(image by Arne and community member MaximDude)

It's a monumental day for Data Realms..

Not only are we launching our first online multiplayer game today:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1013040/Planetoid_Pioneers_Online/
But we are also letting our first baby out into the world! Cortex Command was something that started as a passion project in high school, and ended as a title with such an unexpected long-lasting community and staying power that we're very proud of.

Despite oodles of official content, many feel that Cortex Command was never "finished" - and we're actually extra proud of that fact. The game both grew into something far beyond our own hopes, and also remained open-ended and flexible enough to let others pick up and take it even further!

One of those people is Weegee, who joined us from the community, and has in recent years contributed a tremendous amount of work and features to the official codebase that we are releasing to the public today.

Not only did he add a ton of additional interfaces to the scripting and ini files for modders to use when accessing the engine, he has even worked out a functional networked multiplayer mode for Cortex Command! This is an impressive feat, and uses non-traditional techniques - albeit it only works well on local networks (LANs) for now.

Anyway, the codebase today contains all that good stuff, and can be considered as Build 33, with the short form changelog to be found at the end of this post.

Without further ado, here is the now open source'd repository:

https://github.com/DataRealms/CCOSS
We anticipate that releasing this will ensure CC lives on and stays vibrant for even longer than it already has! We wish you luck and hope you have fun digging through the high-school-era code in some of the older parts in there ;)

Major features:

LAN Multiplater
Implemented mass and passengers count constraints for crafts
Dynamic pie menus
Dynamic buy menus

Fixes:

Reworked loading screen to reduce loading time.
Added an option "DisableLoadingScreen" in settings.ini to disable loading screen completely to reduce loading time (Thanks Duh102, CrazyMLC, MaximDude)
Fixed InvincibleCrafts and ToughCrafts global scripts (Thanks 4zK)
Fixed a bug when AEmitter flash was drawn in the wrong position if emitter was not emitting.
Fixed a bug in Siege when incorrect units wear spawned.
Fixed a crash when calling TimerMan.TicksPerSecond in Lua script
Fixed a situation where flipped crafts dropped units in invalid direction.

Added shortcuts and bindings:

Added binding UI for weapon pick, drop, next, prev and reload for "keyboard only" and "keyboard" control schemes.
You can press CTRL + ~ (ConsoleMan.ForceVisibility = true) to toggle console which does not grab input.

F1 - Shortcut help
F2 - Reload all scripts
F3 - Dump console text to file
F4 - Dump console input to file
F5 - Clear console log

New global scripts:

Added Low Gravity and Faster walking global scripts.
Added bulky drop ships global script.
Added global scripts to disable buy menu constraints.
Added Global scripts Better jetpacks, Constant Gold Income and All Units Are Brains

New collections:

MOSRotating.Emitters
MOSRotating.Attachables
Scene.Deployments
Emitter.EmissionList
PresetMan.Modules
DataModule.Presets