So is there anyway to get it without bying humble indie bundle. Or will data give us download link when b25 really comes out? I have paid this once so i wouldt like to buy it another time.

Check the DevLog.

this is great feedback guys; thanks particularly findude and miluaces for the constructive impressions on the metagame.. agreed on scanning skipping and polishing up how terrain is revealed (and concealed! where and when enemy builds new bunker pieces).

Also, yes the invasion force deployment is just revision one right now.. the idea is to have all delivery times delayed for a longer time in the beginning so the invading players can set up all their ships and delivery locations and have them arrive at the same time when the game starts.

Ronin weapons are incredibly powerful now. No complaints, (Minus the spas12, it's super overpowered) but it seems to me that the coalition guns should be the powerhouse weapons that are rugged and strong. God forbid you get a browcoat heavy with a spas12.

About design mode: it seems that doors are considered as blocking the “path to orbit”. Not sure if that's intended, but this does force you to use a brain robot if you want your complex to have doors, which I find a little unpleasant.

Also, more than often you want to deliver your cargo somewhere you can't because it's too far from the brain. Maybe should selecting such a delivery target be possible; only the craft would appear in your brain area, and then navigate to the delivery point. This travel could be announced in some way on the delivery point cursor.

And a few bugs:
• after putting a piece in design mode, and selecting another one, the cursor jumps to some other location (above the brain maybe). I think it happens pretty much every time for me.
• on Mac OS 10.7, I can't switch to fullscreen, and in windowed mode the system cursor appears on top of the game cursor.

Otherwise, this is a great build! As the others said, the metagame is fun already and a good preview of what's to come, and the weapons rebalance is quite good in its whole.

Oh, brain robots. That works.

I just made a thread about it, never thought about the mobile brains.

Though, on a side note, I wish there were options to turn these restrictions (path to orbit, limited dropzone, et cetera) off.
I mean, I get it makes it more challenging and that's fun, but sometimes I'm only after a bit of screwing around and dropping crates full of bombs on people, or enjoy having little sentry towers with buried brains and a sniper.
Each new build seems to be making Skirmish less and less 'sandbox', and Skirmish has always been 'screw around mode' for me.

That said, it is fun to be challenged, but I really wish there were options to turn the extra restrictions off.

Overall, I think it's a nice step up. The AI is 10x more awesome now for a start.

Ok, there are a few things which bother me though:

1) B25 lags far more for me than any previous version did and this is the main problem. If I'm playing any gamemode against AI it will get slower and slower as the game goes on. After about 15 minutes the game's running at 1/10 normal speed and it's pretty much unplayable. It doesn't seem to be related to the number of actors on screen or anything like that, because even if nothing much changes in a scene and nothing new spawns it will continue to slow down.

Seems to have fixed itself... the game generally runs faster than B24.

2) Jetpacks seem too weak now... maybe it's just a personal balance thing but Coalition Lights seem to barely be able to fly if they're carrying more than a rifle and sidearm. The flight times are too short to make anything beyond tiny hops.

Scratch that; I needed to rebalance some of my custom weapons.

3) Actors' feet get stuck on things quite often. If I'm jetpacking over a small obstacle or manouvering in a tunnel their feet atoms get stuck in terrain and it's like they have a bungee around their ankle. They will fly about 1 metre away, slow, and then spring back to where they were before and I have to wriggle them to get their foot free. Strangely the foot sprite moves away just fine with the actor.

4) The Metagame could really do with some explanation (ok, I know this is a very new feature but I'm gonna throw this out there). It's confusing to understand the turn structure and which player is supposed to be doing what in what order. A little readme with some instructions before the metagame starts would be nice.

5) Ok, this I'm curious about. It's not really to do with B25, but remember back in B18 there were glows on bullet trails of certain colour? Could we bring this back? I think it looked pretty rad, and because you can't apply glow sprites to long trails of bullets you can't do this any more. It would be sweet for making laser weapons and better looking tracer.

What you're saying makes me think that maybe the solution would be to actually create a “screw around mode”. Drop anywhere, enjoy infinite money, ignore your brain's safety—something where you could truly go overboard and enjoy mayhem to its fullest. I'm sure this would be very well received.
Of course, the downside would be the lack of challenge, but this would precisely be the goal of this mode; allowing plain screwing around. If nothing, this would highlight the interestingness of the rest of Cortex Command. And please long-time players who remember plain screwing around fondly.

For me, B24 ran very slowly, when compared to B23 with the exact same mods.
B25 however has returned to B23 levels of speed, but maybe it's just because I have post-processing off.


Re: Screwing around mode

To be honest, even if you didn't have this option people _are_ going to find ways to guarantee absolute safety, be it godmoded walls or miles upon miles of lasers and turrets.

Hell, easiest way is still to just put your brain up in the sky.
I wouldn't mind a full-on screw around mode, but I still think there should be _some_ facade of challenge, but let us decide how much.
Hardcoded restrictions aren't really going to be that effective, as you will have ways of getting around them, and they will end up just being complicated and convoluted (ie. building a tiny shaft from your brain vault to the surface to appease the >> MUST HAVE PATH TO ORBIT << gods.)

As I see it, if people want to be invincible, they will have ways to be invincible.
Hardcoded, permanent restrictions just limit our freedom and our entertainment.

I'd love to see options to tone down some of the skirmish restrictions, I want to go back to bombing a crowd of coalition soldiers with a crate of crabs. It's what drew me to Cortex Command, it's what keeping me playing too.


tl;dr, I don't recommend forcing restrictions on people for what's historically 'sandbox mode', as people will find convoluted ways to get around them.

I am all for limiting the drop area and the path from orbit, but the doors need to be fixed though.

Agree with you 100%
I play cortex command for the sick sandbox experience. I don't like to be restricted in terms of what I can do.
Two solutions I can think of right now

1. Make an option to turn off "limited dropzones" and "clear path to orbit restrictions"

2. Create a whole new gametype called "sandbox"

Number two would be the best of course. If it were to be done it should resemble the "spectate mod" (best mod ever by the way) and be as unrestrictive as possible. Like the spectate mod, we should be able to choose when the enemy attacks.
Also, what would be simply AWESOME is if we could access the "spawn menu" (the one that shows up at the beginning of skirmish defense) WHILE our sandbox simulation is running. I know this seems like cheating because you won't need the dropships to deliver actors but in terms of pure, creative, sandbox fun it would be an incredible addition to the game.

I hope I'm not going in the wrong direction with this post. I know some people like their games realistic and restrictive in order to create a more challenging and interesting experience. I respect that. I just want to remind everyone that some men (like me) just want to watch the world burn

I think it'd be super duper rad if, in the editor before a skirmish, you could pick what actors/weapons/craft/etc the AI can use.

It'd be very easy to make a simplified sandbox activity script; basically take the skirmish defense one and rip out all the restrictions. We might do that officially, but I'm sure someone on here has the chops to do it too.

Nice to see that Data finally got back to making the game, the real way.
You seem to be very active lately.

Wohoo, new build, nice new download area -and- DRM free. Data, you're too good to us.


Build: mac B25
OS: 10.6.8
Native Screen size: 1440x900


Screen Resolution Issues

• Selecting a higher resolutions than a certain amount will cut my resolution in half, although it will still list the screen as the larger size.
  • 1152x720 works fine
  • 1280x800 WXGA will force my window to be 640x400, 1344x840 becomes 672x420, 1440x900 becomes 720x450. etc.
  • Also I believe whenever this happens it makes NxFullscreen = 2.
  • The above resolutions all worked with B24.
• When starting at the low resolutions listed above the intro becomes un-skippable and alt+return/enter will not attempt to fullscreen.

Concerning x2 mode

• Right now to go from 2x to 1x you need to go through fullscreen mode. This is not possible when using a nonsupported resolution (which on my screen tends to be the default case before I choose my own resolution)
  • I would prefer to have one fullscreen checkbox and one 2x checkbox that don't interfere with each other. It would just be more clear and would allow you to toggle 2x mode even if you are using a resolution that is not supported by fullscreen mode.

• The way that 2x is currently handled is really ungainly. How it works right now:
  • Assume the user is using resolution X by Y
  • When NxWindowed = 2 (2x mode is clicked on) the rendered area is still X by Y but the window increases to 2X by 2Y.
  • If you were using an X,Y resolution that was filling your screen you just exploded the window to 4x your screen size.
• How it should work:
  • Assume the user is using resolution X by Y
  • If NxWindowed = 2 then area rendered should be X/2 by Y/2 filling a window of X by Y.
  • No window explosion, it works as you'd expect it to.

Other window related things

• The system cursor will sometimes not be hidden, or 'captured'. It shows up even when playing in skirmish mode, locked to the center of the window.
  • Switching in and out of full-screen mode does seem to fix this.
  • However tabbing out to another application causes the cursor to be visible again. (I feel this might be related to the un-skippable intro)

AI

What a difference! Very well done, on all fronts the AI, especially when moving across large distances, is much better.
I had seen the demo videos but actually seeing it in-game is a thing of beauty.

• Vehicles
  • Drop-ships and are much more controlled and self-correcting now, to the point where they can recover and land in areas where they never could have in b24. They correct by rocking side to side, but can get stuck in this rocking motion for a while before delivering their cargo.

• Combat:
  • My first tutorial match I accidentally activated the enemies with just one guy, and was swarmed and killed within ~15 seconds. scary.
  • In further tests Ai continued to prove much more accurate and deadly, however often unaware of the physics of their weapons (such as weapons that have an arch trajectory like the uber cannon).
  • love how bots will try to pick up weapons they dropped, temporarily setting their waypoint to them.
  • Sometimes the AI did seem to loose their edge though, for example during the Maginot Mission they all just kinda sat there after the initial push: (eventhough I still had guys on the roof):
  
  - I recall in older builds they would try to dig through the floor to get to me.

• Digging:
  • Digging is worlds better than what it was before. It seems that they will periodically look in a circle as if to 'scan' the nearby areas for gold. They will dig well for some time but then get stuck in that cycle even when there is gold nearby.
  • Test 1:
  
  - What amused me is that the first thing he did is take out the AK I had picked up and murdered the crab.
  • Test 2:
  
  - Again, very impressive, Although I did have to intervene twice to prevent him from digging the enemy brain to death.

Campaign

• Not too much to say that isn't obvious: it's very incomplete, and very unpolished, not to mention no real explaination of what you are really doing, why are there different day turns, etc. it seemed like I had to click 50 times to even start playing.
  • When I finally did get to the battle the game crashed: http://pastebin.com/ECXT29DB