Elemental: Interim PRE-day 0 update

from JoeUser Forums

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!

236,110 views 75 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Nice. Any word on getting this (https://forums.elementalgame.com/391302) fixed? Makes the game completely unplayable for some of us.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

We are looking into it. Thanks to your report, we were able to assemble an XP SP3 + GTX 260 + running at at very high resolution.

You can probably get around the issue by lowering your resolution.  Basically, the nVidia drivers on XP don't support the unusual memory configuration of that card (900MB).  If you ran the game at as 1280x1024 I think it would work.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Frogboy,

I was out of town yesterday and at work all day today so no EWOM until this evening.   But so far this evening:

The pre day 0 version was worth the wait.   So far stability has been good and gameplay very interesting.   Changes in the user town interface have been very useful in speeding gameplay.  Overall first impression is very good.

More later.

Thanks to you and the rest of Stardock for all your hard work on EWOM.

 

Xaltotun

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Fixed a crash related to city tiles on DirectX 11 based setups with a game within a game

 

I  N  C  E  P  T  I  O  N

 

 

 

On a serious note though, good job! Nice to see all of these bug fixes happening so quickly. You guys rock! However, some of you should probably sleep at some point!

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Have you guys worked on any of the general framerate/performance issues on the 3D map?

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 2
We are looking into it. Thanks to your report, we were able to assemble an XP SP3 + GTX 260 + running at at very high resolution.

You can probably get around the issue by lowering your resolution.  Basically, the nVidia drivers on XP don't support the unusual memory configuration of that card (900MB).  If you ran the game at as 1280x1024 I think it would work.

Great thanks for the tip. Probably explains why I never encountered the the bug during the beta (was playing the game in windowed mode at a lower resolution).

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Now that's a nice changelog for 1 day.

 

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting HarveyBernstein, reply 6
Compatible with saved games?

Yes, you should be able to load existing save games.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Compatible with saved games?

Yes.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

nice. Glad to see you're supporting us through this early release. Fun game (even though I'm an ATI user which makes things rough ;; )


My poor notebook is getting raped :/ Is there a way we can feed you our technical specifications? I noticed per every ... half an hour? of gameplay it consumes ~200 more MB. I'm on an ATI card (a Mobility series, not the 5xxx series. THAT computer is in the garage right now ;;)

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

also, forgot to ask (I'm on a cell phone connection == very slow internet, so not gonna edit... do not want to know how long it took to download Elemental :/ )

 

Will our campaigns/saved games be invalidated per patch? Or will they be loading the old XML and using the new kernel? Or is the old XML converted to new XML? Basically... if I have the Ice Spellbook, will I get this new spell? If I have a Sion, will I use the old or the new unit design? and so on.

Reply #15 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting drakkheim, reply 9
Now that's a nice changelog for 1 day.

 

 

Heh. Day 0. The game isn't officially released until tomorrow. We just don't like to procrastinate. :)

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting HobsonA, reply 14
Why was ice bolt removed?

 

It was basically the same as flame dart. We're trying to move away from generic spells.

Reply #17 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting awuffleablehedgie, reply 13
also, forgot to ask (I'm on a cell phone connection == very slow internet, so not gonna edit... do not want to know how long it took to download Elemental :/ )

 

Will our campaigns/saved games be invalidated per patch? Or will they be loading the old XML and using the new kernel? Or is the old XML converted to new XML? Basically... if I have the Ice Spellbook, will I get this new spell? If I have a Sion, will I use the old or the new unit design? and so on.

 

No. Save games and such will still work though the data will be old.

Reply #18 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting HobsonA, reply 14
Why was ice bolt removed?
it was replaced with .."New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage." would have been better text.. looks like they are trying to differ the low level attack spell in ice from fire... not a bad thing..

Reply #19 from Elemental Forums Top

Any progress on the memory leaks that cause the game to slow to a crawl? Kyro posted in this thread https://forums.elementalgame.com/391534, but I was wondering if you guys had figured out anything yet.

Reply #20 from Elemental Forums Top

Any progress on the memory leaks that cause the game to slow to a crawl? Kyro posted in this thread https://forums.elementalgame.com/391534, but I was wondering if you guys had figured out anything yet.

I would keep my eye on and post in that thread.. easier for them to track that way ...

Reply #21 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Twohawks, reply 20

Any progress on the memory leaks that cause the game to slow to a crawl? Kyro posted in this thread https://forums.elementalgame.com/391534, but I was wondering if you guys had figured out anything yet.
I would keep my eye on and post in that thread.. easier for them to track that way ...

 

Frogboy talked about removing dead enemies from cache and how that might be it. second bullet in the lsit

Reply #22 from Stardock Forums Top

I'm running pretty smooth... few things:

-100% crash on Alt-tab (direct X error)

-In some cases, hitting the "back" arrow in the docs (hiem..whatever) crashed the system. Might want to have a feature that says IF no object to browse to DO nothing, I was pretty deep in nested browsing at that point, so trying to debug all that might take a while.

-I had a case where it kept saying "must build on open tile" when I was on open tiles. After wasting 6 precious turns wandering around, simply making the Pioneer leave the group made it work right away. I summoned a minor elemental into my army, which wasn't showing (both another bug and possibly connectd with the bug also).

-I'd suggest changing the default to ALWAYS doing manual battle. The Autobattle is beyond terrible, especially because archers do not shoot at all until the enemy is adjacent, which makes then worthless.

Reply #23 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 16

Quoting HobsonA, reply 14Why was ice bolt removed?
 

It was basically the same as flame dart. We're trying to move away from generic spells.

 

 

That's fine I understand trying to stay away from generic skills, but it's a different element.  If I didn't take fire that's a problem for me.

Reply #24 from Elemental Forums Top

Fixed a crash related to children being born during a reloaded saved game that could cause a crash on 64-bit machines

wow, now thats a specific scenario to have accounted for... :)

Reply #25 from Elemental Forums Top

t was replaced with .."New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage." would have been better text.. looks like they are trying to differ the low level attack spell in ice from fire... not a bad thing..

twohawks said they replaced it

"it was replaced with .."New spell: Stab of Ice, short range spell, causes enemy to lose turn in addition to damage." would have been better text.. looks like they are trying to differ the low level attack spell in ice from fire... not a bad thing.."