After many months of work and preparation, we are finally ready to start creating the real campaign missions! There were several large hurdles that needed to be cleared before we could proceed with this, including:

• Exposing almost all of the C++ engine to Lua, using LuaBind.
• Adding a powerful in-game console for testing and debugging scripts.
• Making the game Activites’ logic be completely driven by Lua scripts.
• A new and flexible data-driven system of trigger “Areas” in each Scene, which the scripts can hook into.
• Making a completely new in-game editor for defining and naming the Areas of each Scene: The Area Editor —->.

The scripting of Activities is super important; before their logic could only be hardcoded in C++. That meant the whole executable had to be recompiled each time a change was made to the winning condition or whatever of a specific mission. Now, the script can be edited (by you!) while the game is running, and it is just reloaded automatically when Ctrl+R is pressed. Any errors encountered in the script will be reported to the in-game console, with line numbers and decent descriptions.

Here’s an example of how the Areas tie into the scripts. This snippet of Lua in your script’s UpdateActivity() function will cause any Actor that wanders into a specific Area named “Kill Zone” to be instagibbed:

for actor in MovableMan.Actors do if SceneMan.Scene:WithinArea("Kill Zone", actor.Pos) then actor:GibThis(); end; end;

We are also working on the online documentation for all of CC’s Lua interface – more on that later!

Chris is doing a great job with the porting, and has made lots of progress. The code now builds and runs on Mac OSX, but there’s still some issues to iron out… (lack of RMB!%@#)

Sorry for the sparse updates lately, but rest assured things are moving along on several fronts: We are almost done building a new licensing system which will make things a lot more easy and flexible for you guys. We just need to integrate it and test it thoroughly before putting it out there. Another front is the mac porting mentioned above.

On the actual game side of Cortex Command, a few big under-the-hood hurdles have been completed. There’s a new memory management system which makes things run faster and more reliably. Also the Lua interface has been improved and made a lot easier to work with. Now you can create new instances of any Entity by simply doing something like this in the console or script file:


myActor = CreateActor("Soldier Light");
myWeapon = CreateHDFirearm("Pistol");
myActor:AddToInventory(myWeapon);
-- This adds the new Actor to the scene, so he actually appears
MovableMan:AddActor(myActor);


As many of you have noticed, the data center in which our server lives has had some severe problems the last few days. First a transformer exploded and knocked down three walls around it, plus all nearby electrical equipment and cabling! Luckily no one was hurt. Or killed.

The techs brought in a generator, but a breaker on it failed last night so they had to bring in another generator today which just went online. More details here.

Hopefully things will keep on humming from now on, but if not, at least you know what’s going on. This doesn’t affect our webstore or licensing server, so don’t worry if you just placed an order.

However, if you did send anything to contact@datarealms.com or support@datarealms.com since Friday, and didn’t get a response yet, you might want to re-send as it likely didn’t make it though!

Here’s another interview of me by the indie scene scoopmaker Tim W. at IndieGames.com. This one is more about the development than the game itself, which complements the previous interview well.

The big news Tim breaks is that we now have a very experienced guy actually working on the Mac OSX port of Cortex Command! After many years in the ‘big’ games industry, Chris Kruger recently left his position at Rockstar Games to pursue freelance programming on his own. We are very fortunate to have him working with us on our project, and all you Mac users out there will soon be battling it out on your native platform!

Chris is one of those guys who actually enjoy porting games, so there’s a good chance other target platforms will be within our reach as well. Stay tuned…

Continuing the feature series.. Next up is something really powerful that will open whole new worlds of possibilities for you tinkerers and modders out there: There is now an in-game console that enables so much control of the engine that it’s almost scary.

Thanks to the Swedish geniuses at Rasterbar (recommended to us by Klei), we have managed to expose almost all of our internal classes and interfaces to the Lua environment now running in the system. This will eventually mean that some of you will literally be able to create entire new games with the Cortex Command engine by writing elaborate Lua scripts in addition to the content mods and addons you have been limited to so far.

Even if you’re not so ambitious, it’s still fun to play around in the console. Like making a guy instantly fly at 100 m/s to the right –>>

Documentation of all the commands and interfaces will eventually appear in the Data Realms Wiki, so you can easily harness this new power that has been unleashed!

Contrary to (understandable) popular belief, we are toiling away on the next build. I’ll try to get a series of posts going, each talking about a new feature or fix already completed for the upcoming version.

Today’s featured… uh, feature is: sticky particles! Yes, now some of the spray from the concrete gun actually stick to walls and ceilings, as well as blood splashes, etc.

This enables you to reinforce tunnels and caverns you’ve dug in the bare dirt. Just spray some concrete up on the walls and it will set into much harder material to make intrusions difficult for your enemies!

Photographic evidence

Also, checking this out is mandatory: Voxelstein 3D

As some of you have undoubtedly noticed, we just revealed a completely new version of the Data Realms official website! The new design is courtesy of Michael Heald of Fully Illustrated, who quite clearly did a bang-up job!

There is still more work in store for the site in general, specifically some cleaning up of the forums and dev log – and I don’t just mean the design.. we’re going to be cracking down on flaming and general BS in the comments and threads of both places.

Also – finally – there’s a proper page for Cortex Command itself, which we will be adding more content to as well. Hopefully it will give visitors a better idea of what we’re shooting for with the game than having to decipher an incomplete demo. You can expect a “coming features” section or high level to-do list of some kind soon!

UPDATE: The new flash banner is up now too, for extra wow effect 🙂
UPDATE2: Flash banner’s effects have been greatly improved!

We are proud to report that Cortex Command was chosen to be the inaugural game on IndieGames.com‘s new Game of the Month feature! Head over to the feature page for some juicy new concept art and explanations of the game’s setting and story:

In other news: Sorry there has been a bit of a gap in updates and activity. There were a series of IRL distractions, but we are back on track and the exciting times will definitely be picking up again!