Trif’s here, and I’d like to say that I like jeb’s beard. And frequent updates. So I stole both. Okay, maybe just one of them.

v124i Alpha of Cobalt is out in the wild, and I want you to download it! “But Trif, where did v124c go?!” I learned that Oxeye had several prototypes waiting to be snatched, so I took the shiniest one! We’ll take a look after staring at this glorious animated picture!

I like trains!

The freshly baked update adds Hadoukens— erm, moving platforms to the game! More specifically, map wizards now have a new spell that allows them to properly add moving stuff. While it can be used to put flying carpets in maps, it serves an even more glorious purpose:

Notice the train in the bottom of the picture? It moves. The newest dark next–gen technology adds more dynamic atmosphere features to the level editor. Make good use of this new weapon, wizards. I’ll be stalking you waiting at the vault.

Gotta go slow

The evil scientists continue their possibly dark experiments with the essence of time itself. Bullet time has been refined once more, no longer trapping you like a Chrono Bomb when a throwable is getting out of your danger zone—unless it is a Chrono Bomb, of course.

Should you be dissatisfied with the default bullet time mechanic, the custom settings have been glorified to suit the entire audience. Other than changing the amount of slowdown, the options now tweak the range of reaction enhancers a little bit, and activation speed a bit more. You’re going to pick the “None” option, of course. Real gladiators experience the world in bullet time naturally anyways.

Freeze! ‘Nade time!

If you’re reading this from the Northern Hemisphere, you have successfully survived the winter—but the danger of freezing to death is not gone, especially not if you hug a Nitrogen Grenade! The newly introduced tool of icy destruction now delivers an even more cold death, exploding on impact with greater power than before. Obviously, it’s for peaceful scientific purposes. …Right, guys?

The developers have given the other explosive devices some love too. Opening doors is lame, kicking them in is cool, but making the door fly open with the sheer impact force of a grenade is even cooler! That’s right, you can now blast open a door with a grenade followed by another one, a rocket, or whatever surprise you have in your arsenal!

Finally, the beautiful little boxes that indicate you’re about to be shot in the face have been made more… discoish. It’s a wonder of colors, and it’s so marvelous you should see it in its full glory. Go in–game and check it out!

The Breakdown

Fine, you want the change log, don’t you? You’re in for the raw list of awesomeness? I’m in a good mood. Take it.

Alterations:

• Another small Bullet Time tweak. It feels fantastic!
• Made the speed at which the reaction enhancers activate part of the bullet time setting and also tweaked all bullet time settings to be more useful.
• Moving tiles is now possible in the editor in a more controller and free system!
• Improved predator ai slightly.
• Improved Nitrogen grenades
• Facing away from flashbangs is even better
• OnScoreReached working and more options.
• Improved fires warming ability.
• Bopo now follows the player.
• Warning boxes now come in player colors!

Bug–Fixes:

• Fixed some eye and light animations on actors ai feedback
• Fixed offers can get stuck when teleporting

Next week, we’re stealing Oxeye’s level art process! That’s a secret, though. Don’t tell them. See you.

Hit the jump for the full read.

After the last update we got a bunch of bug reports, and they are still coming in. The most troubling ones were related to random crashes and other equally bad stuff. We have gone through a series of fixes now on our side, but one of the bugs took longer than expected and have held us back from having a stable executable for a while. We have also received some feedback that a weekly or bi-weekly update tempo would be great, and we can only agree. We enjoy development in that tempo and we should be getting back to that after the coming update.

In the meantime we have been building the Adventure component of the game. This includes work on the editors as well as the content of it and the implementation of running it.

An example shop setup in the adventure editor

We are looking forward to see what people will be able to do with these editors!

As of this week things seem to be on track again and we are basically in release preparation mode trying to make sure that all the things that we have worked on since the last update gets packaged and presented in the best way possible. I’m currently sitting on a train, the weekend will largely be occupied by a wedding, and next week the Mojangstas and Kinten are away and I’m in Denmark. So as of right now, we cannot say a date, but I will be working today and the next week to make this happen as soon as possible.

Also, here is a flying brain:

The version used at Minecon was v116 ALPHA, and is not yet available for download. Among other things, it featured a new game mode called Challenge. In Challenge, you focus on doing things as fast as possible, like getting from point A to B. Today we created more maps for the mode. Here is a sneak preview:

We have also added local high score lists with epic voice acting feedback by Kinten to all relevant game modes:

Huge thanks to all the volunteers during Minecon that made it all possible!

Thats it for today!

Good night!

/thewreck

• The last couple updates
• A new reload related feature
• Outdoor climate colors
• A community lead map making contest

Hit the jump for the full read!

The last couple updates

During the week that has been we have seen 2 Cobalt updates and a number of bugs! It always breaks my heart to hear about bugs that slipped by, even so when they are critical crash bugs… To all of you who have been reporting bugs, making suggestions and suffering through crashes, thank you very much! Without your help these updates would be so much harder to get done and the quality of the game would not have been able to reach as far as it has today. The reported bugs should be fixed now and the update containing the fixes is planned for the beginning of this coming week.

A new reload related feature

If you have been following frall on twitter you might have heard that we added a new gameplay aspect:

Reload Boosts! – By pressing the reload or use button at a specific time during the reload (unique for each weapon), the remaining reload animation becomes twice as fast! (usually the rest of the reload)

The reasoning behind this feature was that I have for a long time been feeling that the gameplay aspect of single shot weapons was skewed. Their gameplay was focused to a single instant, and then a bunch of waiting. Along with that, i’ve had a long reluctance towards automatic reloading of single shot weapons because it takes away part of the immersion of “controlling” the character. Unfortunately I for a long time did not know what to do about it. This was until I saw a video of War of the Roses and noticed that they had a minigame for the reloading of crossbows. Instantly the problem and the solution seemed so obvious.

Our take on the feature offers a number of things that fit so well with cobalt:

• It raises the skill ceiling further
• It evens out uneven distribution of gameplay with certain weapons (mostly the single shot ones)
• It allows us to place the reload boost point at a unique position for each weapon which in it self decides how much of a bonus we want the reload boost to potentially have (late in the reload is less of a bonus than early in the reload)
• It fits well with the main focus in cobalt: Timing!
• It severely adds to the tension in a fight, where for example two metalfaces are reloading their single shot rail guns. (who will reload first?)
• It adds a sense of mastery when you start to manage to get the timing right without even looking at the reload progress bar
• It becomes an emergent combo system, where you feel like you are more and more in “the zone” for each consecutive successful reload boost (when me and kinten was playing, getting three in a row in a hectic situation felt incredibly satisfying)

I know I’m hugely in love with the feature. I hope you will be too!

Outdoor climate colors

Kinten has for a long time had his worries about the outdoor lighting system in Cobalt. Mainly the fact that all levels in cobalt tend to be somewhat red… A couple of days ago we finally decided it was time to fix some problems and the way we did it was by adding:

Climate! - In outdoor theme settings you can now pick a climate which will control the overall color of the sky and the hills in the background

We also tweaked the way the actual gameplay layers are colored from the sky, and once we tried it out…

To me the first one looks washed out and strange, and the new one looks warm and deserty! Like you are actually at that location. This is a great step towards creating a really atmospheric experience and is an important part towards creating a great adventure mode. Now, don’t worry, your old maps will still look like your old maps since old maps will by default get the “alien” climate, resembling the old colors as much as possible.

A community lead map making contest

Over at the cobalt forums community member Aconitin is hosting a map making contest! This time around we have offered to include the winning map into the official release of Cobalt! So if you ever wondered what it takes to get a map officially in, here is one way!

Even if you don’t make it to the winning spot, this could be a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with the editor and perhaps talk to other cobalt mappers! You can usually find them in the #Cobalt channel on espernet! If you don’t want to download an IRC client, you can use the webchat! If you are just looking for custom maps for cobalt, the cobalt file database is a great resource!

Cya next week for v111 Alpha!

/thewreck

Puffdot on the cobalt forums has a great post that summarizes the hot-keys as well a number of other tips!

http://www.cobaltforum.net/topic/1659-tutorial-how-to-use-the-editor/

Cobalt v103 Alpha is finally ready, and it contains improvements in many spread out unrelated areas, however, the biggest addition is the Map Editor! For the people who have accessed the editor previously, there is a huge amount of unlisted changes that have been made, but for the others, this will simply be the first encounter with making your own maps.

Bugs discovered post upload:

1. Due to the reorganization of the maps, there are some oddities if you are updating from v102. You might see some duplicate maps with different names in your menu. If this happens, reinstall the game from a v103, or clean out the maps folder prior to updating. (all map files that does NOT have a .localization file next to it are old.)
2. The map editor will crash if you try to place a tile that has a default ID (which goes for a lot of important tiles). This crash is bad enough that if you are already using the map editor, it is advisable to keep separate installations.

If you find bugs, please post them at http://getsatisfaction.com/cobalt/ we will be making another update tomorrow!

Hit more to read all about it!

As of this writing there is no official manual on how the editor works, and since many things are likely to change, it is unlikely this will be written anytime soon. However, I know the community has been experimenting and documenting like crazy over at www.cobaltforum.net/. and while some of that will be outdated with the changes in v103, many concepts will be very relevant, and the forums are also likely to be your best bet for finding help on this topic.

To get you started, here is a quick guide how to create your first map:

• Open the editor from the main menu.
• Goto [File] and select “New”, pick “Outdoors” and “Small”
• Goto [File] and select “Save As…”, name the map “dm_myfirstmap”
• First thing you need to do is make sure you are in the correct layer. Press and HOLD Z, hover over “Collision” and release Z.
• Press T, select “Actors” from the list on the left, scroll down until you find the “Spawn Point” and click it
• Place a couple of spawnpoints around the map
• Press T again, now select “Boxes” and pick a box you like on the right.
• Place a couple of boxes around the map
• Press esc to stop placing boxes, then select a spawn point by clicking it. Then open [edit] at the top menu bar and click “Expand”. This will select all spawn points.
• Right click one of the spawn points, select “Spawn Settings” from the context menu. In the dialog, put a check next to all the teams to make this spawnpoint valid for all teams.
• Goto [Stage] and click “Set Game Mode”. Select “scorematch” from the list on the left, pick “kills” in the objective list on the right. Set the goal to 10.
• Goto [Stage] and click “Set Camera Mode”. Click “apply preset” and select pick “versus” list that pops up.
• There should be a gray tile looking like a character with a green outline somewhere on the map. Select it! If you cannot select it, it might be in a different layer than the one you are in. Hover the mouse over it, and press the middle mouse button to instantly go to the layer the tile you are hovering is in. If it does not exist, you can find it by pressing T, hitting ENTER, and writing “playerspawn”.  Right click the tile, click “Set Spawn Action”. In the dialog, check all the teams and hit OK!.
• Goto [File] and select “Save & Copy to Menu”
• Goto [File] and select “Close Editor”
• Find your map in the deathmatch list under after play!

For the prospective mappers out there, we have added rudimentary support for populating the in-game menu with your custom maps! If you are working on a map in the editor, you simply go to [File] and select “Save & Copy to Menu” and your map will show up in the menu! Keep in mind that the menu only loads maps that have one of the following prefixes in their name:

• ctp_ Capture the Plug
• dm_ Deathmatch
• sur_ Survival
• bo_ Bounty

If you have downloaded maps from the internet, place the maps in your /maps/ folder and they will be added to the menu (as long as they have the correct prefix!). The name and the description screen that comes up when you select your map will default to its filename, but there is support for editing this as well! First, under [Stage] in the menu in the editor, there is a button called “Edit Meta Data”. In the dialog  that pops up, you can define the follwing:

• author will show up as “by YOURNAME”
• workInProgress will add a strong red Work in Progress warning
• difficulty describes the general difficulty of the map
• minPlayers lowest suggested players
• maxPlayers highers suggested players

If you leave any of these as their default value, they will be omitted from the description of your map. Finally, to change the actual name of the map in the list or to write a flavor text, you must create a brand new file with the file extension “.localization”. For example:

dm_coolmap257.map
dm_coolmap257.localization

The reason this is needed is because the name and the description has to be custom written for each language that the map will support, while difficulty for example will be translated centrally by us for all maps. Edit the localization file with a text editor of your choice and paste the following:

{
    eng = { --English Translation
        name = "Cool Map", --Name of the Map, will show up in the list
        description = "This is a cool map", --Description of the map
    }
}

The map will work fine without a localization file, but it offers greater customization. I recommend you keep this file in maps_dev and use the “Save & Copy to Menu” action under [File] as it will copy both your map and localization file to the menu.

change-log

Alterations:

• Custom levels placed in maps with either ctp_ dm_ or sur_ will now be loaded into the menu.
• Removed all girders from cannon arena and tweaked design and weapons.
• Improved head flying off rendering, also made all body parts be colored by the original actor.
• Objects and items that are destroyed (by explosions and heat for example) now have better feedback
• Tweaked object healths
• Added new deathmatch map, Gladiator
• Added new ctp map, Frozen
• Added new ctp map, Volcano
• Added new bounty map, Rumble in the City
• New preference in profile for always showing your player name under your actor
• Plug now has health and will die from sustained explosions and lava, and will respawn when destroyed.
• Jet shoes now do less damage initially, but also do heat damage over time.
• Extended the map filters for future use.
• Added bounty AI and better bounty hud.

Bug-Fixes:

• Safest gate left door is now lockable again.
• Garbage Collection has been turned off by mistake. This has been a big since v101. This is likely the cause for many periodic performance drop issues.
• Score hud being incorrectly scaled in some resolutions.
• extended magazined and other ammo increasing upgrades now also add ammo as they used to.
• burners no longer generate bullet time warnings
• thermal bombs that were destroyed by lava and plasma for example would not explode.
• spare ammo icon no longer shown for salvaged weapons
• fixed some clipping metal hit sounds
• smoothed out a glowing trail jaggedness bug.