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:

• Adventure mode!
• Item Comparison

Hit the jump for the full read!

Adventure

Our main focus right now is the adventure mode. We’ve been working intensely on it for about 2 months, and while we are not ready to release anything of it just yet, I can show you some of the ideas and concepts we are working with.

Light and Dark

We love exploration.

We love dark and scary!

But just making everything black isn’t a good solution.

You need contrasts and varying moods. To achieve this we had to work on improving the lighting of the game. One component is that it is now possible to render most common tiles with individual colors for each corner:

Then we let lights affect those colors. Left light is only using the shader, while the right light is also affecting tile corner colors.

Having this we could now create really dark areas, while still being able to light them up nicely for contrast:

Procedural + Design

We also love exploration!

The key component in exploration is not knowing that will come next or what you will find. I’d go so far as to say it pretty much defines it. Because of that, and because we want to give the adventure good replay value, we have created a system that combines design with procedural content generation on a number of levels. Let’s examine a normal room:

1. The cabinet may or may not be there, it may or may not be locked. It’s contents are unknown.
2. The entrance leads to another procedurally created room.
3. There may or may not be items on the table and there may or may not be actors hanging around there. What items, and what actors and what they will look like or what items they possess is unknown.
4. The door may or may not be locked. What kind of lock is unknown.
5. The urns may or may not be there, and the contents of them is unknown.
6. There may or may not be items on that shelf. What kind of items is unknown.
7. (not shown in picture) a bunch of assorted decorations may or may not be there.

What spawns where is controlled from higher up. Maybe the room is owned by a pirate mushroom clan that is preparing a spikebird feast on the table, or maybe the room belongs to a hermit lunatic that stores its bomb and grenade stash in those urns and to guard it has put a hefty pad lock on the door.

What about exploring those dark and scary caves?

Lets examine a 3×3 dungeon:

The dungeon has incoming travel where the red lines are. When the adventure is generated, it creates paths between all travels and places other optional things like a goal. As you can see, 1,2 and 3 are all just different solutions to the same dungeon making sure that every time you play, exploration will remain fresh and surprising.

So finally, you find yourself exploring a dark procedural cave, fumbling with the light enhancer to try and find a way out.

Item Comparison

Another fun thing I have been working on is item comparisons. Since the game contains a bunch of both weapons and equipment, playing the game effectively in an adventure would almost require you to have a wiki or similar open on the side for you to have any chance at all to make an informed decision. Do I buy item 1, or 2? Do i equip this helmet or that helmet? Do I buy this upgrade, or that upgrade? Here follows a couple of screenshots of me using the system:

Comparing two weapons

Inspecting the effects of an upgrade

Equipping a helmet

Also, as you can see in the last screenshot here, equipping a helmet or any other piece of equipment has a really complicated effect. This is likely the first glimpse into what a helmet actually does since they were introduced.

That is it for now!

If you have any questions, just drop a comment!

Change Log

Alterations:

• All slugger weapons have had their rate of fire halved, damage doubled, and bullet time generated doubled.
• Slugger bullets now retain ability to hit after deflect.
• Punch is now more adaptive to how far from max range the hit was, in regards to how fast the next is charged up and damage
• You can now hold use to keep punching at max charge.
• Added a bunch of minable tiles

Bug-Fixes:

• Fixed incorrect speed calculation for tiles leading for crazy bobbing in fluids
• Fixed incorrect door rendering
• Added automatic adding of “simple” locks to io-connected to lock slots on old maps.

We updated Cobalt to v119 today with some new stuff and some bug fixes! We added a new actor and lots of new locks! Hit the jump for the full change log!

Change Log

Alterations:

• Locks are now modular and can be used both for doors and containers.
• Added 6 lock types.
• Added new deathmatch map Amanita!
• Added Amanita actor
• Added a bunch of mycelia tiles.
• Added a bunch of generic symol tiles.
• 3d-ish boxes are now by default physical and destructible
• It is now possible to draw the color of the quad vertices for basic tiles. Check tiles menu in editor for more details.
• added credit value to pickups section in tile browser

Bug-Fixes:

• Graphics and engine related crash fixes
• Fixed hackscreen related crash bugs.
• Various other undocumented bug fixes.

In this version we have set Direct X as the default renderer again, fixed a bunch of bugs as well as included new tools for finding out why crashes occur. If your game still crashes in this version, we will have a much better ability to locate your specific problem if you locate in your My Documents/Cobalt folder the two files called “log.txt” and “send-me-to-oxeye.dmp”, and send them to errors@oxeyegames.com

Other than that, we have made general bug fixes and improvements, among them hud and sounds for splitscreen. Hit the jump for the full change-log!

Change Log

Alterations:

• Desert Wind actually updated now…
• Game now uses Dirext X by default again. You can use Open GL by checking the Force Open GL checkbox in game options in the launcher.
• Added price changes to upgrade levels.
• Re-added dm_rooftops with increased performance and visual clarity adjustments
• More accurate explosion damage in respect to penetrating multiple small enemies.
• Added more tiles!

Bug-Fixes:

• Delivering the plug by touch now works properly
• fixed Safest Gate crash
• Fixed laser alarms incorrectly showing a disabled lightning icon
• Fixed phaser and jet shoe bullets being able to bounce on bouncepads.
• Fixed flickering mouse
• Fixed lua crash when pressing keys outside fields in launcher
• Fixed split screen hud and light error
• Fixed split screen sound missing
• Opening doors sneaking is now more accurate and takes duck-walking into consideration too
• Turned automatic controller timeout into a config option so that when you play many people in challenge, the controllers don’t get disabled while waiting.
• Multi-kill combo texts now spawn just 1 text for the whole multi kill
• Shield belt battery should now properly be listed
• Corrected some deflect speed impulses
• Improved logic for certain pickup weapon decisions

Since v116 and v117 we have gotten report about the game crashing for some people!

The most common ones seem to be:

• It crashes right away on startup: This is likely because of opengl being using and your system not working well with it for some reason. This can be solved for now by Right-Clicking the Cobalt shortcut, click properties, and in the “target” field that should contain something like “C:\Program Files\Oxeye Games\Cobalt\Cobalt.exe”, add -directx to the end, so that it now looks like “C:\Program Files\Oxeye Games\Cobalt\Cobalt.exe -directx”.
• Crashing at some random point during a challenge:  In v117 we fixed a couple of these issues, and some who had problems with this no longer does. But it seems that for some all problems were not solved. We do not know why it is happening, and we would like to ask the people that are having these problems to clarify their crash report with some more information!

The reason why many of these crashes slip through is because they simply don’t happen on any of our systems. This is the reason why it is extra important that we understand exactly when and why it crashes for you.

To help us help you, these are the things that would really help us when trying to figure out what is wrong:

The type of crash

• Did the game freeze with continuous looping sounds?
• Did it crash hard with a windows crash report dialog box?
• Did it crash with a message in the game window, and a lua-stack trace?
• All details will help!

When does it happen?

What were you doing when it happened? There is a big difference between if the launcher appears as a black window and then crashes, or if it just never appears at all! These little things help a lot. If you were doing something in the game, please tell us exactly in what games modes, maps, situations, if you were using a gamepad or anything that could help us narrow the cause down. It is extra interesting if the game crashes in more than 1 situation, for example, if it crashes both at the end of a DM match, at the end of a Challenge and at the intro screen after the alpha text at the start of the game. These kinds of correlations are very helpful!

Crash information

All the information that is generated in any shape or form associated to the crash can help. If it was a lua crash, the game will save screenshots of the stack trace in the “my documents/cobalt” folder. Please upload those with your crash report! If the game crashes hard, windows can generate a crash report. Please upload that together with the report!

Reproduce it

The absolute best way to solve crash problems, is to find a step by step way to make it happen again. If you can supply us with the steps we need to take to make it crash, narrowing down the problem becomes easier!

Whether  you can reproduce it or not, other information can still help. Things like, does the crash occur both in “direct-x” and “opengl” mode? Does the crash occur if you enable or disable shaders? Does the crash occur on another computer? If you can identify a case where it crashes in one but not in the other, it is again easier to narrow down the cause!

If you dont know where to upload crash screenshots, we suggest using http://imgur.com

-directx

then start the game again.

Hit the jump for the full change log!

Change Log

Alterations:

• Survival House is updated
• Brand new water movement
• Desert Wind now gives x2 conversion for loot
• Desert Wind: Added more harder tiers, and fixed some tiers that were reset and added weapons to some actors that had missing items.
• Ai now understands that non-activated destructible tiles are potential paths.
• Increased view edge cap buffer for ai-feedback

Bug-Fixes:

• Fixed slugger bullets disabling rolls automatically
• Fixed crash on sur safest gate
• Fixed crash on sur desert wind related to relation behaviour
• Fixed editor not working at all
• Reduced stutter in preview generation
• Thermal bomb is no longer upgradable
• Fixed bug with placing tiles that were supposed to get a unique id on placement
• Fixed some ai end of path jump bugs
• Fixed radio not working
• Added some opengl error handling so that we know what is wrong
• Summoner booths have regained their old light glow that went missing for a while
• A lot of shader related crashes fixed
• Fixed certain effect doing a proposterous amount of canvas flipping
• Water world is “working” again. There are likely a bunch of graphical horrifics, but its alive at least.
• Fixed misaligned map previews
• Fixed rendering of lots and lots of combos not making the combo list super tiny

Hi everyone! Today we released the v116 alpha update for Cobalt.

This contains a big list of changes and bug fixes. Among the bigger things, we have added a new game mode:  Challenge! For it we have added 18 new maps of varying size and difficulty. We have also added a new survival map, and updated some of the ctp and vs maps. Burntcustard also supplied us with a revamped version of the jet fuel dungeon!

For a long time we have been feeling that Cobalt has been lacking good transitional singleplayer gameplay component after tutorial. DM & CTP are more aimed towards playing with friends, and while Survival is fun for the hardcore player, it doesn’t offer a sense of completion nor any significant feeling of progress. This is where challenge mode now comes in. It offers maps in a wide range of difficulty where you can actually complete a map, as well as offering a wider range challenges and goals than just surviving. For us this is a very important component in making Cobalt a more complete game, and once we get the adventure component ready too, we feel that we will have a much more satisfactory sense of progress offered.

Hit the jump for the full change log!

Change Log

Alterations:

• Ninjas have had their weapon arm switched, also ninjas can now be equipped with backshell and energy shield. This is part of the process of letting more actors use the generic equipment system.
• Added initialDelay to pickups
• Increased rail scout bullet speed
• New Actor: Felishroom
• Now possible to assign tints to actors spawns.
• New Challenge game mode.
• Highscores for survival and challenge.
• Added 4 Challenge Sets totaling 18 new maps
• Added 1 new Survival map: Desert Wind
• Map list fades to show that it continues.
• Auto aim now considers tile targets even if there are other targets too.
• Railgun prices adjusted downwards.
• Snow, ice and icicles!
• Added a bunch more tiles to the map editor!
• Changed the way activated physics are handled in the map editor. Now you can activate and simulate physics while in the editor, and then pause them. And all the things that were previously “magically” activated, are now just activated by default.
• You can now attach physical tiles to each other in a hierarchy creating composited activated physical tiles.
• You can now make tiles destructible from the right click menu of tiles, and then set their health.
• Plasma striker increased max ammo
• Plasma pistol increased max ammo
• Plasma guns have generally had their speeds and ranges tweaked.
• change plasma to dissipate charge less first, and more later.
• Reduced handling sway penalty for all rail weapons
• Increased rate of fire for rail defender and revolver
• Increased reload speed for rail cannon and rail prototype and burst and screamer and revolver
• Increased effect of burst and screamed extended magazine
• Increased the effects of the motor for rail revolver and defender and vanquisher
• Reduced price for rail burster and screamer and revolver and defender
• Matter gun now costs 325
• 3 new matter weapons added: Matter Bolt, Matter War and Matter Machine
• Matter cannon support is more powerful, lessens recoils and increases rate of fire
• Matter shots are now able to first destroy a protection piece and then continue to hurt the target if enough remaining damage is left in the shot.
• Plasma cannon and striker now shoot multiple projectiles in an arc.
• Added a combo system that gives time bonuses in challenge and volt bonuses in survival
• Ai actors now have a small ai-feedback icon which designates the general state of the ai.
• It is now much easier to push physical stuff.
• Pushing or shoting a physical box, and it destroying an enemy will give you a kill
• Landing hard on another enemy or a destructible tile will do damage!
• Jump kick now works better on the way down when hitting a surface
• Opengl is now default, Uncheck the checkbox in options to use directx!
• Added a value to summoners called noOffspringSpeedBoost which makes the summoner start the next wave faster if all of its offspring are dead. This multiplier is 1 for birds nests and shroom summoners, but 10 for the booth summoner and 2 for the factory.
• Opening doors now makes sound that can give you away.
• Sneaking while opening a door will cause you to open it slowly making less sound
• You can now configure where cobalt saves its user data: make a “paths” file into AppData/Roaming/Cobalt and write: $DOCUMENTS$ “your/documents/path” into it

Bug-Fixes:

• Shield belt discharge now only affects enemies
• Fixed actors being killable by heat and cold while being “invulnerable”
• Reworked tile destruction code which seems to have removed a horrible stutter that was present before.
• Plug was dropped when switching to more powerful weapons on pickup.
• Lots of small fixes and tweaks to the editor
• Plugs would sometimes disappear visually, when bouncing or periodically in the station
• Trails would sometimes disappear in whole incorrectly.
• Fixed music not playing correctly sometimes on restart of maps
• Optimizations both in engine and game code
• Likely a bunch of that we forgot to add to this list!

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

Hit the jump for the full change log!

Change Log

Alterations:

• Added dm_oasisTemple by _SIM_
• Added item spawning speed modification based on number of players. The settings can be configured in the game mode menu of the map.

Bug-Fixes:

• Fixed not being able to use scroll-wheel in tiles browser.
• Fixed not being able to press file after right clicking in editor.
• Fixed size of search field in tiles browser
• Fixed buying upgrades in shops not working correctly
• Fixed switching from punch making the next item be angled incorrectly.
• Fixed upgrades not showing cost after first level.
• Fixed arms and similar not placing themselves correctly when flipping for one frame.
• Fixed changing colors on tiles crashing
• Fixed labSign tile
• Fixed editor not defaulting to collision layer
• Fixed editor camera default position
• Fixed eyes and mouth profile colors not showing up
• Fixed entering hack screen crash