Go half way and make it 30. That's what I did, and the trade off is fine. I was sooooo sick of sinking into the ground.

It's funny, I was just checking the thread and was going to post that changing it to 30 has the same improvement on lag but doesn't quite jack up the speed as much.

I found it difficult to play when set to 40. Moving it down to 30 made it perfect. Also I found the speed increase good enough to raise my resolution to 800X600 and keep it perfectly playable. Any more than that, though, and the actors always look too small IMHO. Now the only thing my actors sink into are piles of gore =D

I also finally figured out the activities modding thing. It wasn't as confusing as some discussions made it out to be. Right now I've got the teleportation pods from the Crobos set dropping in infantry from the Pelian set. One trooper per pod, very low interval between drops. It's great! Lots of carnage without the gads of annoying wreckage. Still, this capability should be built into the game... at least with vanilla troops! It would provide for much more personalized/enjoyable gameplay to the masses that don't even think of screwing with their data files.

I think we need a way to place features on maps that spawn steady streams of troops. Like dimensional portals or something that keep spitting out clones. Would make for some awesome SP potential... Though I suppose half the clones would still be getting killed on accident by their comrades on their way to your turreted fields of death. Don't get me wrong, I love the game and am very happy I bought it, but the AI needs Prozac worse than Britney Spears.

Fresh meat becomes BBQ too fast now a days.

I'm proud of you, it's like the legacy of the revered modders, and people of said forums.
What's next, harvesting Chuck Norris' tears.

I have nothing against the exploding dropships and debris. I just don't like that there's no decaying factor to it. I mean, it's cool and awesome to watch, until your doors can't open and you've got dropship gibs up to your highest tower windows.

EDIT:
And definitely on something that spawns clones. Or BETTER, a complex MAT that looks like it's assembling a dummy drone, then you see the completed part drop down a tube and disappear according to the MAT, but have that be where you spawn a dummy actor.

Dummy factories please!

The only reason CC lags is because it bypasses your graphics card. Once this is fixed, no more lag, unless you're being REALLY crazy.

Once or if? News to me if the former. Did Data say something about it?

Exalion is trying to typecast it as an eventuality.

It's not. And contrary to popular belief, it's probably not going to FIX CC's lag. The only way to do that is optimization of the game engine; not just adding more number-crunching capacity.

Damn, Grif's on to me.

Either way, CC is more unstable and CPU hogging than 90% of full 3D intense shooters. Even ut2004, which is running an engine which when it crashes, causes blue screens. This is not acceptable for a tiny 2D game to clobber most machines (with exceptions to anyone running the HAL 9000).

Well Exalion, from my experience Cortex Command doesn't bog down computers at all with a bit of modification.

On my rig, I tried turning off pixel glow and changed the particles per meter or whatever to 30. I'm running a 3 year old single core rig, an AMD processor, and my performance is great.

Now if you're dropping planet killers or digging with plasma swords, you're going to get slowdown. Unless Datarealms blows excessive quantities of money on licensing technologies created by huge teams of people, or blows that money on hiring his own huge team of people, you're going to have a CPU-dominated game.

That's not to say that technology like Nvidia's CUDA general processing architecture could not have amazing implications for a simulation-style game like Cortex Command. Big commercial games these days are hardly "Simulations." They may possess physics engines, but this does not generally have a huge impact on gameplay. The focus is on glitz and glam visuals, but the gameplay has remained stagnant for years. Gaming has experienced a death of creativity. "Genres" were codified and this ruined it all.

GPU technology up to this point has reflected the nature of the gaming industry and simultaneously enabled it. The fact that CC doesn't use it is really no problem for me, because it doesn't need to get any closer to that moneycentric creative void that is the game industry today.

However, this isn't to say that some interesting particle effects or other accelerated eye candy would hurt the game. Just, the process of getting to that point probably would.


Engine first, content second, THEN you worry bout' the bells and whistles. We haven't even gotten past step 1 fully. I'm sure DR wants the engine to be capable of even more than it already is...

my ~£200 single core (pentium4) rig can run CC fine without any modifications what so ever. Of course I have a £75 nvidia 8600 card that isn't added to the cost, but CC doesn't use the graphics card much.