We at Data Realms want to thank you for another year of your fantastic support and enthusiasm for what we do! It literally keeps us going – a good thing too, since you haven’t seen anything yet! We have some very neat stuff in store for our beloved fans, which will be revealed in the next few weeks. As far as Cortex Command goes, 2009 should yield the completion of the campaign and metagame – so stick around!

Inspiring brickwork by Andrew Colunga

In this week of examples of recent tech breakthroughs that bring us closer to the world of Cortex Command; behold the first stable, artificial osteocutaneous (“bone-skin”, in this case metal-skin) interface:

Click for article and video

The process of merging the skin and the metal pin is similar to the way that skin interacts with deer antlers. This breakthrough, although great for prosthetics, is also a prerequisite for making permanent, wired brain-computer interfaces. Otherwise, the physical ports into the body would risk getting infected all the time.

There’s already significant work done on how to decode visual signals going to the brain (more), so the video-in jack on the back of my head that I’ve always wanted can’t be far off! No more need to sit upright, staring at a monitor all day — or to use hands on a keyboard/mouse, for that matter… bring on the interface revolution!

After a long wait, Cortex Command for OSX is out. This is a universal binary package, so it should work on most Macs out there (as long as they are running a version of OSX higher or equal to 10.4 (Tiger))! However, we couldn’t test this on all possible combos ourselves, so if you find it doesn’t run on your mac, please send the error message to us at support@datarealms.com.

A big thank you and kudos goes to Chris Kruger who did a fantastic job getting this complex piece of software running on this great platform! Cortex Command is built on half a dozen libraries and middleware components that all had to be made to run in harmony in the Mac environment – on both old PPC and new Intel flavors. It wasn’t a walk in the park.

We need your help to spread the word to game-starved Apple fans everywhere! If you have a friend who uses Mac and haven’t been able to play CC yet, how about getting him/her a copy of the game for the holidays?

Finally, note that if you have bought a license for Cortex Command, you can use it to play any version on any platform. In other words, the keys are platform-agnostic.

Here’s a couple of fascinating tech advancements that bring us that much closer to the world of Cortex Command:

Happy turkey day everyone! Hope you’re not too stuffed.. because it’s the day of great shopping deals (in the U.S. at least, but the rest of the world can get in on it here too)…

Yup, that’s right, it’s Black FRIDAY. Get a full license of Cortex Command for only $9.00!

Go here, type in “BLACK” (without quotes) as the coupon code, and enjoy your 50% savings this holiday!

This coupon is only valid to the end of this weekend, so tell your friends about it! Remember, if you buy this now, you will get access to future updates of the game – including the one containing the complete campaign.

If you already have a key, then how about buying a nice x-mas gift for someone you know? Give the gift of remote-controlled body carnage this year!

UPDATE: Sale is now over – stay tuned to the blog for future opportunities.

Sorry for the cheesy title – supar tired.

Build 22 is out! You should be able to install it over previous versions without problems.

This is a big one, especially on the content side. Highlights include:

• TONS of new official weapons and actors implemented thanks to new content producers Capnbubs and Numgun – most of the balancing, costs, and audio effects are still works in progress.
• Lots of new exclusive and amazing in-game music thanks to DannyB of dB Soundworks. More on this later!
• Completely new, completely awesome full-blown mission with almost completely hand-painted environment!
• Vastly more interesting and reactive AI actor behavior
• AI GO-TO mode waypoints can lock onto moving actors – make squads move in groups!
• 2X Windowed mode for easier to read fonts and screen action
• Buy menu lists are now grouped into data modules/factions
• Description popups for almost every item
• Items and actors can now be loaded into Craft!
• New installer will ask if you want to remove EVERYTHING or leave your installed mods and settings
• Lots more I can’t remember right now

UPDATE: Whoops, forgot to include a file that regulates the Skirmish fights. If you downloaded before this message appeared here, you can download a quick patch from here. If you are downloading the build now or later, don’t worry, the current setup file has been updated.

For the next few days, Data Realms is representing at The Independent Gaming Source’s inaugural TIGJam 2008! Will be good times getting work done next to some of the indie game development community’s finest.

Live stream from ground zero: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tigjam-2008

Collection of posted screenshots from jam participants: http://www.tigjam.com

UDPATE:

It’s all over, and t’was the BEST TIGJAM EVER!
Photos: http://www.datarealms.com/stuff/photos/tigjam08/

Here’s an update on the Mac version of Cortex Command, straight from porter extraordinaire Chris himself:

“Last night was productive. The game is running again now. The most annoying debug session ever. The main problem was ridiculous.

It turns out the problem (i’ll save you too much of the gory details), was my use of a non-standard wifi dongle for my Internet connection!

If you don’t use the Airport … you’re in for a nasty surprise.

Unbelievable that it can cause an exception so deep in workings of Mac OSX it was distinctly non-trivial to find. I was so perplexed I started looking for harebrained causes, and eventually I was lucky enough to get a crash that didn’t completely overwrite the stack and I noticed it was crashing deep in the os dns lookup library somewhere.

Short story: It was just trying to get its own hostname on game startup and blowing up in my face because it assumes the use of the Airport.

Now, I can concentrate on the mouse, which is the original bloody problem :)”

The mouse issues he refers to appear to be related to legacy mouse interface code in Allegro which causes the mouse to skip and not be responsive. He’ll probably have to write new mouse handlers that use more modern API’s.

Other than that, things are looking good for a Mac release very soon!

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.

Here it is folks. Going to update this post later with more info. There’s not much new content, but many many new features! That’s why the price discount stays the same for this update.

Got to catch a flight in an hour, and haven’t packed or showered yet (another all nighter)… so enjoy! I’ll write more soon!

UPDATE: Ok stuck in airport terminal, so can write about some of the new features. There may not seem like a lot of difference at first glance, but there’s eight months of important work done under the hood. On the other hand, there really isn’t much new content in this one; it’s all been about laying the foundation for the real production that can now start in earnest.

Without further ado, some of the new features:

• Full support for any screen resolution your graphics driver can handle! Cortex Command in HD, baby!
• New audio system that is far more robust. No more missed sound effects. All non-UI audio pitches down when the simulation starts going slower than real time. More about this later.
• Simulation speed partially decoupled from real time. It’s allowed to smoothly slow down into slomo without sacrificing FPS when the simulation becomes too heavy for your machine to keep at real time. You can turn this off with Ctrl+O. Again, more on this later.
• Lua engine and console now integrated, and almost whole existing C++ engine exposed to it. The console can be accessed with the [~] key (left of your [1] key). Exhaustive documentation of the full Lua interface is coming soon!
• Lua scripting of entire Activity logic! This allows for any game rules we want to make the missions have, and any multiplayer style as well, like CTF or king of the hill, etc.
• First draft of data-driven Campaign screen. You can select eligible scenes/sites directly on the planet. As more mods and official content is loaded, more sites/missions will show up on the planet. This menu will evolve into the metagame eventually.
• Completely new licesning system that allows you to reset your own key, AND to register/play with that key offline. Reset and update your keys at http://licensing.datarealms.com
• Many many bug fixes and tweaks everywhere.

UPDATE 2: Whoops, there was a menu bug in the first release of b21.. one line of code which causes the main menu to get shifted in higher resolutions, screwing up skirmish menu etc. Just uninstall the old one, re-download and install again if you got it before this update appeared.

PLEASE UNINSTALL ANY PREVIOUS VERSION BEFORE INSTALLING THIS ONE!