[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/3524264168/Elemental+Dev+Journal+28+Version+1.1+preview[/confluence]

For the first time in many years, Stardock has invested in a massive upgrade to its server hardware.   It's, by far, the most expensive and expansive hardware upgrade we've done.

Part of it was necessitated by last year's near destruction of not just this site but all of Stardock's tech infrastructure.

About a year ago, we had an issue in our datacenter that caused many of our critical VMs to become corrupted and required us to reconstruct nearly everything from scratch. 

Now, we had backups but it was one of those things that hadn't been fully tested because you are talking something like 36 terrabytes of data.  

It took us awhile to recover and we didn't fully recover.  There was loss and the recovery wiped out our IT budget for the year.

Now, we are in 2026 and we are looking at where things are going with WinCustomize.  The first thing we're doing is migrating it all to the new hardware. This will happen in bits and pieces but you should notice a general speedup.

But the real change is going to be the complete rewrite of this site.  It's going to look different and we are going to be changing the site's mission a bit.  It's still about customization but the world is getting very interesting with people able to create a lot of interesting stuff.

I've already built a kind of test site for this.  You can see it here. https://www.clairvoyanceai.com/gallery/browse?type=exhibit 

That's just for showing off cool stuff people have made. It's not terribly applicable here since WInCustomize has always been about sharing things that others can use to customize their Windows experience in some neat way.

But I do think we can look forward to people being able to make DesktopX type things a lot easier and share them.  We just need to make a new product for it (a new DesktopX basically but one that is built with today's security -- we were so native 20 years ago).  

I'd like to get your opinions on what kinds of new things you'd like to see added here.  We are pretty far away from the days of people making Winamp skins and icon packages. People don't do that anymore.    I had thought, at one time, that maybe iPhone/Android stuff might be interesting but I never even change the wallpaper on my iPhone.

But I can imagine all kinds of interesting things that I might want to improve my desktop in 2026 provided it can be done without fear of malware or something getting injected.   

[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/3492381043/Dev+Journal+116+The+Tech+Tree+in+the+Room[/confluence]

https://www.illiteracyhasdownsides.com/p/id-still-prefer-if-stormgate-had

found this article quite interesting.

Lots of cool things going on. We’ve been reading the feedback closely as well as reviewing and fixing crash reports. Your posts are extremely helpful in narrowing things down.

So today we want to talk about the roadmap for Elemental: Reforged. We have two years (at least) of budget now. Thank you for all your support! So let’s dive right into the near term:

Now, a lot of people online didn’t realize that Elemental: Reforged is a remastering of a 2010 game series (War of Magic + Fallen Enchantress + Sorcerer King). While the visuals and gameplay have been enhanced, it is still very much a game from 2010. That was a very different era of gaming and there are some things we have already changed like the AI players moving from being “good losers” to playing to win to UI conventions that were based on people running at 1024x768 resolution.

Over time, based on player interest, we are looking to continually enhance the game. So while the game is a 2010 era game, the ENGINE is not. It is a modern engine so we can, over time continue to improve it based on what players want. You just let us know.

[confluence title=""]https://stardock.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDEnt/pages/2609676353/Dev+Journal+3+The+Great+String+System+Overhaul[/confluence]

Let’s start with where things currently stand at Stardock in our remastering and reimagining of Elemental.

1. We have ported the underlying engine and code base to 64-bit.

2. We have upgraded the graphics engine to DirectX 11.

3. We have brought over the Dynasty system from War of Magic (yes, this game had full on families, dynasties, and magical breeding).

4. We have brought over the crafting system and global inventory from Sorcerer King.

5. We have reexported the original textures at much higher resolutions.

6. We have updated the shaders so the terrain will look a lot better.

Here are some in-progress examples:

Wishlists = How much we can do.

There is a lot of work ahead and the size of the team we get is based on a simple formula: Wishlists x $10. So for instance, if we get 50,000 wishlists, we get $500,000 to work with. In the first 48 hours, we got 7,000 wishlists, which is pretty good. That’s $70,000 added to our budget. You can see how spreading the word on the game will be extremely helpful to us.

 

Now, these numbers do have an expiration date. I want to write that in case someone from the year 2043 finds this post and the game has somehow racked up wishlists made by our robot overlords. So, think of it as the wishlists we accrue before release.

We’ve left a number of these slots open so that the community can contribute to this list and we’ll add to it over time to keep the community informed on where things stand.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the things we are already working on.

Graphics Improvements

The graphics of this game weren’t great in 2010. Time hasn’t improved them. When we made the original game, we were in a constant conflict on visual style vs. memory cost vs. time to figure it out. We ultimately ran out of time and ended up with a visual look we didn’t love. It was, however, distinct.

We have already done the hardest part: Move the engine to 64-bit and DirectX 11.

The next hardest bit is to port our assets to FBX so that we can work with them in modern tools. Our character models were extremely low resolution and even updating the visuals, where we could mess with the textures, is challenging if you can’t work with it in a modern app. Games have changed a great deal, but the tools used to make them have changed even more.

Localization

The original game was not just English only, but it was hard coded in absolutely insane ways. The actual data had the strings in them.

Has to become. . .

so that we can localize the text in string tables into other languages. This is a big and unsexy task, but it is a prerequisite. We plan to support English, German, Russian, Chinese, French, Italian, and Spanish for starters and would like to make it easy to add additional languages if needed.

Modding

Elemental was designed for modding, but it was not good at mod management. I had a ton of mods I personally made for the game that got wiped out in a later update and it was pretty annoying. I can’t even imagine how annoying it was to others.

This time, we’re modernizing mod management via Steam Workshop and it will be handled in such a way that an update to the game can’t blow away mods. Or I should say, it better work that way.

So what kinds of mods would we expect?

1. Maps (the game has a powerful map editor built in)

2. Quests

3. Items

4. Tiles

5. City Improvements

6. Locations

7. Units

8. Campaigns

The original design for the game envisioned players being able to share (via Impulse) “modules” with full adventures to the whole community. Not to mention letting modders create their own lore and even full redesigns.

Now, how much we can do with this depends, again, on wishlists. We will keep people up to date on where we are.

Your Wish is Our Command

As the wishlist count grows, more features can be evaluated for inclusion. Please talk to the other gamers you know who remember these games fondly and find others who will enjoy them anew. Tell us what you’d like to see. Stay tuned!

If you could list 3, and only 3 things you absolutely want in Reforged, what would they be?

We aren't in love with this UI for the character creation screen.  And yet we also don't want the character to be too big (the preview) because the 3D model wasn't designed to be looked at too closely.

This is a catch all thread for discussing what's happening in Elemental this Summer.

The team is working on localizing the game to other languages, the new UI, an FBX exporter, and getting the features from War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King in as well as planning out the features that were part of the original game design put in.

So much of what we do is based on AI help.