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Electric RC1 Now Unrestricted
As mentioned in the last post, Electric RC1 is now open for download by anyone, not just subscribers. We chose to do this because that version of Electric no longer represented how Electric would look or play in the final release. RC2 will be released sometime around the end of the month. That one will still be restricted. Our reasoning for that is that we want the game to feel new and exciting for the majority, and by everyone having the final pre-release build, the final release may not feel as special. However, you will be able to download it as much as you want by registering for an account. We love having people interested in what we do, so as our small thank you, you will receive access to the latest stuff.
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Status of Electric
We are quickly nearing the end of the road of development for Electric. It’s exciting to think about releasing our first game to the public, and to know that we’ve actually finally finished something we have started!
Originally, we had only planned a single release candidate. However, after so many bugfixes, small tweaks that individually seemed insignificant here and there, and a fundamental update to the build tool (switched from SDL to OpenGL), the first RC no longer represented the final state of the game.
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Rando Post No. 2
A few weeks ago, I complained about e-learning days. I had another one a few days later. It was also horrible. But, as it did last time, my Econ homework was nice.
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Rando Post No. 1
I’m going to take a moment to complain about school. If you don’t want to hear about it, you don’t have to read it.
As you know, I’m still in high school. (I’m a senior, which means I’m almost done, though.) My school is taking advantage of these modern times. We have a 1 on 1 netbook deal, where every student has a school-issued netbook. This year, the school initiated a new program – the e-learning day.
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Account Creation Problems
Dear CWG followers,
First off, I would like to thank each an every one of you who have subscribed to our website. It is you who we strive to create content for, and you who will ultimately help us achieve our goals too simply by just signing up for this site.
Unfortunately, when we migrated servers, our registration page did not retain our previous customizations, and thus reverted back to the default registration method. This means that users were required to wait for an email containing their temporary login passwords for the site, but that email was not setup to actually send. Therefore, we had about 54 “locked” accounts dormant on our website. For that, we apologize.
While this issue has been corrected for all future registrants of the website, those who used the faulty registration method still are unable to login. To correct this, a series of emails are being manually sent to all those affected. These emails will contain your username (as a reminder) in the salutation, and also contains a randomly generated login password. You will be given the opportunity to change that password upon first login.
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People!
Last night, we discovered that 50-odd people made accounts on this site.
That’s weird.
Aside from the NSA and people who my parents know but I was too young to remember, I didn’t think there was anyone who I didn’t know, but who knew about me.
That means that I actually have to start putting real, quality content here. For the first time, I have a responsibility to real people.
<tangent>
Huh. People talk about social interactions between people over the internet as impersonal. As far as my responsibilities to other people go, though, the ones in school or within the family seem very self-contained compared to this. Sure, I have to do homework, but only because one person told me to, and college people judge me based on how well I do it. But now I’m responsible to a few people who I don’t even know, or don’t even have a guess about. These people are more “real” to me because they are outside of the pre-determined track that is education. My existence is affecting “real” people, in the “real” world, however small that group is.
<\tangent>
I’m probably going to make posts more frequently from now on. I’ll think of something to talk about. Surely.
Oh, and one more thing. I forgot to say this in the Electric RC post: UNINSTALL BETA II FIRST! Things will break otherwise. Also, the settings file will behave weird on most computers (all of them that I tried), so I recommend going into the settings and fixing up the new stuff before you play. The music volume will be off, and the new controller inputs will all be assigned to “Button 0,” which doesn’t exist. Also, clicking “Restore to defaults” causes a crash. The best course of action is probably to delete the settings file after you install RC and run it the first time. That should take care of it. If it doesn’t, tell me, because that’s not supposed to happen.
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Electric RC
Most of this happened over Fall break, Thanksgiving, and Christmas break.
RC is out, and it’s different.
- Main menu and Options menu have cool new background, plus the text is less ugly
- Other menus, the HUD, and the market have a brushed steel background
- Added a random forest in the battlefield and a river*
- Added menu and game music
- And thus music volume controls
- Added more functionality to controllers other than the mouse & keyboard (controllers can now toggle weapons and mods)
- added the cruise missile – very powerful and has a blast radius, but very expensive too. Also, it doesn’t require a direct hit, it just blows up once it reaches the closest point to its target along its trajectory.
- removed BVR scope – suffered from uselessness and a huge bug that would have been very difficult to fix
- replaced it with flares – confuse incoming missiles, but aren’t guaranteed to work
- with “really good” AI, other planes can use the market (with limited selection)
- AI planes will only fire primary weapons when within a radius of the distance between your plane and the left edge of your screen
- Added those wing tip trails (fancy graphics only – sorry, netbook people.)
- Boosters last 3 seconds
- Boosters and flares are stackable
- Speed now reads in mph (the plane’s top speed is 645.5 mph)
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Electric Beta II Patch
To follow up the discovery of the performance bug on Friday, a patch has been released for Beta II which fixes the slow, inconsistent speed that was plaguing Electric ever since controller support was added.
This patch does NOT include any other changes or enhancements that have been added in the development branch since B2 was released. We just thought it would be nice to give B2 a chance to provide its original feature set at full speed, so it was mainly done for historical purposes. However, if you’re forced into running B1.1 due to performance issues, you may now finally upgrade to B2.1 without experiencing any meaningful speed drops!
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Good news
Ever since I added support for game controllers, Electric has had horrible frame rate problems; on the Asus Transformer I’ve been using, I have been consistently getting frame rates below 20 frames per second. WELL. Earlier tonight I fixed the problem! I had been trying different things to optimize it for months* with little impact before I finally figured it out. It was trying to load the controller every frame, even though it was already loaded before the game starts. I made a goof when trying to optimize controller inputs. I deleted the erroneous line, and all is well.
RC1 will be out soon (Valve time – trends suggest that school causes a dramatic decrease in productivity).
*Months of school time is more like weeks/2 of summer time.