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

Some generous people have posted that they would be willing to donate to Data Realms to help us keep developing games… well, that’s great (just buy multiple copies of the game instead!), but this is what we really need:

Underground in rural Washington:

• Three – 160′ Tall Missile Silos
• Three – 4 story Equipment Terminal Buildings
• Three – Fuel Terminal Buildings
• Two – 6 story Antenna Silos
• One Air Intake/Filtration Building
• One 100′ diameter Control Dome Building
• One 125′ diameter Power Dome Building
• One – 6 story Entry Portal Building
• and a few other misc buildings and areas.

All that, available for the very reasonable price of $1.5M USD! Here’s the details. And here.

In other news, we’re hard at work on the updated submission for IGF which the judges hopefully will wait to see before they score. Once that is delivered, it won’t be long until the first commercial version of the game will be released. We plan to make it available at a discount from the final full price, since it will still not yet contain many of the campaign missions. However, if you buy the early discounted version, you’ll also get all future versions up to when the first full campaign is completed and released.

Also, you may have noticed that we’re moving servers.. we hit a snag with that and are still on the old box – but not for long. The new machine will be online in time for the first commercial release and should help ensure fast downloads.