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.