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 11)
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on Aug 27, 2010

Sylar666
I Have AMD Phenom X4 955, 4GB and GeForce GTX 260 and all performance is great! 

I've got the same GPU and my performance is terrible during certain portions of the game.

on Aug 27, 2010

great patch update, it improved things for me keep up the great work.   

on Aug 27, 2010

TheProgress

Quoting Sylar666, reply 147I Have AMD Phenom X4 955, 4GB and GeForce GTX 260 and all performance is great! 
I've got the same GPU and my performance is terrible during certain portions of the game.

 

same thing here but cloth map which they fixed helps alot. sorry for the double post btw.

on Aug 27, 2010

They should really implement a bug database...

My Gawds, I've been asking for something like this since Demigod. I still don't understand why they haven't implemented a simple Bugzilla for crying out lout. Instead of getting post after duplicate post and having to use pastebins, it would be all built into the engine. Bah.

on Aug 27, 2010


+ All tactical actions use up to their cost, except for spells which require at least 2 action points.

Does Wisdom still reduce the AP cost for spell casting?

on Aug 27, 2010

Aack the hotfix to 1.06 prevents me from playing my saves from 1.06!

on Aug 27, 2010

*blinks*

 

Niiiiiice!

on Aug 27, 2010

+ Hooked up the projectile follow camera code to obey the Auto-Move Camera in Tactical option.

 

Thank you! That one was giving me a serious headache.

on Aug 27, 2010

This patch significantly improved my performance, and I am on Win 7 64bit with a ATI Radeon HD 48xx and a dual core PC. (From what I can tell this build seems to be a bug magnet for most people D: ) It is not perfect, but I can actually see the spells being cast! (They never showed up before) and the sound effects do not disappear for like 300 turns! I also just played 250 turns in a row without an out of memory crash. It also has only lost a little performance, whereas in past games by the point I am at now, everything moved at a snails pace.

 

There is still are slowdowns, the sound effects do go away eventually, and there are still a number of weird bugs (like when I hired someone and she joined the people I was about to fight, or when I died out of territory, and for some reason was perfectly fine with my entire army resurrected...) But you guys have come a lot farther then I expected possible in the time you spent. To be honest, the speed at which you worked the last few days makes me wonder why there were any bugs in the first place, but it is probably just a volume issue with the number of PC's it is being run on.

 

Anyway, I am impressed, there is a way to go, but as usual, you have given me confidence that it will get there quickly and cleanly, and this amazing game will be as awesome as it should be.

on Aug 27, 2010

cant load saves? How am i supposed to enjoy the campaign now?

on Aug 27, 2010

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

Fortunately I had stopped playing until some of the most egregious bugs had been squashed (palying some GalCiv2 instead) so I didn't lose anything, but guys please, next time you pull something like this, display a big warning when people click to update to a non-backwards compatible patch, one which they have to OK to proceed. Then people can decide to avoid updating if they like their current game, even bugged.

on Aug 27, 2010

Is this patch overriding mods? Some of my mods have stopped working and I think that the core files are taking priority over them. My theory, anyways.

on Aug 27, 2010

Well, just played a full 45 minutes, without any crashes, slowdowns or errors.

And I've had battle after battle.. and now no more white screen of doom or battle slowdown!

 

This was a huge fix for me! Thanks Stardock people!

on Aug 27, 2010

Amazing fix! Thanks guys! Finally experienced the tactical battles for the first time, and NO CRASHES!!! Great work Stardock 

on Aug 27, 2010

happy that the game is constantly improved, but very annoyed that I cant continue my saved campaign

 

some sort of warning in the release notes wouldnt go astray if this happens in future. i had no stability issues playing the game using previous versions, so would have happily held off on upgrading until my campaign was completed.

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