Morning Discussion

This morning I finally cracked open my copy of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's "Roadside Picnic." Fascinating stuff. I'll probably polish the book off in a lunch break or two, since it's so short.

I became interested in the novel after playing the first game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. The GSC Game World-developed franchise is loosely based on the novel. And I mean loosely.

Basically, the only two things the book and video game series share is the concept of "Stalkers," a person who crosses into forbidden territory for specific (and usually nefarious) reasons; and the mysterious and dangerous area known as "The Zone." That's pretty much it, so far.

After I'm done the book, I'll have to track down the movie "Stalker," which was written by the Strugatsky brothers. But, I may need to learn Russian.

Have you ever explored the work that inspired your favorite games?

Xav de Matos was previously a games journalist creating content at Shacknews.

From The Chatty
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    August 27, 2010 5:01 AM

    Really hoping to get some Elemental: War of Magic in this weekend. Despite the flaws, really enjoying it.

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      August 27, 2010 5:02 AM

      I miss the Pirst Fost days...

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        August 27, 2010 5:22 AM

        shrug, I had to come up with something...

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      August 27, 2010 5:03 AM

      Well 1.06 is out and the patch to 1.06 should be out in a few hours.

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        August 27, 2010 5:11 AM

        Wait... what?

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          August 27, 2010 5:13 AM

          I think he's being silly.

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            August 27, 2010 5:27 AM

            nope here is the 1.06 change log and they already annouced there is an issue with 1.06 and a patch for it will be released within hours.

            ---------------------------------------------------------
            ----------- 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.

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              August 27, 2010 6:20 AM

              Fantastic, hopefully all this makes it into the demo.

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              August 27, 2010 6:22 AM

              The last 2-3 change logs make it look like a much more playable game. Why didn't they fix this stuff before? An open beta for preorders would caught most of this stuff.

              Hope it goes on sale in Q4!

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              August 27, 2010 7:26 AM

              ah, I see that I patched to 1.06.18 last night and updating to 1.06.19 right now (I think I got that correct)

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              August 27, 2010 7:44 AM

              I tried playing this morning and getting some weirdness. Unexpected large mob groups early that I hadn't seen and groups not moving to the square I am aiming at, but to adjacent squares (and more than the previous somewhat unpredictable movement selection).

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                August 27, 2010 7:45 AM

                also getting many duplicates of custom armies showing up in my roster, just have to retire the redundant ones.

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      August 27, 2010 5:09 AM

      Same, loboca, same.

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      August 27, 2010 7:24 AM

      me too, though I doubt it with in-laws in town ... maybe when they leave (who knows, by then maybe another patch).

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      August 27, 2010 1:31 PM

      Same. Random npc bandits piss me off though.

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        August 27, 2010 1:32 PM

        Wish I could assign patrol routes so I didn't have to make 30 guys at each city >:(

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