After the last post hyping things up a little, it’s time to dish out a counter to keep expectations in check with reality regarding the next release.

As some may have gleaned by now, the next version of Cortex Command will be the first one you can buy a license for. The plan is to release something that can be downloaded and played for free, but to get access to all the features you’ll need to buy a license key and unlock your installed copy with it.

We will have more details about how to buy and use the keys in a later post. Rest assured that we are trying hard to make it as flexible, affordable, and as little hassle to you as possible — while still ensuring that the seven years of work we’ve put into the project will pay off enough to allow us to keep working on it and future Data Realms games.

As for what will actually be in the version due out soon, please note that it is not going to have a complete campaign right off the bat. Currently there is only one complete mission, and half of it is a tutorial. There may be another mission done by time we put out the release, but it’s iffy.

Since the game won’t nearly be complete by the next release, the licenses are at first going to be heavily discounted from what they will eventually cost when the full campaign is done. If you buy a license at this early point, it will also unlock all future versions and updates up till where the full first campaign is complete and included.

Additional campaigns or expansion packs thereafter may have to be bought separately, but we haven’t planned that far ahead yet.

This is not to say that there isn’t tons of new stuff due for the next release - including editors and everything else hinted at in previous posts. Just don’t expect a full-blown campaign and metagame right away.

We will be rapidly adding missions shortly thereafter though, and working up to the point where there is a full campaign to play through. It will be up to you whether you want to play the missions on their own as they come out, or wait for the metagame mode we have planned (more details later).

Note that you will pay less the earlier you buy the license, since we going to gradually decrease the discount as the campaign nears completion and the game matures into the complete package we envision.

We hope this makes sense and isn’t too confusing. I’ll try to answer any questions you have in the comments below.

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.

Yep, and it’s dynamic so when new tunnels are created and old ones get clogged with corpses, the AI will always know the path of least resistance to their targets - even if it means digging through lots of material!

This will change the necessity to heap tons of stupid AI guys on you like we used to do in the test builds. Now only a handful of smarty enemies should make a much more fun challenge than before.

It also means your own AI-controlled bodies can be commanded more specifically and be able to carry out much more complex tasks. Don’t want to bother digging that tunnel yourself? Just send one of your drones to do it for you, and he’ll expertly avoid rocks and other subterranean obstacles on the way.

UPDATE:

“Look Pa - I did it all on my own!”

Just a quick update on what’s going on in DRL HQ. We’re crunching both to make the IGF submission, and the first commercial version of CC. The full in-game Scene Editor is now feature complete and we’re using it ourselves to build the real story scenarios that will make up the meat of of the Cortex Command experience. After six years in the making, we can finally say that we’ve transitioned from pre-production into actual production on this project. ;D

So, if you already enjoy the rickety skirmish mode of the test builds, you’re in for a treat. We are adding many times more content than you’ve seen so far. Environments, ships, guys, weapons, tools, game modes, cut scenes… oh my!

The Scene Editor will be included with the full game, and since we’re using it ourselves to build the game (aka “eating our own dog food”), it is shaping up to be quite powerful and user friendly.

Good things come to those who wait. Image to the left is purely fictitious fun.

• 32-bit rendering effects! Shiny gold, glowing fireballs and tracers, etc.
• Much-improved player interface with adaptable pie menus. All relevant commands just two buttonpresses away!
• 32-bit video mode - no more palette corruption problems.
• Enemy spawns are now data driven… Modders: fight against your own creations, just look in Activities.ini
• Memory leaks massively reduced, can play long games without RAM being eaten, and overall memory footprint reduced.
• Several crash bugs gone and other glitchfixes

We’re proud of this one - enjoy!

We have figured out how to keep the entire engine at 8 bits per pixel internally (for manageable memory footprint), while rendering the last step of each frame in 32 bits per pixel to your screen. This allows us to do some nice glow effects in-game, and will eliminate any “crazy color” palette problems that some have experienced with the old 8bpp video mode builds.

You will still be able to turn off the effects and even go back to 8bpp mode in the next build, in case this slows down the game on your machine. We haven’t noticed a huge hit to performance though, so I think it’s well worth it for the extra eye candy.

Also, we’ve been profiling the memory allocations and have managed to plug the vast majority of the memory leaks present in previous builds. This should make longer games more feasible without CC slowly eating all your RAM.

Just wait for the rocket gib/explosion effects coming soon!

… at least not collision map-related ones

After reworking the way movable objects clean up the map, we ran several hours of stress testing of the engine on all the available machines here at DRL HQ:

No crashes or hiccups.

Also threw in a frag counter due to popular demand!

As Linus Torvalds used to say:

“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”

Yes, B15 may have been a little rushed out the door. But we listened to the issues, and here is the fix to most many of them (plus more):

• No more crashes due to corrupt collision map Nope, still have these.. were introduced with the new optimizations.. sorry. Will work on them.
• No more crashes due to out of bounds of the scene (digging off the bottom etc)
• No more crashes due to unknown materials… defaults gracefully to a safe material instead
• Far more optimized version which runs much faster. We profiled the code and nailed a few hotspots which were slowing down things, especially on larger maps. This is what took a bit longer to do than the other fixes.
• Mouse jerkyness completely fixed.. silly bug
• Mouse interface improved.. no more tedious double clicking!
• Many more small fixes and improvements

Enjoy!