At our first PAX Prime the other week, we were proud to present Cortex Command to the gaming public, as part of the awesome Indie Megabooth! So many cool and enthusiastic people came through and playtested the crap out of it! I have since been busy prioritizing and fixing the glaring issues before our launch of 1.0.. VERY SOON. Like, for realsies.

Yup, a fresh build is out, immediately available here, or on the HIB download page for you dear Humble Bundle customers! Mostly fixes and tweaks in this one, but there’s some new fun content too!

• Fixed broken custom pie menu options; now they work as advertised
• Fixed over-drawing of glow effect on selection cursor and aiming reticules. No more fat glows
• Fixed duplicate team objective cursors added each frame in activities.
• Fixed additional (I think all!) mouse control conflicts with other control schemes.
• Fixed resolution setting issue. The game will now try to use whatever res is set in settings.ini, no matter how high or silly it is. The in-game options menu will still automatically set to 2x fullscreen scaling on high resolutions though. This is a compromise between what will suit first time players, and the power users who want inappropriately high resolutions.
• Gave the Coalition Gatling Drone some more Coalitionish sprites – Lizard
• Added Thumper Grenade Launcher; tweaked Nailgun, Railgun, Scouting Rifle, Annihilator, and a lot of other stuff – CaveCricket48
• Improved Lua AI sentry behavior. Improved aiming at very short distances – Abdul
• The Dummy Rocklet now respond to delivery/stay/return orders properly – Abdul
• Made grappling gun more mouse-friendly – CaveCricket48
• The Lua AI was modified to make it easier to add custom behaviors. Humans try to fly to their targets after losing both their legs. Added a Lua AI for the Gatling Turret – Abdul
• Updated enemy drops in activity scripts, fixed a bug on the Annihiliator – CaveCricket48
• AI now fires the Annihiliator with longer-charged shots. – Abdul
• Heavy Sniper rounds no longer bounce – CaveCricket48
• Balancing of Blast Runner and Gatling Drone and Turrets – TheLastBanana

Just a quick update on what’s going on in DRL HQ. We’re crunching both to make the IGF submission, and the first commercial version of CC. The full in-game Scene Editor is now feature complete and we’re using it ourselves to build the real story scenarios that will make up the meat of of the Cortex Command experience. After six years in the making, we can finally say that we’ve transitioned from pre-production into actual production on this project. ;D

So, if you already enjoy the rickety skirmish mode of the test builds, you’re in for a treat. We are adding many times more content than you’ve seen so far. Environments, ships, guys, weapons, tools, game modes, cut scenes… oh my!

The Scene Editor will be included with the full game, and since we’re using it ourselves to build the game (aka “eating our own dog food”), it is shaping up to be quite powerful and user friendly.

Good things come to those who wait. Image to the left is purely fictitious fun.

Arne busts out some new personal art! This is not related to CC, but damn check it out nonetheless:

http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/main.php?id=rifts