New build:

• Randomly placed debris in terrain, including the gold. Different each time!
• Jumping and jetpack behavior has been changed completely. Now control the jetpack bursts more precisely.
• HUD updates with jetpack status and weight overload iconography. If the player is overloaded with stuff, jetpack will be ineffective. HUD will warn of this.
• Too tired to think of what else. Maybe I’ll remember later.

– D

Arne has been working on redesigning the skin of the buy menu GUI:

Still WIP of course.. but yeah it’s going to look a lot better than currently in the last build!

Got terrain debris in there. They are randomly placed throughout the terrain based on three parameters: MinDepth, MaxDepth, and DensityPerMeter:

Should help make the scenes a little more interesting. Also, the gold is placed randomly too. This means each time the scene is loaded/reset, things have changed around and should affect gameplay (large deposits outside your door? score!)

We’re really cranking them out now, folks!

New in this build:

• Gamepad support! Try plugging in any gamepad (or joystick, but that’s kinda silly) and play Cortex Command the way it is intended! Custimizable controls are forthcoming.
• Buy GUI improvements: Now the selected craft has a separate field which is required to fill before you can press the BUY button. This eliminates the bizarro possibility of ordering multiple rockets which pop out from a… rocket.
  Also separated out the Tools and Weapons.
• Recycling: Now, when you fly off the top of the screen with a rocket, the game will tally up its total value. This includes all its cargo, namely the gold it’s carrying, as well as any passengers (and their inventory), as well as the craft’s own value. The ship’s value will proportionally count for less if it is damaged.
• Lots of other small bugfixes and improvements.

Also, stay tuned for some exciting announcements in the music department!More on that tomorrow.

New build. Very tired. New in-game music (more on that after I sleep). Menu works. Needs more work:

Brain and friends

There seems to be an issue with the latest build not loading any other data modules than Base.rte… on some computers (not mine!). This will result in a failing to load the scene ‘Prom Grounds’, since it is defined in the custom ‘PromGrounds.rte’ data module.

The good news is that a new build will be done tonight – with a working in-game buy menu! This is a big deal since it will finally close the gameplay loop of mining-filling-buying-fighting-repeat.

It will also make it so much easier to get your new and modded weapons and characters into the game, since they will automatically show up in the menu, ready for purchase and delivery!

So, stay tuned…

[Update, next day: Ok so it was optimistic… the release will probably be late tonight instead]

Yep. The old sounds and music are back in action! Now played back with shinier, better audio libraries (SDL with SDL_mixer on top). OGG playback is now possible… what will happen with music is yet to be seen…

Also, there was an issue with the Visual Studio 2005 CRT (standard C++ libraries) not being loaded properly on some machines with a super vague crash on launch. All I can say is that Microsoft created a fine mess with their ‘side by side’ DLL management technology involving their assemblies and and manifests and what-have-you. Not even their own linker can create proper manifests!

Anyway it’s fixed now, so if previous recent versions didn’t work, it’s worth a shot again!

Please note that the music and sounds are still mostly placeholder, and there’s so many more sound events to be put in there yet..

New Build with Actor switching and a (non-functional) buy GUI!:

• Cycle between all the Actors – including the Brain – on your team with the buttons shown in the loading screen. Tap both keys at once to get the Brain immediately!
• Splitscreen was reimplemented so it works now with setting horiz/vertical splits, or both.. play with settings in Settings.ini if interested.
• Buy GUI layout now slides in and out when the Brain is activated. Making it functional (and a whole lot prettier) is the next task!

Note that rockets won’t be spawning automatically anymore… took that code out since we’re pretty close to having the buy menu working. That’s where you’ll select and buy exactly what guys and gear you want.

So, where is the build, you ask?!

Well… let’s just say some unforseen troubles got in the way of getting it out there earlier. Like lots of unexpected hidden bugs, and losing an entire day reinstalling all the software on my uncooperative machine.

There’s still some nasty bugs to track down.. but while waiting in progress bar hell yesterday I had some time to think through the in-game purchasing GUI (graphical user interface) layout and how it’ll work.

The idea is that you can cycle between Actors on your team, one of which is your Brain (or Cortex – get it?). The Brain can’t move or really do anything physically. However, when you switch to it, the communications link with the orbiting space station is established and the purchasing GUI will pop up, occupying half of your (split) screen:

This GUI layout consists of three columns and has to be completely navigatable with each player’s respective directional keys/stick. The leftmost column is the category selector, which is a set of radio buttons that determine what shows up in the next column to the right.

That middle column is where the items for the selected category are displayed, along with their price (in ounces of gold). To add anything in here to your order, or ‘shopping cart’, just scroll and select it with the up/down buttons and use fire to add it. The item will then appear in the next column over.

Your order column all the way on the right, shows what you’ll when you hit the ‘BUY’ button – if you have enough gold to pay for the total cost. Another criteria for the buy button to be activated: you need to have at least one space craft in your order. There will be several types of craft, only some which can carry ‘bodies’ (clone soldiers or robots) to aid you in your mining operations. Also, some craft will not be able to ferry gold back to the station (think cheap one-way drop ships that slam into the ground). Using the fire button on any item the order list will delete it from the current order.

So, the player navigates between the columns with the left and right keys, and through the lists with up and down. Hopefully it’ll be intuitive enough. We’ll try to build as much assists into the functionality as possible, parhaps including a way to save an order setup so you don’t have to keep selecting the same items over and over each time you need a new soldier. There’s some room in the lower left corner of the layout for this..

That’s all for now; back to the great bug hunt!

“Finally! It’s 6 AM here and we have a brand spanking new data system that actually works! Everything seems to be functioning great with the data modules, and multiple scenes are handled properly by the engine for the first time..”

Ok, so that was all I managed to write in this post the other day, before I literally passed out in the chair. It’s true though: the data modules are now a-ok, the engine is building/running, and a new test build release of CC is brewing.

That’s right – since actor locomotion is on the agenda now, we’re about to start releasing test builds again. We really need your help to tell us if we’re improving on things, or if moving the guy around is still just pissing you off. So, we’ll be putting out updates pretty frequently with some different test scenes for you to run/fly/crawl all over.

There’s just a couple more bugs to straighten out and we’ll have the first in a series of new builds up shortly.