Prom and I have now been working together in real life and in person on Cortex Command for over two weeks. Needless to say, there is a LOT of progress in general, and specifically on nailing down how the campaign is going to work. The next few days weeks we are going to post some of the very cool new stuff that is coming up..

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.

• 32-bit rendering effects! Shiny gold, glowing fireballs and tracers, etc.
• Much-improved player interface with adaptable pie menus. All relevant commands just two buttonpresses away!
• 32-bit video mode – no more palette corruption problems.
• Enemy spawns are now data driven… Modders: fight against your own creations, just look in Activities.ini
• Memory leaks massively reduced, can play long games without RAM being eaten, and overall memory footprint reduced.
• Several crash bugs gone and other glitchfixes

We’re proud of this one – enjoy!

New build:

• Randomly placed debris in terrain, including the gold. Different each time!
• Jumping and jetpack behavior has been changed completely. Now control the jetpack bursts more precisely.
• HUD updates with jetpack status and weight overload iconography. If the player is overloaded with stuff, jetpack will be ineffective. HUD will warn of this.
• Too tired to think of what else. Maybe I’ll remember later.

– D

Arne has been working on redesigning the skin of the buy menu GUI:

Still WIP of course.. but yeah it’s going to look a lot better than currently in the last build!

Got terrain debris in there. They are randomly placed throughout the terrain based on three parameters: MinDepth, MaxDepth, and DensityPerMeter:

Should help make the scenes a little more interesting. Also, the gold is placed randomly too. This means each time the scene is loaded/reset, things have changed around and should affect gameplay (large deposits outside your door? score!)