[UPDATE: The instructional video will come after some fundamental things are changed in the metagame, like the tiresome scanning mechanic etc]

I am going to add a video and talk about the now playable metagame/campaign here soon, but I just wanted everyone who previously bought the game to not have to wait and be able to download the newest version right away:
http://licensing.datarealms.com/licensing/

Use your email and old license key as password (all UPPERCASE) to get access to Windows, Mac, and Linux variants of Build 25, without any kind of DRM!
You can now play anywhere, anyhow without having to worry about registering license keys etc. If you forgot your old license key, just use the password reset feature on that page.

We worked hard on this one; I hope you enjoy the campaign mode with your friends, even in its current rough state!

After many months of work and preparation, we are finally ready to start creating the real campaign missions! There were several large hurdles that needed to be cleared before we could proceed with this, including:

• Exposing almost all of the C++ engine to Lua, using LuaBind.
• Adding a powerful in-game console for testing and debugging scripts.
• Making the game Activites’ logic be completely driven by Lua scripts.
• A new and flexible data-driven system of trigger “Areas” in each Scene, which the scripts can hook into.
• Making a completely new in-game editor for defining and naming the Areas of each Scene: The Area Editor —->.

The scripting of Activities is super important; before their logic could only be hardcoded in C++. That meant the whole executable had to be recompiled each time a change was made to the winning condition or whatever of a specific mission. Now, the script can be edited (by you!) while the game is running, and it is just reloaded automatically when Ctrl+R is pressed. Any errors encountered in the script will be reported to the in-game console, with line numbers and decent descriptions.

Here’s an example of how the Areas tie into the scripts. This snippet of Lua in your script’s UpdateActivity() function will cause any Actor that wanders into a specific Area named “Kill Zone” to be instagibbed:

for actor in MovableMan.Actors do if SceneMan.Scene:WithinArea("Kill Zone", actor.Pos) then actor:GibThis(); end; end;

We are also working on the online documentation for all of CC’s Lua interface – more on that later!

… at least not collision map-related ones 😉

After reworking the way movable objects clean up the map, we ran several hours of stress testing of the engine on all the available machines here at DRL HQ:

No crashes or hiccups.

Also threw in a frag counter due to popular demand!

As Linus Torvalds used to say:

“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”

Yes, B15 may have been a little rushed out the door. But we listened to the issues, and here is the fix to most many of them (plus more):

• No more crashes due to corrupt collision map Nope, still have these.. were introduced with the new optimizations.. sorry. Will work on them.
• No more crashes due to out of bounds of the scene (digging off the bottom etc)
• No more crashes due to unknown materials… defaults gracefully to a safe material instead
• Far more optimized version which runs much faster. We profiled the code and nailed a few hotspots which were slowing down things, especially on larger maps. This is what took a bit longer to do than the other fixes.
• Mouse jerkyness completely fixed.. silly bug
• Mouse interface improved.. no more tedious double clicking!
• Many more small fixes and improvements

Enjoy!

“Finally! It’s 6 AM here and we have a brand spanking new data system that actually works! Everything seems to be functioning great with the data modules, and multiple scenes are handled properly by the engine for the first time..”

Ok, so that was all I managed to write in this post the other day, before I literally passed out in the chair. It’s true though: the data modules are now a-ok, the engine is building/running, and a new test build release of CC is brewing.

That’s right – since actor locomotion is on the agenda now, we’re about to start releasing test builds again. We really need your help to tell us if we’re improving on things, or if moving the guy around is still just pissing you off. So, we’ll be putting out updates pretty frequently with some different test scenes for you to run/fly/crawl all over.

There’s just a couple more bugs to straighten out and we’ll have the first in a series of new builds up shortly.

Almost, anyway.

The work to get all the exisiting data formatted to fit the new system was… surprisingly grueling and voluminous. After hacking a branch of the old code to spit out large chunks of the data in the new format, the rest still had to be done manually.

Then, both the reading and writing logic had to be tested and debugged to fix the dozens of problems which were introduced in the process. We finally have the game running again though, with the new system’s data loading. Some bugs remain, as well as the work of optimizing the data files so there aren’t any redundant properties defined (will speed up the parsing/loading time).

Due to this, we are a couple of days behind schedule for IGF, but we should be back on track soon. There’s enough slack in it for stuff like this.

I should’ve seen this coming. After all, forced data conversion is HelloVader’s favorite method of torture…