Yes, that’s right: The first version of the in-gameplay integrated scene editor is now for you and your friends to have fun with! Co-operate to build your modular bunkers together or against each other before the game round starts, and then blast them to pieces!

As usual, there are many improvements and changes, but (also as usual) we worked uninterrupted all evening, night and morning to bring this to you.. so we’ll add the details later on after some sleep.

The big points are:

• You can now load stuff back into the rockets and ships and recycle them!
• Mouse control EVERYWHERE! Even in splitscreen games, the mouse cursor will stick to the screen of the player who is using it!
• Complete automatic Data Module independence if you stick to the simple modding rules.
• That goes for materials too! Don’t worry about your material indices colliding with others mods’ out there. It should magically work regardless now. (but let us know if it doesn’t…)
• Drawing order and material copying priorities have been swapped between the foreground terrain and the actors. This has a lot of good implications including helping to preserve the integrity of hard walls, possibility of camouflage and hiding, and just generally looking better.
• New grouping system to help organize all the Objects in the game. Note how your mod items will automatically show up in the bunker editor! (See the new AddToGroup property)
• You can set the gold amount that each team gets at the start of the game. Look in Settings.ini. Will hook up to in-menu UI soon.
• So many more bugfixes and tweaks…

The above complex was built in about two minutes with the editor. Pieces and items still cost gold to build, so you have to save some for when the the actual game round starts!

Next up: Making the AI actually able to navigate your arbitrary mazes and find your brain anyway - Coming soon!

So here’s an update on what we’ve been working on. There was a bit of a slump in productivity in June as we moved our offices, but we’ve picked up the pace in the past week.

A big problem with making mods for Cortex Command has been that any new names you defined in your data module could collide with ones found in any other random mod out there. So, if anyone tried to load both your and that other mod at the same time, very strange and unexpected things would occur (someone else’s arms and legs on your guy!). Or just crash the game with little clue as to what conflict caused it.

So we took a break from working on the new editors to solve this problem. Now, user made data modules form their own ‘name-spaces’, and thus can define whatever names they want, as long as they don’t conflict with anything in the official Base.rte module. This means your SuparGun will coexist peacefully with that other guy’s SuparGun, as long as you both follow some simple rules:

• Your instance names can’t be the same as anything in the official data module Base.rte
• In your own data module you can use anything defined in the official module, Base.rte. You can safely make copies or reference them as you wish.
• You CAN’T, however, use anything defined in any data module other than the official one, or the one you’re working on. This would cause an interdependency between two user made data modules, and will cause errors if they get separated. Just put everything dependent on each other into one module… you can organize it thoroughly. Look at how Base.rte is organized for tips.

Back to work on the Scene and Gib Placement editors!