Can I just express my thanks about the direct and simple answers to our questions about ETA.  It's so freaking refreshing.  And when one of these patches gets delayed for good reason and someone says "but you promised us 1.08 in 48 hours or less!" I'll be first in line to smack them with a wet noodle.

Truly right!

But its 11.54 pm in germany, so i go to bed and read upcoming news tomorrow...

Hear hear! Second this.

You guys have an awesome job! (Except for painful releases)

If you wait till next week might as well give it up, Civ 5 will be out.

So what?  that has nothing to do with this game.

SS is a Troll Please do not feed it.

Lee

Yeah was just getting tired of little quips like that from him just about everywhere.

Froggy, if there is yelling it means its fun multi

Errr well at least fun for one of them.

Next thing you know, the community will be taking bets on QA v Dev games. ;) 

Yep, exactly like my job as a mexican food critic.

Having worked with both QA and Dev resources on Software projects I always bet on the Devs to win. All Devs I've worked with find undocumented features in the code.

QA is another story, a normal QA person finds bugs, an exceptional QA Person finds Workarounds for the bugs, and even finds other bugs based on the code correction.

Some *** Developers hated me because I could usually crash any program by thinking like a normal user and doing the unexpected.

I'm a troll because i'm not gushing over everything Stardock does like you?

Hey if you want this forum to become an echo chamber, by all means, but look where that got us.

No problem playing the game as is...NEED MP!!!

I can definitely say there's been a lot of anguish.  It's "this close" to being a classic. Hopefully a year from now people will be pleased with what has been wrought.

Seriously, do you really think Civ V and Elemental are remotely similar? Really? That's what makes you seem like you're trolling to me.

They are both turn based and take place on the ground. So I guess they're the same.

No one wants Civ V to come out more than I do. It'll be clear then just how different the two are.  Elemental, in some ways, has more in common with Civ IV than Civ V has with Civ IV.

Sooner then that Brad.

Much of the post release time has been spent dealing with APIs in various driver versions that just don't work. Some crash. Some don't deallocate memory.  It's been painful. We do some different things with our visuals that are biting us in the rear. 

I wish I could say "If only we'd waited until February" but no. No way. Game features might have been more polished but the stability wouldn't have changed much which is really a sad state of affairs. That is what really causes despair. That we may be reaching the end of the line where new 3D engines can be created without spending millions on them and have them have a chance of working reasonably on launch.  

The Pear engine worked and evolved over 7 years. Kumquat should hopefully go for another 7 years.  After that, I suspect we'll all be licensing stuff or the gaming platform on the PC will have changed dramatically. I remember on the eve of launch my biggest concern being diplomatic AI. Not stability. 

But we're going to focus on Elemental for as long as it takes. As a privately owned company, I can have us work on something purely on principle rather than the profit motive. Elemental needs to be awesome.

Tell you what, Frogboy...

If 1.08 is ready to install tomorrow morning so I can enjoy it on my day off, I'll have an extra whiskey for you!

Seriously though, thanks SD for all your hard work these last few weeks!

I was making reference to MOM.  I don't think many people remember how MOM was released but today is remembered as a classic. We're on Elemental until it reaches our expectations and that is a spiritual successor to the MOM genre (which, outside of MOM is a pretty lonely genre unless you extend it to include AOW, HOMM, DOM3, etc.).

I'm seeing checkins coming across my email so it won't be tomorrow morning. Thursday is our typical release update window which is what I'd plan on.

Disappointing, but cool. I'll still have an extra whiskey for you guys while I play 1.07 tomorrow.

Hey having your company work on a non profitable product warms everyones hearts, but we want you to make money. The game has gotten better and more stable with each patch. You are going to get a stable game, and a game that you want to play. Already the game is pretty addicting. Adding to it will only make it better.

Stable addicting games sell. There is no reason elemental sales would tick up a bit and stay stable long term.

I was refering to sooner then a year from now the game will be seen in a different light.

This may sound hard to believe, but there are people who love the game as it is right now.  I have been playing for hours and am having a blast.  I personally think all the negativity is a little overblown.  The game has some rough edges, but is otherwise really awesome.  I can definitely see this game becoming a classic over time like MoM, Civ, and X-Com.  This may be one of the only games in history where reviewers will have to do a re-review in a few years because the original scores won't match the final product.

Looking forward to the patch.  Thanks for all your hard work!