memory errors...sadface.

on Aug 27, 2010

Well the 1.06.019 patch doesn't seem to be backwards compatible with 1.06.  This really is aggravating.  I had a really good game going and honestly this is wasting a lot of time.  I feel like I shouldn't even bother playing at this rate.  How many patches are we going to go through here in the first week?  Two weeks?  It would help determine how I'll spend my free time.

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