Wandering around on the intertubes the other day, both Dan and I independently came across this cool Zero-gravity experiments video. A guy makes a sphere of water in (held together in zero-g by a loop of wire) and does neat things like injecting air bubbles into it and making waves. Worth a watch!

It reminded us of a cool game called Osmos. There’s a trailer you can watch of the game here for comparison.

Osmos has, like Cortex Command, has won an IGF award too! It really is a lot of fun and is a very new and unique game mechanic. Check out the demo here.

Speaking of other games, have any of you checked out Minecraft?

There’s a few servers running in our forums — if you aren’t active already, join up and get talking! You can see all of our other-game threads here.

Q: In Skirmish play, will there be any goals implemented in it soon? Examples: Survive for X minutes, obtain X kills, collect X% gold, etc? – FrogFreak
A: There’s going to be two major game modes: Metagame/Campaign and the Scenarios/Skirmish (we’re still deciding on the final names..). The Scenarios basically offer any compatible combo of a Scene and an Activity (usually Lua script-driven). We’re working on having the Activities have a special Lua function that can test if a Scene has the required and properly named Areas and other placements needed for that Activity. That way each Scene can be re-used for many different types of Activities. For example, think of home base Areas and flag placements needed for a CTF Activity. As long as they’re in a Scene, that scene supports CTF games. – Data

Q: Will making money ever be anything more than collecting gold? – Garrett
A: Yup! There will be precious stones and artifacts buried in the ground. They have to dug out and brought up to the surface, tossed into a landing craft, and flown off the top of the screen for a big payoff. Also, we are working on animal fossils that have to be ‘revealed’ (but not dug out or destroyed) from the unexplored areas of every Scene, with an x-ray type tool. The fossil science data rewards are then given to teh team who first claimed that new site. – Data

Q: Can I have a dollar? – Jesse
A: You can have many dollars – if you earn them first! – Data

Q: How much micromanaging will there be in the metagame? Will it be like the total war series where structures can be bought in certain cities or bunkers? Or where generals could develop, fight battles and increase statistics? – The Pub
A: Once a site on the planet has been claimed by one of the teams, it can be built upon. It will be an important part of the game to invest resources into your money-making bases, so they can be defended against attack. You’ll have to place all bunker modules, defensive installations and personnel before an attack happens, or it’ll be that much harder to defend when the enemies start landing! – Data

Here’s a new mailbag! We didn’t promise one EVERY Monday, did we?! (um, actually, seems like we did.. oh well here is a double dose anyway – be happy for what you get! ;))

I’ve noticed that, when an actor is wielding a shield along with a single-hand weapon, if the said actors crouches while pressing any other movement keys, the shield will disappear from it’s hands, to reappear magically (or not) a couple seconds later. Is there any hope that this issue will be solved in the next build? – Areku
A: Ah, this is probably because the arm holding the shield is being used to crawl.. will add to the bug list, but can’t promise it’ll be fixed by next build! – Data

What cool new things are being done to help the modding community? – Cody
A: As always, more Lua bindings to the engine and documentation for them. There’s also talk of some modding database integration in the forums. The forum admins know more about that, I’m sure there’s a thread or two kicking around in there. Looking at making the AI routines run in Lua instead of the C++ code… however, since I’m not so comfortable with Lua, I will probably ask some community hostshots to port the AI Update functions for me while referencing the current C++ code. Any takers? – Data

At the moment, the AI is a bit reckless and they sometimes end up wiping out their team mates. Will the AI eventually be able to ‘see’ better and distinguish friend or foe more accurately? – matty1
A: See the previous answer above! When the AI is run in Lua, you can make any changes to it that you’d like. Next build should have a Lua-based AI Update function that will override the native C++ one in there right now. – Data

I’ve been watching CC since the third build, but haven’t seen any information yet about implementation of hardware acceleration for graphics, which would greatly improve the performance and lower requirements on the processor and ram end. Are there any plans to implement this feature? – Brian Frazer
A: There actually is hardware acceleration done in the blitting of bitmaps in CC, albeit very primitive and limited (DirectDraw7 on windows). The next Data Realms project is already being built on top of Direct3D/OpenGL to take better advantage of the the power of GPUs out there (yet still in 2D) – Data

Are there any plans to add multicore support to the CC engine? – Cody
A: Nope – we looked seriously at this since CC’s physics engine is CPU-bound. However, the extra work and complexity involved in retrofiittng it to become multithreaded (and still portable) just doesn’t appear to be worth it. Next project, maybe… – Data

Will it ever be possible to have 4 players on 4 seperate teams? – Matthew
A: Yep, I’m currently rewriting the way teams work because of the Metagame.. if things go well, there will be support for up to four teams, each with their own little symbol/icon instead of the red and green hearts – Data

I personally believe that frequent, not-so-relevant blog posts are better than sporadic, on-topic posts. Dan agrees and has given me the go-ahead to post the general goings-on around the DataRealms HQ! In the coming weeks I’ll post some tidbits from here and there. The posts will probably get a bit more personable and not “all business” as they’ve been in the past.

But for today:

Over in the Forums we’ve started up the Official Christmas Mod Contest. It’s fairly free-form – from weapons to sprites to total conversions, anything goes! Check it out; it will run until mid-December so we have time to take our Christmas breaks.

Meanwhile, Dan is dreaming about one day being able to do one-handed pushups.

Hey there! Sorry about the lack of posts recently.  Data has been trying to get me up to speed on all the changes since the last release, and it’s taking longer than expected. Until then, we will have to settle for mailbag questions!

I have a double-shot for you this week; half the questions are on the Campaign and half on Modding:

Are we going to be able to make custom parameters for third party factions in the campaign? Such as, using Darkstorm or UniTec as your set faction. Will the support even go as far as making custom campaigns for them? – Sean
A: Yes, that’s the plan! You’ll get to choose your ‘native’ faction at the start of each campaign game, which can be any of the data modules loaded (ie possibly your own). All the stuff of that faction will then available to you at the regular prices, but you might still be able to buy things from other factions, but at very high ‘black market’ prices. – Data

Most of us know about the Whitebots (yay!), the Coalition and the Dummies, but are those going to be the three main factions or are there going to be more major races than just those? – Mapleleaf
A: Yup, right now we’re looking at least two more.. the dark bots and the red guys. Prom might be able to chime in with more details here. – Data

Can you tell us what the heck data & company are doing about the campaign? I mean is it going to be hardcoded or what? I’m dying for an answer and I know I’m not alone. – Not Alone
A: As usual, everything will be as data- and script-driven as we reasonably can make it. The campaign metagame is going to be separate from the story episode scenarios we’ll be putting out later. The metagame will be a super-replayable thing that should be different every time. Think along the lines of the board game Risk, and you get the gist of it. The story episodes are standalone, content-rich packages that tell a small part of the CC story with one or more solid scenarios sandwiched between an intro and outro. The campaign metagame is the highest priority for us now. – Data

Is Tradestar a faction within the Coalition? – NMP
A: The TradeStar is a type of huge mothership used by trade and exploration conglomerates to reach out into the galaxy and tap its resources. Think of the East India Co. as a loose analogy for the type of entity, and the TradeStar as a Galleon of that era. They hire on all these different competing ‘factions’ or smaller corporations who get to duke it out and see who can most efficiently harvest the resources of the planets they find. It’s brutal competition and market selection being put to use. Whomever wins the settlement battles, gets the contract for the entire planet. – Data

Will Lua be able to be directly attached/run on attachables? – CaveCricket48
A: I haven’t tried this yet, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work right now? Give it a shot and PM the results in the forums. – Data

Will the lua scripting be able to use external modules? – John
A: I’m not sure what you mean by ‘use’, but you can safely reference anything that has been loaded in the same module as your script sits in, even if it is external. Just don’t reference stuff in OTHER external modules.. then you’re asking for trouble if someone has your module but not that other one. As always, it’s safe to reference stuff in the official module (until we remove or rename that thing in a new build.. 😉 – Data

Is it possible that the 8-bit color palette used for scenes (as opposed to menus) to be a mod-configurable file? The current palette is pretty limiting and has several near-identical shades of white. – Rawtoast
A: I could possibly add some controls for loading a different palette, if not to the INI files, then to the Lua interface.. it’s not a high priority though, as it would really mess up all the other stuff you’d load. This would only be useful in a total conversion type mod. – Data

When will we have a variable for emission velocities (like gibs)? – Duh102
A: I’ll have to look into this.. there’s always more controls to be expose.. at some point we have to triage which things to work on though. – Data

As usual, submit your queries to andy@datarealms.com – I have around 80 questions on backlog, but the more interesting ones get bumped to the front! Submit your query today!

Mod Contest 5 just went up!

– Make a weapon or an actor that is related to something undead.
– Undead does not specifically mean zombies. It could refer to ghosts, vampires, werewolves, or any other creatures of the night.
– Furthermore, the object itself doesn’t need to be undead, it just has to involve the undead.

Check out the official rules and discuss the contest in the forum.

Any plans for rebalancing terrain integrity to prevent actors chipping away at it? – Duh102
A: Yes, we are always open to tweaking the material properties, although we are very careful with it since changing, for example, a strength value so it works better in one context often makes it work worse in some other. – Data

Ask Data about the cryptic stuff releated to potential fog of war. – Findudex
A: We haven’t planned fog-of-war in the traditional RTS sense, although we might do something similar where enemy actors disappear or are only hinted at graphically if none of your team’s members can currently see them.
On a related note, we actually have already implemented a pretty cool “unrevealed” areas feature, so that team might start with large areas of the scene unexplored and therefore remains black, until one of their team Actors “sees” and uncovers the area. This will be an integral part of the gameplay, especially in the metagame campaign. More on that in a separate post! – Data

Is there any optimization being done? My FPS tends to suck, and it’s slightly annoying/confusing to mess with DeltaTime settings and all. – Cody
A: We are always thinking about what rough optimizations can be done while implementing new features and code in general. However, we also follow the principle that it’s more important to first get a new piece of code to generate the desired output with a very clear or naive implementation, and only then work from there in small steps to obfuscate it with crazy optimizations. So, to answer your question: Yes, we are definitely going to be profiling and optimizing the whole engine a lot more to make it run as well as we can, although our first priority is to get things working at all! – Data

Will water particulates/pixels be made to behave more like water? Cause right now they just crush like plants and everything else. – Connor
A: Getting proper-ish liquid physics in is unfortunately a very low priority now. The “bang for the buck” in terms of how much trouble it would be to implement and the improved gameplay just doesn’t seem worth it! The “water” materials you might see in some of the official scenes are purely experimental so far, and I don’t think they’ll stick around. That’s not to say I’m not open to trying some easy hack/approximation solution for pools of water at some point… think the “falling sand” algorithm. – Data

For this week’s featured friday I’m pulling something from the Epic Moments forum thread. I’m waiting on Data to send me some game updates so (hopefully) next week we’ll have more actual content. 😉

This ‘splodetacular video of a V1 Rocket explosion was captured on film by NaXx. The editing gets 5 stars just for the suspenseful introduction. Timing is everything, kids!

Have a particularly spectacular animation? Post it to Epic Moments for your chance at a fabulous prize*!

(*: being featured on the blog, wooo)

For a long time now, Cortex Command has been stuck with the lonely Crab as the only Fauna on the planet. The Flora has been pretty sparse too.

Cortex Command Rough concept art for indigenous life

The basic idea behind these concepts are that a mass extinction took place long ago, with the crab and a type of plant being the only survivors. The fossilized creatures were the ones which drew the short straw of course. With no competitors around, the crab and plant quickly evolved and diversified.

(Note: this is just a sketch-up of some ideas, and isn’t a guarantee of future gameplay elements. That goes for any art I post on this blog, too)

What about the gameplay though? Currently, the (or a) plan is to have different pacing with more action oriented segments, and some calmer segments with more of the indigenous life. It would be a nice feeling to arrive at a new site, finding a new life form (and poke it around a bit). The question is how quick the few lifeforms I’ve drawn above will get old, and if I need to vary the shapes and color a bit more too keep things exciting. Is it boring to just have different types of crabs, or should we go nuts with many different species? I’d like to think that it’s possible to vary the crab design enough to fill the niches we need to fill. Using wildlife derived from crabs also gives Cortex Command a clear identity.

While the regular plants are just terrain objects, the hostile ones would probably have to be special actors. We have thought about trees, but it might be best to put those in the background. It would probably feel wrong if they were static  terrain pixels. They could be some special kind of actor. A palm tree for example could have a trunk spine of little… chunks, and flimsy leaves which could be shot to pieces.

A dropship crashing down in a group of trees could bend the trunks (which could snap if a certain tolerance is exceeded). It would look spectacular, in theory. In reality it might be hard to get it to feel right, and it takes valuable time to implement. Another worry is that trees will crowd up the terrain too much and that too many actors would end up walking into trees and hang or ‘explode’ (wait, did we fix that yet?).

So, well, those were my thoughts on that. I wrote a bit too much about trees. I think I’m supposed to end this pose with a question mark, to stimulate discussion. Instead I used it to highlight a bug which has proven difficult to crush. That’s not the way to do it, so I’ll have another go at it.

Coalition Military Forces (playing with styles)

What do you guys think about the proportions of the Cortex Command humanoids? More specifically, I’m thinking about the head size and foot size. When I was younger I thought big feet and big hands were really awesome. Lately I’ve been moving the focus away from the feet and legs, up to the torso where I feel the interesting parts are. For me, feet are not the most interesting part of a design. Long mecha toes are alright, but putting a lot of the (design) mass into the foot and lower leg seems like a waste unless you’re designing a toy which is supposed to be standing up. Humans get fat around the belly because it’s the center of mass. Imagine trying to move around if all of your fat was centered around the wrists and ankles! (On the plus side, you could wear blue spandex and cosplay as Megaman.)

Fight, Proto-clone, for everlasting gold!

Anyways, I had a fleeting thought about reducing the foot size a bit, and maybe (but probably not) play around with the head size some. The actual foot graphics are separate from the ground collision mechanic, so it can be just a graphical tweak. I mention this because I don’t like drawing pinups of the Cortex Command characters with huge ‘Goofy’ feet, even though they bother me less when seen ingame. It would be nice if the promo art matched the actual ingame graphics though.

Congrats to TheLastBanana for winning the forum contest for best Total Conversion Mod!

The Reject is a total conversion modifcation, changing the game style, the premise, and the goal of the game drastically. From the thread:

Dodge falling cargo crates in an attempt to escape the clutches of the Space Order Corporation’s rejected cargo bin! While you’re at it, grab expensive stuff!

Features:

– Down-to-the-pixel accuracy of fallen blocks will little lag.
– Equip a jetpack or become zombified (or both)
– 16 different treasure items to collect for points along with 3 character modification items.
– 4 difficulty modes and a difficulty select screen, ranging from Easy to Insane.
– Score counter at the end gives you a breakdown of where your points come from.

Best played in 640×480 resolution. Yes, it ends, but it’s not scripted to give you a win message or anything. No, nobody will ever get there without cheating. There is an easter egg.

Download and Discuss The Reject – it’s worth an hour of your time!