I haven't had any mod incompatibilities. Only a few regular crashes.

I can't help but notice a lack of the 'dev log' Data stated would be coming approximately 4 times - on the 15th. 4PM EST on the 17th, and still nothing.
Meh.

Edit: Removed stuff about devlog on the 14th - thought it said 16th . Even worse.

That was from two days ago.

Yeah. Something's not right here.

He was on the forum yesterday, so obviously he is capable of writing the blog whenever he wants to.
And therein lies our problem.

Data? Failing to meet goals?

Certainly, this is facetiousness! Falsities! Data would never do such a thing to the fanbase which he adores so.

Another preliminary warning before we start to have problems, stating complaints in a calm fashion is fine, but personal attacks and rumpus-raising are not.

If ya'll keep forcing him to respond the forums by complaining he WON'T post the damned devlog entry

He was quite content to ignore us the entire time previous to the Humble Indie Bundle, I don't see why he should start giving a ♥♥♥♥ now. Once the influx of new members is over, he'll bugger off to not work on Cortex Command once more.

THE LURKER RETURNS!
I left cortex command shortly after Data announced he never planned to fix the engine so it used more than one CPU core or take advantage of the graphics card, because it was 'too much work'.
As build 14 was more stable, and more fun, than build 23 I figured Cortex Command was doomed to die like so many other indie dev projects.
I then discovered minecraft, and Notch: God of developers. Compared to data, Notch was a community hero! He fixed bugs THE NEXT DAY. He responded to community wishes, but most impressive: he optimised his code.
Now I know being an awesome bearded Northern European Godlike programmer is beyond most, but Data: maybe it's you.
Now you have bought the entire indie gaming community's collective rage down upon you, maybe you'll JUST FIX YOUR ENGINE?
I mean seriously, Cortex Command is FUN: awesome concept, fantastic, unique gameplay, and brilliant style. But all this is let down by the fact it hurts computers harder than most 3D games, and considering it's mario with guns, that isn't really acceptable.
All of your excuses would be reasonable if Cortex Command was free, but as soon as you start charging $20 (A hefty sum for an indie game in (an infinite) beta, check out minecraft!) you can't say 'no I can work how I want' If the game was finished, sure. But you can't sell someone a dishwasher that only works sometimes and then refuse to fix it, because you told them it may not be fixed when you sold it to them. I'm sorry, but just because you put a clause excuse in doesn't mean you won't alienate the community.

With a game like Cortex Command, you're easy to love, but the one thing you seem to have put a lot of effort into is pissing everyone off.

As something of an indie developer myself(you don't want to see my game. It's been in-progress for over a year and the collision engine still doesn't work right.) I have actually put some thought into the question, "If I got my hands on the Cortex Command source code, could I install an OGL renderer like the one I'm building my game from the ground up to include?"

It's not as easy as you think. The Actors, sure, fine, those can easily be applied to rectangles and rotated in arbitrary directions. Gibs, too, can be made into sprites. Until they become parts of the terrain, at least.

Speaking of the terrain... no. This is where most of the processor cycles will be consumed when running the game on a sofware engine, and... no. You can't polygonize this. Maybe it could be done with a pixel shader, but if Data isn't willing to add hardware support, then he'd have to learn how shaders work, and it's intense enough it would probably void any computers more than 3 years old, as well as most laptops.

Threading is possibly less of a straight-up "no," but it's also not as easy as you might think. My day job currently involves locating and fixing thread exceptions in a Java program(difference between Java and C++: Java makes it significantly harder to shoot yourself in the foot and applies a tourniquet immediately if you do so.*), and for the first couple of weeks, I didn't know what I was doing and actually ended up making a few things worse. Done right, it significantly decreases the single-CPU load of a program. Done wrong, you end up with race conditions, thread exceptions, data collisions, lockups, and generally horrible stability. It's really, really easy to write bad thread code. I'm not even considering it for the first version of my game.

Would Cortex Command's PR benefit from Data spending more time on the forums? Probably.

Is that going to happen so long as everyone is talking about how much he sucks? No. No, it is not. And if it keeps up, you're quickly going to get to the point where nothing you can do will encourage him to work on the game, assuming you haven't done so already.

You want to improve the Cortex Command development cycle? Offer to help with it. I would myself, except that I'm a bit busy working on my programming credentials, but I see that a lot of people around here are already proven scripters and spriters, at very least.

*based on an old programming joke, "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you lose your whole leg."

Yeah. He probably could use a little help..

Dunno who though.

That's part of the problem. Most people who could be much help probably don't have time for it(yo) or have their own Indie projects(yo again).

You know what I think would help, though? An official loremaster: someone who gets information on the Cortex Command universe and story(from Data and Promstar, for example), manages it(runs things back through Data for officialization), and writes fiction to help direct the game's development. As an added bonus, you have something highly visible to the community which will also keep us occupied, and it's again something I think a lot of the members here would be able to contribute to, but which actually should take fairly little time away from the other sides of development.

Something like the fluff you get with most tabletop strategy guidebooks(Warhammer 40K and Warmachine/Hordes, for example).

Lemme see if I've got this right.

Data's got NOBODY ELSE to work on CC with him, he's doing it by his lonesome?
People have paid, have BEEN paying him for years to come up with a finished product? And not just $1-$5 donations, but $20+ preorder purchases?
He's extremely lax on updating his status for his customers and has made ALMOST-BUT-NOT-QUITE-promises and broken them?
And this is his SOLE SOURCE OF INCOME? This IS his day job?

You know, suddenly I don't feel so bad for picking CC up via the HIB2. I do feel a little sorry for the guys who have been paying more money for a preorder of a game that has been STRUGGLING to reach an actual commercial release-suitable version for 3 years now, though.

This is a really great game (potentially) but this is a bad way to run a business. Data needs to reevaluate his business model, or something, because this game's development is something that does not strike me as being a one-man task.

At least I got Machinarium and Braid out of the HIB2 deal as well.