The Hero returns.

…The Hope? The Hoarder? I need some sort of code name. The Helixian?

I’ve been absent for a while! After my vacation secret alpine mission, I was met by some mysterious men with lab coats and syringes! I’m not really sure who they were or what they did, but I seemed to catch some sort of illness after their experiment!

I’m getting back in action, however. As promised, there’s some community craft in this week’s report. Tons of it. Am I forgetting something important? Definitely not. Let’s play the community game.

There’s No Eridium Here

The developers recently revealed that we’re not getting in–game level sharing in the near future, if at all. While that’s sad and all, this community isn’t a place where we cry. It’s a place where we don’t give a single drop of care and go fix the problem ourselves—at least if your username is Northcode. In the ancient days of the early Cobalt alpha, we had the Cobalt File Database. Now, Northcode brings you:

The Cobalt Vault! You can check it out right now at cobaltvault.no!

The site is still being developed, but so is Cobalt. The beast is armed and ready to snatch your maps out of your metal paws, and if you ask nicely, it may even give you a few to download. See that Cobalt folder in your Documents? If it doesn’t already contain a folder called ‘maps’, go create it right now. Put stuff in there, and it’ll appear in User Maps in the game! I’m quite fond of magic tricks.

As of my writing, the Vault holds 26 projects, of which community member Janeator owns around 58. Got maps? We’d love to play them! If you need a map making crash course, FabiotheTurtle got you covered with his text and video tutorials!

Got feedback about the site? Here’s the forum thread. You can also accidentally run into the creator through IRC in #cobalt on EsperNet.

Videos Galore

I like videos. As friends, though. We saw a lot of cool ones appear on the magical intertubes through the past few weeks. Here are some of my favorites.

First up, one dosis of what–am–I–looking–at–ohthat’sfunny by the one and only DolanCZ:

Some sort of magic barrier is preventing me from embedding videos, so you’ll get a link. Here.

Marvelous. Simply marvelous. See that piece of montage parody, though? I want more.

Pickselate delivers.

And now for something completely different.

Cobalt doesn’t have that many derivative works just yet, but Librus is in the process of cooking up something in Flash– It moves! There’s not much yet, but he recently showed us a test animation or two, and the style is already giving me major nostalgia trips back to my childhood Flashventures. Good luck with your animation brewing, Librus.

Learn to Fly

Okay, that wasn’t completely different. We need something crazy like flying around with a supercharged Phaser—I didn’t make that up. Isogash did.

He’s making a new modding API, and he wants you to know that Cobalt modding is the easy kind of wizard magic. To prove that, he made the DeathPhaser mod which beefs up the Phaser a bit.

You can find the source of the black magic on the forums, and if you want to get technical, download the mod files and place them in daisyMoon\controls\ in your Cobalt game directory (You may have to create the controls folder yourself.).

It’s A Map!

The Hoarding Helixian Hero of Hope runs on delicious bytes of data, and I ran all out of them. In my quest for a refill, I stumbled upon a fresh map—not the treasury kind, but a battlefield! Turns out it’s cursed with a spell that makes me share it here. There are many excellent–looking maps I haven’t had the chance to play yet, but perhaps we’ll look at those another day. For now, behold: It’s a Deathmatch collaboration between Janeator and phaser master Isogash, and it’s called Abandon Hold!

You can find the Cobalt Vault project page here.

I like this map because it does what I expect of a good battlefield: It has areas for different types of brawling, a good selection of power weapons, and it makes sense.

These two fellow community crafters did a pretty good job, but if you truly want to earn my love, make parkour maps. More parkour maps. Mó̷̧r҉̨e̸ p͏͘͜͜a̷̡r̷͢͞͡k͜o͢u̴͠r̷̶̛̕ m͎̕ą͈̘̋̊̂̃̏̉p͚͆͘s̖͎ͦ͊͗̂̓͑. We need them.

Until Next Time

This week’s report ended up being pure community content, but as I’m getting back in the groove, I’ll hopefully be able to snatch something fancy for you next time. Until then, keep on rolling!

Happy birthday, Kinten. We demand cake!