Some generous people have posted that they would be willing to donate to Data Realms to help us keep developing games… well, that’s great (just buy multiple copies of the game instead!), but this is what we really need:

Underground in rural Washington:

• Three – 160′ Tall Missile Silos
• Three – 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings
• Three – Fuel Terminal Buildings
• Two – 6 story Antenna Silos
• One Air Intake/Filtration Building
• One 100′ diameter Control Dome Building
• One 125′ diameter Power Dome Building
• One – 6 story Entry Portal Building
• and a few other misc buildings and areas.

All that, available for the very reasonable price of $1.5M USD! Here’s the details. And here.

In other news, we’re hard at work on the updated submission for IGF which the judges hopefully will wait to see before they score. Once that is delivered, it won’t be long until the first commercial version of the game will be released. We plan to make it available at a discount from the final full price, since it will still not yet contain many of the campaign missions. However, if you buy the early discounted version, you’ll also get all future versions up to when the first full campaign is completed and released.

Also, you may have noticed that we’re moving servers.. we hit a snag with that and are still on the old box – but not for long. The new machine will be online in time for the first commercial release and should help ensure fast downloads.

Yep, and it’s dynamic so when new tunnels are created and old ones get clogged with corpses, the AI will always know the path of least resistance to their targets – even if it means digging through lots of material!

This will change the necessity to heap tons of stupid AI guys on you like we used to do in the test builds. Now only a handful of smarty enemies should make a much more fun challenge than before.

It also means your own AI-controlled bodies can be commanded more specifically and be able to carry out much more complex tasks. Don’t want to bother digging that tunnel yourself? Just send one of your drones to do it for you, and he’ll expertly avoid rocks and other subterranean obstacles on the way.

UPDATE:

“Look Pa – I did it all on my own!”

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.

• 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!

We have figured out how to keep the entire engine at 8 bits per pixel internally (for manageable memory footprint), while rendering the last step of each frame in 32 bits per pixel to your screen. This allows us to do some nice glow effects in-game, and will eliminate any “crazy color” palette problems that some have experienced with the old 8bpp video mode builds.

You will still be able to turn off the effects and even go back to 8bpp mode in the next build, in case this slows down the game on your machine. We haven’t noticed a huge hit to performance though, so I think it’s well worth it for the extra eye candy.

Also, we’ve been profiling the memory allocations and have managed to plug the vast majority of the memory leaks present in previous builds. This should make longer games more feasible without CC slowly eating all your RAM.

Just wait for the rocket gib/explosion effects coming soon!

… 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!

Yes, that’s right: The first version of the in-gameplay integrated scene editor is now for you and your friends to have fun with! Co-operate to build your modular bunkers together or against each other before the game round starts, and then blast them to pieces!

As usual, there are many improvements and changes, but (also as usual) we worked uninterrupted all evening, night and morning to bring this to you.. so we’ll add the details later on after some sleep.

The big points are:

• You can now load stuff back into the rockets and ships and recycle them!
• Mouse control EVERYWHERE! Even in splitscreen games, the mouse cursor will stick to the screen of the player who is using it!
• Complete automatic Data Module independence if you stick to the simple modding rules.
• That goes for materials too! Don’t worry about your material indices colliding with others mods’ out there. It should magically work regardless now. (but let us know if it doesn’t…)
• Drawing order and material copying priorities have been swapped between the foreground terrain and the actors. This has a lot of good implications including helping to preserve the integrity of hard walls, possibility of camouflage and hiding, and just generally looking better.
• New grouping system to help organize all the Objects in the game. Note how your mod items will automatically show up in the bunker editor! (See the new AddToGroup property)
• You can set the gold amount that each team gets at the start of the game. Look in Settings.ini. Will hook up to in-menu UI soon.
• So many more bugfixes and tweaks…

The above complex was built in about two minutes with the editor. Pieces and items still cost gold to build, so you have to save some for when the the actual game round starts!

Next up: Making the AI actually able to navigate your arbitrary mazes and find your brain anyway – Coming soon!

So here’s an update on what we’ve been working on. There was a bit of a slump in productivity in June as we moved our offices, but we’ve picked up the pace in the past week.

A big problem with making mods for Cortex Command has been that any new names you defined in your data module could collide with ones found in any other random mod out there. So, if anyone tried to load both your and that other mod at the same time, very strange and unexpected things would occur (someone else’s arms and legs on your guy!). Or just crash the game with little clue as to what conflict caused it.

So we took a break from working on the new editors to solve this problem. Now, user made data modules form their own ‘name-spaces’, and thus can define whatever names they want, as long as they don’t conflict with anything in the official Base.rte module. This means your SuparGun will coexist peacefully with that other guy’s SuparGun, as long as you both follow some simple rules:

• Your instance names can’t be the same as anything in the official data module Base.rte
• In your own data module you can use anything defined in the official module, Base.rte. You can safely make copies or reference them as you wish.
• You CAN’T, however, use anything defined in any data module other than the official one, or the one you’re working on. This would cause an interdependency between two user made data modules, and will cause errors if they get separated. Just put everything dependent on each other into one module… you can organize it thoroughly. Look at how Base.rte is organized for tips.

Back to work on the Scene and Gib Placement editors!