And people didn't believe we'd ever get "better".

... oh wow. 7 years. jeeeeesus christ i was 12 years old

things are pretty different now and it is pretty surreal i have no idea who anyone is anymore

I vaguely remember your name, but I was a random noob way back then.

The forum is kind of split into two communities right now: Off-Topic/Forum Games and people who are actually here for CC. The former group has been here for a really long time, while the latter rarely sticks around for more than a few months. Every time there's an update to CC (which hasn't happened for a while), there's an influx of activity and we see some new faces. I don't think this is how Data hoped for the forum to turn out, but at least it's still pretty active despite the lack of Data Realms-related stuff to talk about.

It's weird, though, because back when I joined, CC was under very active development, so there was a lot to talk about. As a result, the whole forum was very strongly geared toward CC, and all of the sections felt very connected — you'd see a lot of the same people posting about mods, talking about the game, and hanging out in the off-topic section. It was a very different culture.

There was also a lot more drama, especially as far as moderators went. Having to administrate this place would have been a nightmare. Here I am now though, pretty much running the show aside from the occasional behind-the-scenes fix by Data, and the most important thing I have to do on a regular basis is clean up the spambot accounts, haha. Poor Wizard James. I wonder what happened to him.

I miss the old days of CC where there'd be a new mod or three every day. There was always something to try out or mess around with, and people were constantly finding new ways to do things.

Though, with the eventual release of the CVE game, I'm wondering if that'll bring in enough new members to throw the forums into activity like the old days.

I certainly hope so! I still haven't gotten a chance to play around with CVE much, but it does look pretty cool. Plus, it seems to be a lot more modder-friendly than CC is (though some would say that working around its limitations was half the fun).

I was around back when he ran his Fantastic Contraption ♥♥♥♥.

If we rearrange these things..



Sort of uh, brings it down on himself huh?
In my opinion, any hope for a culture of thriving nerds bringing new content to the table like they have in years past is gone and has been for a long time.
Why?

I reinforce past statements and arguments brought from dinosaur ages,
"Why the ♥♥♥♥ do you sell a game that's incomplete."


What do you think would be a way to fix this? What sort of systems would be implemented for CC to be considered fresh again? When I say fresh, I mean for new content to be brought to the table, such as lua did.

It's a bit of a catch-22. To have an active modding community, you need people interested in modding, but to keep people interested in modding, you need an active modding community. A few years back, there were just the right conditions to keep all of that going. Eventually, though, development on the game slowed down, the community started to fade away, and ultimately it all lost steam.

I don't know if that's necessarily bad, though. It's just part of any game's life cycle, and I don't think Data really did anything wrong as far as community-building goes. He built a game, people came and played with it for a few years, and then they left. To expect anything else would be silly. Unfortunately, the timing wasn't really the best, because the game was released while the community was already starting to pack up and leave.

Cortex Command was in its prime, as far as community interest was concerned, long before it was officially released. Now that the game has been out for over a year, I don't think there's much that could be done to rekindle the community. For some games, you could just do a huge content update and get everyone interested, but I think CC might be too nichey to pull that off. If and when Data releases the source code, that might get some interest, but that's even more of a niche thing because you would need a fair amount of programming experience. The people who were interested have already been here — I don't know if there's a much bigger audience.

Like I said, hopefully Planetoid Pioneers will attract some attention. It's in super early stages of development right now, so it's hard to say where it'll go, but it looks very promising. Once there's some gameplay to show off, we'll probably see some more activity around here. Why bother trying to rekindle interest in a game that's been around for over a decade and released for over a year? Seems like it would be a lot easier to do with a newer project.

Man, it has been quite a while since I joined this place.

I know it's one guy working on the project, but as has been said countless times before, CC's progression has always felt pretty slow. Compare it to a place like Wolfire- admittedly, I think they have two active programmers, but they still update regularly (and before the alpha for Overgrowth hit 200 they updated weekly with detailed videos and everything), and of course they had a big part in the creation of the original Humble Bundle.

I wouldn't say it's all just Offtopic/forum game people here now.

There's still a good number of lurkers and veteran mod makers that help out with any game related troubles people have.

Throughout the forum's development I'd say this is a rather cozy and chill Arctic place

I probably managed to join during the high point of CC's life cycle, around B22 or B23.

I just sit here watching as my average posts per day goes down :'(
I miss Asklar, no idea what happened to him..
And Gotcha..
This is a depressing topic.

Ah, the Golden Years...
I now know what it feels like to be part of one of those forums that has a big entrenched community, and you look in and wonder about all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and respected members in that.

THE PISS-GOLDEN YEARS, OH YEAH

Naw, i enjoyed it, and i've gotten WAY more enjoyment out of CC than most other games at a comparable price. I owe a great deal to CC, since it got me into modding, arting and eventually game development (which i'm still in the process of getting into), and hell, making all those mods (read: guns) has been a blast. I don't know if it was just me being a whiner though, but i feel that the community was a LOT less forgiving back then than it is now. Either that or my body just wasn't ready back then. I mean wow, you can change a lot in 7 years. :U

I wonder where Asklar is, too.

I look back fondly upon my time here has, thanks to the off topic section, gave me a place to practice writing. I love writing, probably more than I should.