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 6)
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on Aug 26, 2010

Any ETA on the release of 1.06?

on Aug 26, 2010

The 1.06 didn't fix the white screen in occasional tactical battles for me. Have the debug, will research what to do with it.

on Aug 26, 2010

diamondspider
Sorry guys, I've just never heard of graphical performance issues that weren't helped by lowering settings That really does suck.

Hey Diamond, since everyone is different and has their own idea of what is an "ideal performance", what is your frame rate at? More importantly, what is your frame rate at when viewing cities? Are you playing on the cloth map or the 3D map?

 

ARFF1Tampa
The 1.06 didn't fix the white screen in occasional tactical battles for me. Have the debug, will research what to do with it.

The 1.06 update isn't even live yet .

on Aug 26, 2010

TheProgress

Quoting diamondspider, reply 74Sorry guys, I've just never heard of graphical performance issues that weren't helped by lowering settings That really does suck.

Hey Diamond, since everyone is different and has their own idea of what is an "ideal performance", what is your frame rate at? More importantly, what is your frame rate at when viewing cities? Are you playing on the cloth map or the 3D map?

 


Quoting ARFF1Tampa, reply 77The 1.06 didn't fix the white screen in occasional tactical battles for me. Have the debug, will research what to do with it.
The 1.06 update isn't even live yet .

 

haha, i went and checked first thing i saw that post

on Aug 26, 2010

I'm zooming in and out all the time, looking at cities much of the time zoomed about halfway out... I rarely use cloth map, and rarely zoom all the way in.

I'm not even sure how to check my frame rate, but when I freshly load a game, it seems everything runs as I'd think it should. Note that even with 6GB, I do see memory leaks slowing things down in tactical combat after a while (not to mention dropping particles, sound effects, and such). I don't consider those problems performance issues though. Things do move a bit slow in the town when I zoom way into the town, but when I move a unit around on the map, it seems to move at a normal rate.

on Aug 26, 2010

diamondspider, never? I've heard of and seen it alot in other games too
It depends on various things, mostly memory leaks or cpu-bottlenecks. If your fps isnt improving even when lowering the graphics thats a sign of the game using the cpu way too intensively, or that its just coded in a shitty manner (an example of that would be Space Empires V).

on Aug 26, 2010

TheProgress

Quoting Werewindlefr, reply 70
Way to make the game even more imbalanced towards squads.

What are you talking about?

https://forums.elementalgame.com/392412

Now, going for quality instead of quantity is even worse.

on Aug 26, 2010

ARFF1Tampa
The 1.06 didn't fix the white screen in occasional tactical battles for me. Have the debug, will research what to do with it.

 

I'm not sure what you are smoking, or if this is a troll post but wow.

on Aug 26, 2010

Also note that I NEVER use AA in any game as I can never see the difference and is know it tends to slow things down.

on Aug 26, 2010

Guys, I was on the fence about  buying the game, since I barely have time to play what I already own.  However, Stardock has earned my loyalty with Sins, Demigod, Majesty 2, etc.  When I saw how hard you guys are working to quickly release the patches, I decided to send my dollars your way.  The game is installing now.  Keep up the good work and realize that you are appreciated.

Scott

 

on Aug 26, 2010

Werewindlefr

Now, going for quality instead of quantity is even worse.

I disagree. The biggest problem with the combat right now is how attack and defense stack.

on Aug 26, 2010

To the Stardock/Elemental team. I think many people including my self REALLY appriciate the work you guys are putting into Elemental.. I liked the Day-0 version.. The v1.05 was REALLY good! Can't wait for v1.06... A round of digital 01010111010101 beer on me! Cheers guys!

I've already put in A Lot of hours in my favourite game of all time (Elemental: War of Magic). Keep up the good work, but get some rest also, you guys have deserved it

on Aug 26, 2010

patch is out

 

9.43 mb

on Aug 26, 2010

Well it's reassuring to see that the stardock devs are still as productive with their patching as they ever were with GalCiv 2.  I mean even though I think the game feels a little rougher than your release of GalCiv 2 was at first, I can't say it's not fun.  I feel pretty confident from my past experience with you guys that these frustrating (though usually not fun-crushing) bugs will be fixed relatively soon so I can start looking forward to an ever refined AI like we all got with CalCiv 2. 

Keep up the hard work, I'm sure you'll all near dead from exhaustion.  For your next big release, just remember the zombie-like state of sleep deprivation when the bosses whine about extending a beta test and pushing back a release.  We know you guys can make great polished games, and most of us will still be excited if we have to wait an extra month for you to do a more thorough shakedown.

I've coordinated beta tests in the past myself and I bet I know why some of these issues caught you guys off-guard.  People will tend to excuse the occasional crashes (especially when you guys include such a life-saving autosave feature) in a beta product.  This results in under-reporting of bugs out of complacency more than laziness.  I'm sure that's why the memory leak snuck by testing.  I don't remember if the beta version auto-submitted crash reports but even when I've set that up in the past, you can always have a crash so hard the bug submission mechanism doesn't get a chance to run.  I tried using a bug submission system once where we had the program submit memory dumps on crashes, but keep a "recent snapshot" every so often.  We also had it create a file upon opening, delete the file upon successfully closing (or upon successful crash reporting.)  When the program started and saw the file was not deleted, it would then prompt to send the last snapshot and allow the user to fill out an explanation of the last crash.  We had to do that as a yes/no prompt with comments to weed out all the submissions we would have received from power failure.

Again I only got to try the beta briefly at a friend's place early on so I have no idea what kind of bug submission system you guys used.

on Aug 26, 2010

patch is out

AWESOME!

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