Before I get to the goods, a newsflash on Cortex Command: We are indeed still working on a a nice update with Workshop integration that will allow you to publish your mods to everyone on Steam directly from within the game. There’s a lot of menu stuff that needs to come together still, but rest assured it’s well underway. Also.. some long awaited bug fixes are in the pipeline (seam gib bug, i’m looking at you!). Keep eyes peeled on our twitter feed for the latest on when that drops.

Anyway, I’m here to present yet another meaty update to our next project, the Cave Vehicle Engine; this time Miro takes us though our engine’s powerful particle systems and their new editors:

The particles will definitely be put to good use very soon as we get into the collision and particle penetration effects (e.g. bullets zinging off and through objects, with sparks flying and holes being made!). We strongly believe that realistic, detailed, and physics-driven effects add a massive amount of fun and feel to gameplay, so we care a lot about fully fleshing out these things which might otherwise seem like trivial graphical details. We are excited to show what we truly mean in time for GDC this year.

But wait, there’s more! Miro has been hard at work on a ton of other stuff like powerful in-game Lua debugging tools, Color Picker palette, Scenario Editing updates, and refined controls for getting all these editors OUT of the main game window and onto secondary monitors! It’s really a great way to work, with the main CVE screen filling your main monitor, and all the clutter of the editor panels completely off to the side, yet still controlling stuff in the game:

A new test build of the Cave Vehicle Engine appears! So much great stuff: external editor windows for separate monitors, huge improvements to the robot editor, a new FlipBot concept that is a potential solution to the ugly 2D sprite flipping animation problem. Miro demonstrates how it all goes down in these two new videos:

a complete walkthrough on how to build your own robot in the game:

Give it a spin and tell us how it works – just draw the parts laid out in a single .png image and load it into the editor available here to get started:

• The AA-Drone now shoot SAMs at enemy craft at point blank range, unless the target is close to a friendly brain.
• Fixed a bug that would cause craft to self destruct when sitting still for a long time and being under player control.
• Fixed missing turret/mech loadouts for some techs, upped goldcost and slightly nerfed armor of silver man and whitebot.
• Went over and touched up every single techion gun sprite, looked a bit tame compared to the actors.
• Changed Imperatus actor standpaths for added badassery.
• The meta fight skirmish AI now pick safer brain LZs.
• Fixed a bug that made the human AI ignore enemies in some circumstances.
• Fixed a few loadout errors. Fixed a Ronin script that sometimes caused error messages to be printed to the console.
• Added a disarmer to every engineer loadout preset.
• Gave the giga pulsar the same particles per tracer as the pulse rifle, making the giga pulsar the superior choice for sustained fire, as well as an increased magazine size from 50 to 80.
• Improved the human AI gold dig behavior.
• Added the Yskely and Grasslands Mining Outpost for the Bunker Breach scenario.
• Fixed a bug that stopped the AI from spawning units in the Harvester, Massacre and Survival scenarios.
• Added a strong border layer to the bottom of most scenes. Helps prevent actors from digging too deep and falling off the bottom of the scene.
• Adjusted Human AI aim time. Actors shoot sooner but should miss more often.
• Fixed several bugs in the gold dig AI. Tweaked the human AI targeting and aiming.
• Made the human AI look for weapons when entering sentry mode unarmed.
• Updated the new rocket launcher’s targeting system so the missiles can be locked on to the ground.
• The new rocket launcher is now known as the Browncoat “ML-03 Flash”.
• Fixed an issue withe the AI where some behaviors could cause actors to ignore alarm events.
• The Skirmish Defense activities now remember what tech you fought the last round and picks another tech for the next round.
• Made the gold-dig behavior move in a straight line to the gold rather than along the path with the leas obstacles.
• Added the Dummy to both the Light and Heavy Infantry groups so the skirmish AI only spawn dummy AHumans.
• Removed the “Brain Versus Brain” activity to avoid confusion among new players (and reviewers). The same functionality is supported by Skirmish Defense.
• Changed the Browncoat “ML-03″ to “ML-02″ and made the missiles slightly stronger. Browncoat incendiary cannon (CA-01 Firestorm) and shotgun (IN-02) made stronger.
• Fixed a bug in the Bunker Breach scenario that would cause AI counter attacking units to go idle.
• Fixed a path-finding bug that occurred when mining for gold, and an issue that made the AI think some close range weapons had a blast radius
• Impulse Cannon no longer useless, new Browncoat Missile Launcher made slightly stronger.
• Browncoat weapon grip strengths increased slightly, Browncoat units no longer made of cheese.
• Added the “Wave Defense” activity. Increasingly longer waves of enemies, with time in edit mode in between waves.
• Encapsulated the AI to make modding easier. It can now be initialized with a single function call.
• Wave Defense: Made edit mode between waves optional.
• Actors on AI-teams now ignore the fog when shooting and searching for targets.
• The AA-drone no longer replenish its missiles between battles.
• Fixed bug on Ronin Heavy’s randomized armor when placing the unit from the build menu.
• Improved gold dig AI and situational awareness of brain actors.
• Lots of tweaks/improvements to the Nailer-based weapons
• The human AI now reloads any held weapon before digging for gold.
• Made the AA-Drone look for targets slightly faster and gave the SAM a small acceleration boost.
• Campaign end game triggering logic fixed and improved. Now, If the team in the lead is the only team left with any undeployed brains, the game ends and they win. This avoids the unwinnable game state.

Hey guys, here’s a really significant update on the Cave Vehicle Engine project we are working on, in addition to polishing up Cortex Command 1.0! There is now a fully functional, yet unpolished (sound familiar?) robot/actor editor in there. I will let the lead engineer and tech designer Miro Adamus demonstrate how it works in this video:

Play with it yourself – see if you can build something Let us know how it goes and if you need any help in the comments below:

Note this build also features a test robot by Aleksey Abramenko of VAP Games – the man behind Intrusion 2! Try to animate its limbs.. can you make it walk around??

Cortex Command’s Linux builds are now updated to the 1.0 version! You can find them in the licensing area, or on your Humble Bundle download pages. Let us know how it works and if you run into any trouble. Hope you enjoy!

We know the learning curve for getting into the game is still steep, and we’re working on making it more accessible. In the mean time, here’s a nice action packed tutorial for how to play the damn thing :] Thanks to @xxXChaosKingXxx for putting it together:

If the physics-based, real-time tactical, sidescrolling gameplay of Cortex Command is up your alley, then you should definitely not miss out on fellow indie dev VAP Games’ Intrusion 2! It features the best use of physics in Flash that I’ve ever seen, and was made by a sole developer in the middle of Russia (with help from a talented musician as well):

http://www.intrusion2.com/

The trailer speaks for itself; there’s also a demo and you can buy the DONE game today (what a concept!). I appreciate when I can see quality and passion poured into a project, so I am eager to spread the word about this gem. Now go check it out!