We have put together a new version for Cobalt! This update has a number of changes to how certain aspects of the game works, which will be interesting to hear what you think about! We would also love to hear if any color-blind people out there find the color blind modes useful that we added in this version!

Full change-list after the jump!

Alterations:

• Jet shoes are now additive instead of reaching speed. Jet shoes can be used while rolling in the air. While using jet shoes while rolling, you will slow down your roll a lot making you vulnerable, but it also gives you very interesting control mechanics.
• Throwing has been reworked. Charge time is now variable depending on how long you press which makes it snappier, throwing will try to push the throw towards your actor trajectory, giving more power over throw direction, as well as throwing in itself is more physical making up/down/backwards and strange middle of roll throws possible.
• reworked scope to be a bit more useful, as well as giving a little better bullet time bonus.
• auto aim now doesn’t snap back and forth frantically. If you have auto aimed against a target, and it goes behind a wall, you will keep aiming towards the last visible position.
• Rolling now slows down reloading by a significant amount..
• Simply moving against a conveyor belt will now move you, even if you are not grabbing it like a wall grab.
• Added more upgrades to slugger revolver, slugger cobra, slugger pipe and slugger breacher.
• Slugger revolver now starts as it should with no extended barrel, so there are now 2 levels. Tweaked it so that starting point is lower than normal, and ending point with max is higher than before.
• Tweaked all upgrade prices so that more expensive guns have more expensive upgrades. This is because I want it to be less obvious to get them, so that alternative spending possibilities are considered, and also follow better with the economy that you have when being able to afford expensive guns.
• increased price of matter army issue from 250 to 275.
• switched price of spike bow and price for spike bow repeater
• Sliding backwards up walls is now possible.
• Made air rolling backwards as easy as rolling backwards.
• Changed weapons on smooth jazz.
• The Plus can now be moved with explosions and applied force.
• Bomb is now called Thermal Bomb and has had its effect reworked. It is now not instant kill, instead it has damage over time. This makes is less good against tough foes like hamsters and predators. It will also not instantly kill you with shield but will wear your shield down faster than normally. Cost is 50 Volts.
• Stick Grenade and Grenade now cost 15 instead of 16.
• Improved the handling of the boomerang, also made it harder to hit with bullets.
• Tweaked waves in survival house, as well as added 3 new tiers.
• Added color blind modes to compensate for Protanopia, Deuteranopia and Tritanopia.
• Reworked bird movement to be more fluent.
• Added bird wing and breathing sounds and animations for when out of energy
• Activated tile physics can now hurt actors!
• Elevators can now crush enemies if squished by them.
• Increased reload times for bird and shroom as well as lesser recoil recovery speed.
• Altered layout and weapons and ai paths on cannon arena.
• Missles have slightly more bullet time associated with it.
• new map by frall called voodoo!
• Safest Gate has been extended
• Klonk now deals a small amount of heat damage

Bug-fixes:

• Blowing up by a bomb no longer screws up the next life.
• Fixed crash with trying to join a controller with a removed preset
• Plasma assault upgrade names
• Fixed stage selection loading everything too early.
• Shop windows could be outside of level
• laser pointer getting smoke as laser pointer.
• fixed enemies being included in the aim over mechanic cause you to raise the gun above enemies instead of pointed against them.
• Bounced and deflected projectiles now correctly generate bullet time
• Fixed left gas bouncer in position on windy valley.
• Added repair broken weapon ai.
• Fixed hanging cords gathering speed invisibly, making them jump like crazy when activated. This would often make them render incorrectly too.
• Max upgrade level upgrades could be left in the upgrade bench.
• Did some optimizations for larger scale actor and ai code which in practice should mean smoother fps at later survival tiers.
• Fixed not being able to arrange bots into teams a second time without restarting the game.
• Sound at volume 0 now actually doesn’t play the samples. Also, made the sound volume curve exponential so that it has greater precision at low values.
• Strange rolling down wall and then not being able to slide up it again bug fixed.
• fixed buying weapon, buying upgrade, and then buying the same type of gun again.
• improved transition to main menu with transparent menu disabled.
• fixed upgrades not being buyable with many of the same gun. Still a bit iffy, but at least it works.
• added suicide distance ai to grenades.
• Bots should not drop plug for the purpose of throwing it against projectiles now.
• Hud elements are now adapted to screen resolution which fixes things like shops being outside of the screen.
• reload animations to shroom and bird.
• shroom not sticking to ground after punch anymore as well as wall climbing more reliable.
• the switches for the doors on the survival maps are now only usable by players.
• fixed mouse being visible when it shouldn’t

Head over to http://www.PlayCobalt.com to download the new installer.

For a full change-log, click read more.

• Edit control presets in settings menu.
• Switching team resets spawn point
• Bots can now be manually moved around if autoBalanceBots is off.
• “Bunny-jumping” to the left works as well as right
• Pressing esc/start while in shop no longer hangs input.
• Shop is no longer cut off out of camera when having moved around some.
• Bots no longer get stuck when trying to punch each other in really close combat. Should also fix similar problems with grenades and similar.
• Fixed offline indicator in corner not being accurate.
• Blaster splash heat effect goes through shield
• Shield belt is now slightly visible when activated, and a lot more obvious when it is powering down.
• Shield belt now works while animating activation.
• Grenade gun has 14% longer reload time.
• Blaster Ballet and Secret Hideout should now have better pathing.
• Added some tutorial rooms and modified some.
• Stores now restock even when items have been bought up completely.
• All VS maps now have all 4 teams enabled.
• Direct hits with Flashbang will now destroy a shield belt charge.
• Sound and music will mute when window not in focus
• Red robot (ninja) has a longer attack animation
• Phaser gun has slightly less bullet time associated with it.
• Variable throwing power with throwables works now. Tap quickly to throw weak.
• Shield belt does not have warning sound if it has never been charged.
• Bullet time is tuned to adapt more fluently to more players, also bullet time secondary range effect is now dependant on the source range, which makes for much more fluent bullet time in general.
• Added bullet time and auto aim options enable/disable in settings.
• Increased objective limit caps
• safes and revive stations no longer destroy input.
• changing settings with held down button is now a lot faster.
• Improved rolling behaviour against walls, (hold against wall and roll to fall down smoothly)
• Cobalt used to loose air control in some odd situations. Hopefully some fixed.
• Grenades and pickups now explode in lava.
• Added slight gradient to flashbang B&W effect
• Fist has slighly shorter charge up time and slightly longer range.
• A successful maxiumm charged fist hit will now give a bonus to the speed of the next fist charge up.
• Fixed converting of valuables getting stuck if leaving and returning to converter while ending.
• Predator jumping Ai improved.
• Guards no longer sometimes get stuck in a direction holding a throwable ready.
• Bindable reload action.
• Gyrojet gun tweaked balance wise, now slightly less forceful and slighly more expensive.
• Added player health option to survival. Anything except normal will force practice mode.
• In survival, if a player leaves, no more players can join mid-game. The max number of players having been present in a survival game are displayed below the score if above 1.
• Slugger Cobra has slightly more recoil and spread over long firing duration
• upgrade bench crash bug when re-entering upgrade bench while upgrading fixed.
• Some debug print messages did not render properly
• Can buy ammo and shower repeatedly by holding.
• Nano shower effect more clear, also hud disappears when using.
• Metalface sparks randomly when damaged
• Fixed jumping straight up on slopes being bugged.
• Fixed Ai bug where Ai’s would actually run towards dangers instead of from them.
• Picking up multiple ammo boxes before pickup animation finishes will add the numbers together to show total pickup.
• Bots could not pickup plug because they were holding throwables charged
• Rocks have a different damage curve, exponentially less with low speeds..
• Birds have a slower throw animation, which should trigger an earlier bullet time reaction.
• Added shield belt upgrades to be purchasable in the upgrade bench.
• Salvaged items can no longer be reloaded. Was a bug.
• Gas plants now deflect railgun slugs too. Also, bounced bullets can hit the shooter.
• Debug keys are now disabled unless you set “enableDebugKeys” to “true” in debug.cfg
• Increased slugger revolver fire rate a tiny bit, but slowed down reload speed a tiny bit.
• Slugger bullets now modify damage slightly by speed. In practice, this means pipe, and upgraded revolver will do slighly more damage, while breacher will do slightly less.
• Slugger Breacher has increased rate of fire.
• Added strong recoil to railgun, but also 33% longer reload and less bullet time effect.
• Modified Survival House difficulty curve.
• In Survival House, Ninjas no longer use the shield belt, have less guns in general, but now instead have the force device, which is an area of effect attack but also pushes grenades and projectiles away.
• Capital letters in profile name editing if you tap up
• Esc/start now pauses the game for everyone.
• Windy Valley now has infinite ammo as it is supposed to be.
• Fixed some input freeze bugs when going in and out of menues.
• Maybee fixed sound looping in menues error,, please report if it happens.
• The most a map can zoom out is now a Camera Mode configurable number.
• Added option in settings for following bots with the camera.
• Added deathmatch map Tomb.
• Fixed a bug with the auto-updater that make it impossible to download big files.
• Launcher isn’t frozen while it tries to log in
• Launcher now tries to set a valid screen resolution if 1280×800 isn’t supported
• Play offline, if valid, is available without logging in
• Fixed the change log being double (repeated twice)

Check here: http://www.oxeyegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=490

/jeb

I’m currently working on a patch for Harvest. I’m updating this forum post with the patch progress, feel free to suggest other changes as well:

http://www.oxeyegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=490

Currently I’m having difficulties with the Mac version, but as soon as those are sorted out I will upload a beta version of the patch (version 1.17). The reason why the patch needs beta testing is that we’ve changed a lot of things in our engine since the last version (1.14, or 1.16 on Steam), and I’d like to sort out any problems that these changes may cause.

In other words… to be continued.

/jeb

I thought it might be a good time to repeat what the latest versions of Harvest are. Currently, the correct version is 1.14 or 1.16. The 1.16 version is only used on Steam, and fixes a couple of Steam-related issues. This version has the same features as the 1.14 version that everybody else is using. If you got the game from Reflexive, this version should already be 1.14, otherwise follow this link:

• Harvest 1.14

If you are a Steam user and want to migrate your non-Steam copy there, you can do so by activating the product on Steam with your Harvest license key. This option is only available if you bought the game here before March 2009.

/jeb

Linkage: http://www.oxeyegames.com/files/ourglobe/HouseGlobe.zip

/jeb

The patch contains the following mods:

• Emulate Normal Mode: A mod that works just like the Normal Mode.
• Emulate Rush Mode: A mod that works just like Rush Mode.
• Emulate Wave Mode: A mod that works just like Wave Mode.
• Starhawk: A mod that allows the player to send in a small fighter jet with custom graphics by entering “starhawk” in the input field that appears after pressing Enter ingame.
• Super Gun: A mod that allows the player to upgrade defense towers into bullet spewing super guns! These guns don’t require energy, but instead eat credits when they need to refill ammo.
• Infinite Credits: A mod that gives the player infinite credits.

Here’s the Mac OS X updater for registered users (2.6 MB). Open the dmg and run the patcher, then simply drag and drop the Harvest application on to the patcher’s window.

The Windows update is available here (1.3 MB). This patcher requires a previous installation of Harvest, simply use the same application folder when you run it.

Happy Modding!

• A weird crash bug before “Game Over” which occurred with the OpenGL renderer. This is one of those bugs that make me believe that there’s more to programming than bits and bytes. Somebody or something is out there to get us. Anyway, we added a redundant and “unnecessary” fix, and it seems to work…
• Removed the gamepad controller from the main game since it caused problems for some people. You can still play with a gamepad in the “easter egg” (check the forums for more info).
• On the Mac, files are now stored in your user folder instead of the system folder. This should solve some problems people reported on Leopard.

So… here’s the Mac OS X updater for registered users (2 MB). Open the dmg and run the patcher, then simply drag and drop the Harvest application on to the patcher’s window. Simple and elegant, huh? We have also updated the demo version, of course. You find it on the downloads page.

The Windows update is available here (1 MB). This patcher requires a previous installation of Harvest, simply use the same application folder when you run it. As above, the demo has been updated and is available from the downloads page.

Update: We’ve patched the patcher now Please try again
Hit the jump for more Harvest-related news…

Harvest in the media

Harvest has been added to GamersGate. It’s very exciting, hopefully we will do well over there. At least we’ve already received a very positive review!

Two Swedish sites have revieved Harvest, we got 7 of 10 at Level7.nu and 4 of 5 at FZ.se (a video review)! Very nice! We were also nominated game of the week at Bright.nl, and received a 85 of 100 score in PC Gameplay Magazine!

We also got mentioned at TIGSource.com and RockPaperShotgun.com, with very positive feedback in the comments sections. We are TIGSource commoners, so we’ll probably write more about them when we get started with the blogging again

If you know of any other sites that have written about Harvest, please let us know!

/jeb