Data Realms - Dev Log

Data Realms at TIGJam 2008

Data — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:20:04 +0000

For the next few days, Data Realms is representing at The Independent Gaming Source’s inaugural TIGJam 2008! Will be good times getting work done next to some of the indie game development community’s finest.

Live stream from ground zero: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tigjam-2008

Collection of posted screenshots from jam participants: http://www.tigjam.com

UDPATE:

It’s all over, and t’was the BEST TIGJAM EVER!
Photos: http://www.datarealms.com/stuff/photos/tigjam08/

Heroic Mac Debugging

Data — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:00:14 +0000

Here’s an update on the Mac version of Cortex Command, straight from porter extraordinaire Chris himself:

“Last night was productive. The game is running again now. The most annoying debug session ever. The main problem was ridiculous.

It turns out the problem (i’ll save you too much of the gory details), was my use of a non-standard wifi dongle for my Internet connection!

If you don’t use the Airport … you’re in for a nasty surprise.

Unbelievable that it can cause an exception so deep in workings of Mac OSX it was distinctly non-trivial to find. I was so perplexed I started looking for harebrained causes, and eventually I was lucky enough to get a crash that didn’t completely overwrite the stack and I noticed it was crashing deep in the os dns lookup library somewhere.

Short story: It was just trying to get its own hostname on game startup and blowing up in my face because it assumes the use of the Airport.

Now, I can concentrate on the mouse, which is the original bloody problem :)”

The mouse issues he refers to appear to be related to legacy mouse interface code in Allegro which causes the mouse to skip and not be responsive. He’ll probably have to write new mouse handlers that use more modern API’s.

Other than that, things are looking good for a Mac release very soon!

Get Cortex Command for FREE! (yes, really)

Data — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:30:09 +0000

A few months ago I was about to buy a piece of shareware (the excellent RoboForm), but right there on their checkout page was a button claiming that I could “Get it for free!” instead of paying the regular price. Of course my BS detector went off, but my curiosity was also piqued enough to check it out.

I assumed it was a deal like those incredibly annoying flashing web banner ads for “FREE IPOD OMG!”, but I was very pleasantly surprised by what I found and experienced. I ended up getting to choose a single ‘offer’ from a wide range of unrelated big name brands. It sounds completely weird, but I found myself buying some delivered flowers (wife affection bonus, get!) from the reputable FTD.com — and got my copy of RoboForm completely free on the side, without almost any extra hassle or delay.

So, we looked into the business behind this, TrialPay, and were impressed enough that we decided to set it up for our games as well. It is just an additional path for you to get your full license, which is completely equivalent to what you’d get if you took the simple direct payment route:

We’re especially excited about the fact that TrialPay customizes its offers to your geographical location. If you live in the U.S., you will get offers from big-name U.S. brands like GAP and Blockbuster, but if you live in China or South America, you get affordable offers for local businesses in your local currency: prepaid cell phone cards, regional shops, etc. Since you get the Cortex Command license for free with the deal, this means it’s a much lower expense for you than having to pay a fixed U.S. price in U.S. dollars.

Even for U.S. customers, it’s pretty satisfying to be able to choose an offer you’re interested in anyway, and then get the game for free on top of it! It certainly made my day when I got RoboForm, and managed to surprise the wife with flowers at her work.

We understand you might be as skeptical as I was initially, but at least check out the offer page — If nothing else, it’s pretty interesting to see what random deals you get.

Build 21 at long last!

Data — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:14:45 +0000

Here it is folks. Going to update this post later with more info. There’s not much new content, but many many new features! That’s why the price discount stays the same for this update.

Got to catch a flight in an hour, and haven’t packed or showered yet (another all nighter)… so enjoy! I’ll write more soon!

UPDATE: Ok stuck in airport terminal, so can write about some of the new features. There may not seem like a lot of difference at first glance, but there’s eight months of important work done under the hood. On the other hand, there really isn’t much new content in this one; it’s all been about laying the foundation for the real production that can now start in earnest.

Without further ado, some of the new features:

Full support for any screen resolution your graphics driver can handle! Cortex Command in HD, baby!
New audio system that is far more robust. No more missed sound effects. All non-UI audio pitches down when the simulation starts going slower than real time. More about this later.
Simulation speed partially decoupled from real time. It’s allowed to smoothly slow down into slomo without sacrificing FPS when the simulation becomes too heavy for your machine to keep at real time. You can turn this off with Ctrl+O. Again, more on this later.
Lua engine and console now integrated, and almost whole existing C++ engine exposed to it. The console can be accessed with the [~] key (left of your [1] key). Exhaustive documentation of the full Lua interface is coming soon!
Lua scripting of entire Activity logic! This allows for any game rules we want to make the missions have, and any multiplayer style as well, like CTF or king of the hill, etc.
First draft of data-driven Campaign screen. You can select eligible scenes/sites directly on the planet. As more mods and official content is loaded, more sites/missions will show up on the planet. This menu will evolve into the metagame eventually.
Completely new licesning system that allows you to reset your own key, AND to register/play with that key offline. Reset and update your keys at http://licensing.datarealms.com
Many many bug fixes and tweaks everywhere.

UPDATE 2: Whoops, there was a menu bug in the first release of b21.. one line of code which causes the main menu to get shifted in higher resolutions, screwing up skirmish menu etc. Just uninstall the old one, re-download and install again if you got it before this update appeared.

PLEASE UNINSTALL ANY PREVIOUS VERSION BEFORE INSTALLING THIS ONE!

We are set for Campaign Production

Data — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 20:05:35 +0000

After many months of work and preparation, we are finally ready to start creating the real campaign missions! There were several large hurdles that needed to be cleared before we could proceed with this, including:

Exposing almost all of the C++ engine to Lua, using LuaBind.
Adding a powerful in-game console for testing and debugging scripts.
Making the game Activites’ logic be completely driven by Lua scripts.
A new and flexible data-driven system of trigger “Areas” in each Scene, which the scripts can hook into.
Making a completely new in-game editor for defining and naming the Areas of each Scene: The Area Editor —->.

The scripting of Activities is super important; before their logic could only be hardcoded in C++. That meant the whole executable had to be recompiled each time a change was made to the winning condition or whatever of a specific mission. Now, the script can be edited (by you!) while the game is running, and it is just reloaded automatically when Ctrl+R is pressed. Any errors encountered in the script will be reported to the in-game console, with line numbers and decent descriptions.

Here’s an example of how the Areas tie into the scripts. This snippet of Lua in your script’s UpdateActivity() function will cause any Actor that wanders into a specific Area named “Kill Zone” to be instagibbed:

for actor in MovableMan.Actors do if SceneMan.Scene:WithinArea(”Kill Zone”, actor.Pos) then actor:GibThis(); end; end;

We are also working on the online documentation for all of CC’s Lua interface - more on that later!

Mac Port Progress

Data — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:18:08 +0000

Chris is doing a great job with the porting, and has made lots of progress. The code now builds and runs on Mac OSX, but there’s still some issues to iron out… (lack of RMB!%@#)

Sorry for the sparse updates lately, but rest assured things are moving along on several fronts: We are almost done building a new licensing system which will make things a lot more easy and flexible for you guys. We just need to integrate it and test it thoroughly before putting it out there. Another front is the mac porting mentioned above.

On the actual game side of Cortex Command, a few big under-the-hood hurdles have been completed. There’s a new memory management system which makes things run faster and more reliably. Also the Lua interface has been improved and made a lot easier to work with. Now you can create new instances of any Entity by simply doing something like this in the console or script file:

myActor = CreateActor("Soldier Light"); myWeapon = CreateHDFirearm("Pistol"); myActor:AddToInventory(myWeapon); -- This adds the new Actor to the scene, so he actually appears MovableMan:AddActor(myActor);

Data Center explosion and aftermath

Data — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 23:12:03 +0000

As many of you have noticed, the data center in which our server lives has had some severe problems the last few days. First a transformer exploded and knocked down three walls around it, plus all nearby electrical equipment and cabling! Luckily no one was hurt. Or killed.

The techs brought in a generator, but a breaker on it failed last night so they had to bring in another generator today which just went online. More details here.

Hopefully things will keep on humming from now on, but if not, at least you know what’s going on. This doesn’t affect our webstore or licensing server, so don’t worry if you just placed an order.

However, if you did send anything to contact@datarealms.com or support@datarealms.com since Friday, and didn’t get a response yet, you might want to re-send as it likely didn’t make it though!

Data is Famous! Also, Mac port in the works

Data — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:59:52 +0000

Here’s another interview of me by the indie scene scoopmaker Tim W. at IndieGames.com. This one is more about the development than the game itself, which complements the previous interview well.

The big news Tim breaks is that we now have a very experienced guy actually working on the Mac OSX port of Cortex Command! After many years in the ‘big’ games industry, Chris Kruger recently left his position at Rockstar Games to pursue freelance programming on his own. We are very fortunate to have him working with us on our project, and all you Mac users out there will soon be battling it out on your native platform!

Chris is one of those guys who actually enjoy porting games, so there’s a good chance other target platforms will be within our reach as well. Stay tuned…

Play Magazine Interview

Data — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:53:20 +0000

There’s an interview with me in the current issue of Play Magazine, where some details of our plans are revealed. Click for legible size:

In-game Lua Console

Data — Thu, 15 May 2008 07:42:57 +0000

Continuing the feature series.. Next up is something really powerful that will open whole new worlds of possibilities for you tinkerers and modders out there: There is now an in-game console that enables so much control of the engine that it’s almost scary.

Thanks to the Swedish geniuses at Rasterbar (recommended to us by Klei), we have managed to expose almost all of our internal classes and interfaces to the Lua environment now running in the system. This will eventually mean that some of you will literally be able to create entire new games with the Cortex Command engine by writing elaborate Lua scripts in addition to the content mods and addons you have been limited to so far.

Even if you’re not so ambitious, it’s still fun to play around in the console. Like making a guy instantly fly at 100 m/s to the right –>>

Documentation of all the commands and interfaces will eventually appear in the Data Realms Wiki, so you can easily harness this new power that has been unleashed!