One of the things that will make Elemental different from anything Stardock has developed before is that we will view the release date of the game as the beginning of its life rather than the climax.
The reason for this is that a big part of our objective with Elemental lies in the engine underneath it. It is our dream to slowly evolve Elemental to be so modable that a user familiar with Python 3.x will be able to use Elemental to create virtually any kind of land base computer game.
One of the things that some of you probably suspect but we can confirm from bitter experience is that while there are plenty of good 3D engines out there (Unreal, Gamebryo, Source, etc.) there aren’t really any modern engines (that we could find anyway) that are specifically designed for top down where there’s lots and lots of units on screen.
What I am hoping will happen is that over time, more and more of Elemental will cease being C++ and be moved into Python scripts. The AI and some of the game logic will be first but eventually as much of the code that we can economically justify taking from C++ will be moved to scripts.
In this way, users would be potentially able to create all kinds of new games using the Elemental engine. For first person shooters, this is nothing new. Civilization IV is extremely moddable too. Our goal here is to take an engine that was designed from the ground up as a 3D engine with full strategic zoom and a multi-threaded graphics engine and make it as generic as possible.
To learn more about Python visit http://www.python.org/