Hey folks, just wanted to let you know that Arne has made a thread with a bunch of new Cortex Command art works-in-progress! It’s a cool place to check out the process HERE!

So after six months of development, it’s about time we pull the covers off the next big project Data Realms is working on! Before I say anything else, let me assure you all that Cortex Command is still alive and well. It’s what I personally focus my development time on until it is considered “done”.

For a couple of years now, I have been dreaming about making something out of these incredibly inspiring sketches that Arne made for his Metafight redesign page. The new project wouldn’t be set in the Metafight world (for licensing reasons, etc), but many of the game mechanics outlined in that sketch just looked too fun to not make a game out of!

A vehicular exploration/combat game where you can jump in and out of your ride, then run it into the ground until you find another one to replace it.. now that’s what the Cave Vehicle Engine is going to support! When on foot, you will have a little jetpack with which you can skim down slopes and do cool jumping and grappling tricks to get away from danger.

While Cortex Command and its Retro Terrain Engine was all about the dynamically destructible pixel terrain, the Cave Vehicle Engine is going to be about the dynamically deformable/destructible movable objects (as opposed to the mostly static terrain). The graphics and physics are now all polygon-based and fully hardware accelerated.

The person who has been working full-time on getting the CVE and its custom physics system going, is the very talented Miroslav Adamus, a Slovakian hero who is a much better (and faster!) programmer than myself. Among other things, he has so far managed to implement a powerful particle system, soft-body dynamics with volume (area) preservation, procedural fracturing of objects, and run-time generation of physical objects based on transparency data in their source images/textures. We are applying the lessons learnt while making CC, so this new technology should reach new heights of power and modability!

Oh, by the way, in addition to much other rambling, the maestro musician DannyB and I talk about the project about 25 minutes into this podcast by the 1UP Oddcast crew: PODCAST DOWNLOAD

In the spirit of transparent indie development, here is a very early test build of the engine in action! Have fun smashing objects around and driving the test vehicle. 100% of the art in here is placeholder test stuff, so don’t judge how it looks, only what it can do. In fact, everything (including the physics) is in early test stages. There’s definitely weirdness in many situations, but we think it’s already quite fun to noodle around with! See the included readme for the controls, and ENJOY!

Here’s a little preview of what one of the phases of the turn-based metagame will look like.

Specifically, this is the income-counting phase where all the revenue from each team’s owned mining bases gets tallied and added to their gold accounts in the TradeStar. When the lines actually point to the TradeStar, it indicates the money that team had left over “in the bank” since last turn.

In designing these UI animations, the challenge for us is to always show in a graphically clear and appealing way what’s going on with the flow of money in the metagame.. I hope this draft approaches that goal!

I know you are eager to try this thing out; the trouble with building a turn-based game system is that none of it is really playable until all the components have at least a baseline of functionality implemented. If any one phase of a game round doesn’t work yet, you can’t really play the game at all.

The good news is that we’re currently making good progress and are completely focused on closing that gameplay loop, at least in a basic fashion. As soon as we do, the long-awaited new build will be out for you to try and give us feedback on!

I just wanted to bring to your attention the incredibly cool deal that a bunch of my indie gamedev friends have put together. For only three more days, you can get five absolutely solid quality indie games for WHATEVER PRICE YOU WANT.

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Nice April Fools’ gag.. OR IS IT?!

Here’s a quick and dirty mockup of what a screen mid-round in a Campaign game might look like.

The whole thing will play very much like a board game, with each player (human- or AI-controlled) taking turns each round, deciding where and how to invest their funds in their bases and where to make their offensive move that turn. The choices have direct consequences over how the on-ground battles go, dictating how many bunkers and defensive forces you start with when defending, and how much of a budget you have to work with when attacking/exploring.

Also, the final outcome of each battle will cause players to gain and lose cherished and valuable income-generating bases (mining outposts), eventually ending the game with one player controlling all the available sites on the planet. The events on the ground will finally have meaning!

The lines you see in the image show where and in what proportions each player have chosen to invest their available funds that round. Yellow is for how much they’ve built in their already owned bases, and red is for the attack or expedition they intend to carry out that round. The floating team bars can be dragged around the screen to get a clear view of the situation.

We can hope this becomes as fun to play as we imagine it as we’re busy designing and building it! At any rate, we’re excited to find out ASAP..

Hello everyone, and belated happy new decade!

To the right we’re cranking away at one of the several menus and dialogs needed for the Metagame (aka “Campaign”) mode. In the coming days and weeks, I hope to throw up some more mockups, teasers, and info about this aspect of the project which will tie the whole Cortex Command experience together. In short: it’s a turn-based game which sits on top of the tactical missions (hence the “meta” – i.e. a game about the game) and puts them in a larger context. What happens in the tactical on-surface battles directly affect the orbital metagame, and vice versa.

We have cut away a lot of the feature creep and finally nailed down a feasible scope for this Campaign mode, and I think what we’ve ended up with is going be very fun to play. As always, we’re making it all data-driven, so you crafty guys can make and mod its content for a customized experience.

Having achieved a fairly clear and realistic picture of exactly how it’s all going to work is pretty exciting for us, so I expect productivity on this to really pick up! Stay tuned..

Wandering around on the intertubes the other day, both Dan and I independently came across this cool Zero-gravity experiments video. A guy makes a sphere of water in (held together in zero-g by a loop of wire) and does neat things like injecting air bubbles into it and making waves. Worth a watch!

It reminded us of a cool game called Osmos. There’s a trailer you can watch of the game here for comparison.

Osmos has, like Cortex Command, has won an IGF award too! It really is a lot of fun and is a very new and unique game mechanic. Check out the demo here.

Speaking of other games, have any of you checked out Minecraft?

There’s a few servers running in our forums — if you aren’t active already, join up and get talking! You can see all of our other-game threads here.

Q: In Skirmish play, will there be any goals implemented in it soon? Examples: Survive for X minutes, obtain X kills, collect X% gold, etc? - FrogFreak
A: There’s going to be two major game modes: Metagame/Campaign and the Scenarios/Skirmish (we’re still deciding on the final names..). The Scenarios basically offer any compatible combo of a Scene and an Activity (usually Lua script-driven). We’re working on having the Activities have a special Lua function that can test if a Scene has the required and properly named Areas and other placements needed for that Activity. That way each Scene can be re-used for many different types of Activities. For example, think of home base Areas and flag placements needed for a CTF Activity. As long as they’re in a Scene, that scene supports CTF games. - Data

Q: Will making money ever be anything more than collecting gold? - Garrett
A: Yup! There will be precious stones and artifacts buried in the ground. They have to dug out and brought up to the surface, tossed into a landing craft, and flown off the top of the screen for a big payoff. Also, we are working on animal fossils that have to be ‘revealed’ (but not dug out or destroyed) from the unexplored areas of every Scene, with an x-ray type tool. The fossil science data rewards are then given to teh team who first claimed that new site. - Data

Q: Can I have a dollar? – Jesse
A: You can have many dollars – if you earn them first! - Data

Q: How much micromanaging will there be in the metagame? Will it be like the total war series where structures can be bought in certain cities or bunkers? Or where generals could develop, fight battles and increase statistics? – The Pub
A: Once a site on the planet has been claimed by one of the teams, it can be built upon. It will be an important part of the game to invest resources into your money-making bases, so they can be defended against attack. You’ll have to place all bunker modules, defensive installations and personnel before an attack happens, or it’ll be that much harder to defend when the enemies start landing! - Data

Here’s a new mailbag! We didn’t promise one EVERY Monday, did we?! (um, actually, seems like we did.. oh well here is a double dose anyway – be happy for what you get! )

I’ve noticed that, when an actor is wielding a shield along with a single-hand weapon, if the said actors crouches while pressing any other movement keys, the shield will disappear from it’s hands, to reappear magically (or not) a couple seconds later. Is there any hope that this issue will be solved in the next build? – Areku
A: Ah, this is probably because the arm holding the shield is being used to crawl.. will add to the bug list, but can’t promise it’ll be fixed by next build! – Data

What cool new things are being done to help the modding community? – Cody
A: As always, more Lua bindings to the engine and documentation for them. There’s also talk of some modding database integration in the forums. The forum admins know more about that, I’m sure there’s a thread or two kicking around in there. Looking at making the AI routines run in Lua instead of the C++ code… however, since I’m not so comfortable with Lua, I will probably ask some community hostshots to port the AI Update functions for me while referencing the current C++ code. Any takers? – Data

At the moment, the AI is a bit reckless and they sometimes end up wiping out their team mates. Will the AI eventually be able to ’see’ better and distinguish friend or foe more accurately? - matty1
A: See the previous answer above! When the AI is run in Lua, you can make any changes to it that you’d like. Next build should have a Lua-based AI Update function that will override the native C++ one in there right now. – Data

I’ve been watching CC since the third build, but haven’t seen any information yet about implementation of hardware acceleration for graphics, which would greatly improve the performance and lower requirements on the processor and ram end. Are there any plans to implement this feature? – Brian Frazer
A: There actually is hardware acceleration done in the blitting of bitmaps in CC, albeit very primitive and limited (DirectDraw7 on windows). The next Data Realms project is already being built on top of Direct3D/OpenGL to take better advantage of the the power of GPUs out there (yet still in 2D) – Data

Are there any plans to add multicore support to the CC engine? – Cody
A: Nope – we looked seriously at this since CC’s physics engine is CPU-bound. However, the extra work and complexity involved in retrofiittng it to become multithreaded (and still portable) just doesn’t appear to be worth it. Next project, maybe… – Data

Will it ever be possible to have 4 players on 4 seperate teams? – Matthew
A: Yep, I’m currently rewriting the way teams work because of the Metagame.. if things go well, there will be support for up to four teams, each with their own little symbol/icon instead of the red and green hearts – Data