Archive for August, 2008
A few months ago I was about to buy a piece of shareware (the excellent RoboForm), but right there on their checkout page was a button claiming that I could “Get it for free!” instead of paying the regular price. Of course my BS detector went off, but my curiosity was also piqued enough to check it out.
I assumed it was a deal like those incredibly annoying flashing web banner ads for “FREE IPOD OMG!”, but I was very pleasantly surprised by what I found and experienced. I ended up getting to choose a single ‘offer’ from a wide range of unrelated big name brands. It sounds completely weird, but I found myself buying some delivered flowers (wife affection bonus, get!) from the reputable FTD.com — and got my copy of RoboForm completely free on the side, without almost any extra hassle or delay.
So, we looked into the business behind this, TrialPay, and were impressed enough that we decided to set it up for our games as well. It is just an additional path for you to get your full license, which is completely equivalent to what you’d get if you took the simple direct payment route:
We’re especially excited about the fact that TrialPay customizes its offers to your geographical location. If you live in the U.S., you will get offers from big-name U.S. brands like GAP and Blockbuster, but if you live in China or South America, you get affordable offers for local businesses in your local currency: prepaid cell phone cards, regional shops, etc. Since you get the Cortex Command license for free with the deal, this means it’s a much lower expense for you than having to pay a fixed U.S. price in U.S. dollars.
Even for U.S. customers, it’s pretty satisfying to be able to choose an offer you’re interested in anyway, and then get the game for free on top of it! It certainly made my day when I got RoboForm, and managed to surprise the wife with flowers at her work.
We understand you might be as skeptical as I was initially, but at least check out the offer page — If nothing else, it’s pretty interesting to see what random deals you get.
Here it is folks. Going to update this post later with more info. There’s not much new content, but many many new features! That’s why the price discount stays the same for this update.
Got to catch a flight in an hour, and haven’t packed or showered yet (another all nighter)… so enjoy! I’ll write more soon!
UPDATE: Ok stuck in airport terminal, so can write about some of the new features. There may not seem like a lot of difference at first glance, but there’s eight months of important work done under the hood. On the other hand, there really isn’t much new content in this one; it’s all been about laying the foundation for the real production that can now start in earnest.
Without further ado, some of the new features:
- Full support for any screen resolution your graphics driver can handle! Cortex Command in HD, baby!
- New audio system that is far more robust. No more missed sound effects. All non-UI audio pitches down when the simulation starts going slower than real time. More about this later.
- Simulation speed partially decoupled from real time. It’s allowed to smoothly slow down into slomo without sacrificing FPS when the simulation becomes too heavy for your machine to keep at real time. You can turn this off with Ctrl+O. Again, more on this later.
- Lua engine and console now integrated, and almost whole existing C++ engine exposed to it. The console can be accessed with the [~] key (left of your [1] key). Exhaustive documentation of the full Lua interface is coming soon!
- Lua scripting of entire Activity logic! This allows for any game rules we want to make the missions have, and any multiplayer style as well, like CTF or king of the hill, etc.
- First draft of data-driven Campaign screen. You can select eligible scenes/sites directly on the planet. As more mods and official content is loaded, more sites/missions will show up on the planet. This menu will evolve into the metagame eventually.
- Completely new licesning system that allows you to reset your own key, AND to register/play with that key offline. Reset and update your keys at http://licensing.datarealms.com
- Many many bug fixes and tweaks everywhere.
UPDATE 2: Whoops, there was a menu bug in the first release of b21.. one line of code which causes the main menu to get shifted in higher resolutions, screwing up skirmish menu etc. Just uninstall the old one, re-download and install again if you got it before this update appeared.
