I'm going to go ahead and guess that nobody out there remembers me. I made mods when this game was still in its Beta (The Fist Gun and the Wiimote being my most successful), and I stopped around Build 18. I've since learned that there was a situation with the Build 18 section of the Mod Forum, and all of the threads were removed.

Now, I just finally bought the full version of Cortex Command, and I'm interested in modding again. So I ask you, the purveyors of Data Realms Forums, what has changed since then? I don't need tiny details, but if I wanted to make a mod and haven't been updated on the news, what are the basics I need to know about?

I'm sorry to the moderators if this is in the wrong spot. Feel free to move it wherever you please.

Data changed the names of everything like he used to, and that's about it for the code.

We've got crabs now, and Lua support for scene-making. That's about it.

Well, if you're asking about the deep gutsy features for the sake of modding, then this is probably an alright place to ask.

Guess what? It's still in Beta.

Anyway, everything might not come to mind for me immediately, but... one nice thing is that projectiles like MOSParticles, MOSRotatings, and TDExplosives can now be set to face the direction in which they are fired. More specifically, they face in the direction of their current velocity. OrientToVel is a variable that can be set from 0 to 1 for any rotatable projectile.

There's Lua scripting for scene modding now. Though I haven't really touched that myself. No Lua for general modding yet, which is what I'm waiting for.

Uhm... there's this weird "slowmo" feature in regular play now. If the game gets laggy, rather than... well, lagging, it instead goes all Matrix on you and slows down smoothly, sound effects and music included. Its kinda weird, and can be deactivated by pressing ctrl+O (that's "oh" not "zero") while playing.

You can change how objects accelerate now. You can set GlobalAccScalar from -1 to 1. Negative numbers are fun since they make "falling" things go upward, which is used now for more convincing smoke effects.

Also, there's an AirResistance that can be added to projectiles. Setting this to anything above 0 makes it so a projectile gradually loses its velocity as it flies. In an environment with gravity, this results in it slowing horizontally until its falling straight down, and it falls more slowly. This feature can be used for various things, but one good one is more realistic bullet ballistics.

That's everything I can think of at the moment.

Dammit.

Mine was the tl;dr of Darlos'.

Holy crap. They've added pretty much everything that I wanted (Namely the OrientToVel value). Thank you. I'll try to start modding as soon as possible .

One minor thing on top of all that: There were a few changes to variable names in the latest build. BodyAnimMode and BodyAnimDuration are now SpriteAnimMode and SpriteAnimDuration. Also, InstanceName should be changed to PresetName.