New Build, folks… delay due to holiday madness etc. Will write more about what’s changed soon.

Short incomplete list:

• Gibs! Everywhere! (Except rocket, yet.. need more time to develop proper effects or it’ll look weird)
• Bleeding of wounds now stops after a while. Certain wounds bleed for longer than others (like missing limb wounds are bad)
• Gold collection has been simplified, more info here.
• No more mysterious .dat files. Everything is exposed in the .rte folders now… easier to mod anything!
• Gamepad setup has changed completely… right now custom configuration doesn’t work, but it’s set up to work for the wired XBOX 360 controller, which you can just plug into any USB port on your PC (and download driver from microsoft here).
• Swapped keyboard layouts for player one and two – so now you can easily play singleplayer on laptops!
• Actors don’t lose grip of their held weapons nearly as easily. Was frustrating before.
• Brain actor updated slightly; hangs from ceiling. Blows up!
• Long games don’t slow down as much anymore… forcing jittery particles to settle after a while.
• Tons of other small stuff

If you want to try the XBox 360 Controller, here’s the basic setup:

• Left analog stick = Movement, including controllable jetpack
• Right analog stick = Aiming
• Right Trigger = Fire
• Left Trigger = Reload, and hold down and use the left stick to change, pick up and drop weapons
• Bumper buttons = Cycle through actors, hit both to bring up buy menu
• Start button = Resets the current game

Last night I had some friends over for a game night, which included a playtest session of the latest version of Cortex Command on the projector screen and proper analog controllers. Here are some screen shots of the end of Matthew Wegner‘s epic 20+ minute struggle on the ‘Death’ difficulty setting:

How many bodies are mashed in that heap of blood and metal at the bottom of the rocket bunker?!

The AI bots literally wore a deep groove in the terrain in the east approach.

This tunnel is what financed the base defense.

And here’s the guy responsible for digging the whole thing! He could stay down there because of the simplified gold collection scheme… as soon as there was enough money collected, another base defense guy was bought and called in to push back the onslaught at the base!

I messed up and forgot to make the images attached in the Official forum viewable to everyone… check it out now for some sweet art.

Also, we made the Mods forum attachments downloadable to everyone, even poeple without registered accounts! This will make it easier for your friends to download your mods since they don’t have to hassle with signing up first.

After almost six years in the making, the Cortex Command engine (the ‘Retro Terrain Engine’, actually) is ~80% done. It is finally time to make an actual game out of it, complete with a story line and a campaign of scenarios! So, earlier this week we started a forum hidden from the public to coordinate art production for the final game.

However, in the spirit of open development, we decided today to un-cloak it and allow Cortex Command fans everywhere to see exactly what’s going on behind the scenes!
http://datarealms.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=6

Only official developers can post and modify the threads within, but please feel free to comment and discuss the development efforts in the General forum.
http://datarealms.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4

Please note that this Official dev forum will contain pretty much complete spoilers of the story and what the final game will contain. So, if you’d rather enjoy the campaign with fresh eyes, you shuold NOT go here:
http://datarealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=474

As you can tell in the previous post, we need to come up with a name for the planet and moon which serve as the setting for the game. You can help us with this!

More info here:
http://www.datarealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=407

So, continuing on the topic of what will change in the wake of our recent playtesting sessions:
Gold digging and collection is a core mechanic in Cortex Command. The yellow metal represents the ‘resource’ which is supposed to give the game its RTS-esque element. With it, players finance their mining operations, including the defense from – and offense against – rivals.

In the context of the story, gold is actually the reason these space-faring frontiersmen (represented by the brains) have traveled so far to the planet [insert name here], which is game’s setting. In the story’s relatively far future, humanity’s money currencies are all backed 100% with tangible gold reserves, after having finally learned the repeated painful lessons of using pure paper currencies (which are only backed by the issuing governemnt’s percieved ability to tax its people).

Ok, let’s not get too sidetracked on economics and philosophy: Gold collection is part of Cortex Command. The way it was originally concieved, the process involved using your controlled Actors to dig up gold from the ground, carry it to a waiting rocket, and throw the gold into said rocket. Then, the rocket was supposed to be flown off the top of the map, symbolizing that it was being delivered to the huge space station/ship/city-state orbiting [insert planet name here]. Only then was the gold amount added to the player’s spendable funds.

Needless to say – and obvious if you have played the test builds – this process is far too tedious and un-fun. It was just too much work to do it all, hauling gold back and forth… and the game’s still rough locomotion and controls didn’t help with the frustration factor. Not only that, the carried gold’s weight was acutally added to the actor’s total, making him even less mobile (can’t jump as high with the jetpack if you weigh more)

It was as if, in Super Mario Bros., you had to go empty your pockets of the coins you collected into some piggy bank in some remote location. And the more coins you carried, the less high you could jump! Fun? Probably not. And it just isn’t in CC either.

So, we got rid of it. Now, all you need to do to collect gold is to dig it (one verb, instead of four). It gets magically added to your total funds. Specifically, each time a gold pixel hits an actor of yours, it makes a little subtle *poing* sound and your funds are incremented by one ounce. As i think you’ll see in the forthcoming test build, gold collection is considerably more rewarding with this change.