Hey all, here’s a rundown of what’s new in the new Test Build 24 of Cortex Command, which was launched in the Humble Indie Bundle:

• Support for an unseen (unexplored) obscuring layer of the Scene, per team. This enables a lot of interesting game mechanics where the players of the same team share the knowledge about a Scene they’re playing in. Only by having one of their bodies or ships literally ‘seeing’ an area will what’s there be revealed. This should make digging for treasure, hidden bunkers, and fossils much more interesting in the future. It will also be integral for the Metagame, where collected intel about a site or enemy base on the planet is key to winning.
• Scripted logic for revealing the entire surface of a scene by way of a “scan from orbit“. Naturally, while this scan reveals everything in the airspace and the surface of the planet, it doesn’t penetrate far into the ground and thus leaves everything subterranean a mystery to the team. See the “Prospecting” activity for a work-in-progress example of this in action.
• The Lua interface documentation in the CC Wiki (coming back online shortly!) is now updated automatically by scanning the source code of the game and harvesting the extensive comments we’re written for all the classes, functions, and member variables.
• The animation of the arms and legs of characters in the game are now much improved when their bodies are tossed around. They will cartwheel out as an approximation for centrifugal forces of a ragdoll flying through the air.
• Upon loading a terrain, the algorithm for randomly placing terrain debris like boulders and gold nuggets now take a lot more care in not placing these things floating in underground caverns and spaces under overhangs.
• The effectiveness of jetpacks has been reduced, but will be rebalanced a bit upward again by the next build. Got a little carried away..
• Landing and objective HUD cursors are now red for friendly, and green for enemy (sounds a bit backwards, but works well in the game’s color palette).. this is to accommodate more than two simultaneous teams playing at the same time.
• Any of the four players can now control the mouse cursor in any of the general or shared menus, like the Main Menu and all the editors etc. This also applies to the gamepad/joystick players, so one doesn’t need a keyboard/mouse to navigate the menus anymore. (yay for couch-friendly play)
• Added quit confirmation dialogs so hitting esc doesn’t make you accidentally lose game progress (especially important for the metagame).
• Teams can now have custom, mod-addable flags/icons, which will show up in-game instead of the previously hard-coded heart icons. This is important for the metagame as well.
• Speaking of changes regarding the teams in preparation for the metagame, there can now be FOUR teams vs the previously hardcoded two. Also, there can be ‘gaps’ in both the player and team numbers in a game. This is very important to note for poeple who script Activites.. take note at how all the included Activity scripts now iterate through all players and teams. Failing to accommodate this change will break any game that has, for example, team 1, 3, and 4 playing in a game. (note the gap in enumeration)
• Completely new Scenario Battle mode and menus, which replaces the old now obsolete Skirmish menus and setup GUI.
• Activities and Scenes are now decoupled, so that you can first choose an Activity (brain match, last man standing, CTF, whatever else we/you wanna script) to play, and then all compatible Scenes are presented where you can play it. The compatibility is determined by any named Areas used in the Activity in question, like spawn points, landing zones, flag areas etc. The Scenes will be automatically scanned by the engine to check if they contain all these Areas used by the selected Activity, but the script writer can also specify custom requirements as well.
• An almost entirely new set of general Scenes whose terrains match their different geographical sites on the planet. For example, the ones placed in the desert on the planet actually look like a desert landscape when you play them, etc. These will make up the bulk of gold-rich sites you fight over for the Metagame.
• New hand-pixeled backdrops by Simon “Snake” Stafsnes Andersen of Owlboy fame.
• A set of new Activities (with proper winning conditions!) to play on the above scenes, including “One-Man-Army”, “Harvester”, “Survival”, etc.

So, what happened to the Metagame/Campaign mode we’ve been previewing in previous posts? Well, most of the effort since the last build went into getting this up and running.. however, as we worked on it, it became clear that many changes (like support for four teams, etc) were necessary to the engine to accommodate the types of battles that would happen during a Campaign.

Then, as the deadline for the Humble Bundle loomed, I realized that all these changes to the engine had fundamentally broken the previous Skirmish mode and its menus for setting up games. It quickly became clear that we had to abandon the hopes of finishing a first playable revision of the Metagame in order to rebuild and have ANY kind of playable modes working in time for the Bundle timeframe. That’s why this build’s Campaign button is disabled; we couldn’t ship it in a half-baked and confusing state to all the new people (now ~200k and counting!) who would be exposed to Cortex Command for the first time through the Bundle.

The good news is that while the work on the Metagame’s menus and mechanics aren’t visible in this build, it is quite far progressed already, and we are excited to get the last remaining phase of the turn-based mechanic running so the whole thing can actually be played, round after round! We intend to have a first revision of the Metagame up and playable (albeit still rough and unfinished) in the next build.

Last note: for everyone who has bought the game directly from us prior to the Bundle, check the previous post below for instructions on how to get Build 24. We are planning some very interesting things in terms of updates and DRM (or lack thereof) in future builds 🙂 Rest assured that you won’t regret having bought a license before these changes…