Remember kids, school is important. Do not neglect it. It will steal your time if you don’t get rid of it. Escape! Burn it down to the ground! Make school wish it never tried to educate you!

Actually, running away from school is probably a bad idea. Think of all the physics bugs we’d have if nobody had taught thewreck the arts of science.

With tests and exams all over the place, I’ve been unable to procure this week’s intel. Boo. Before running away from the fierce assault of rotten tomatoes however, I’m leaving you with a fresh community map that gives you something proper to escape from. Appropriately, it’s called The Escape, a challenge map by FabiotheTurtle! His species is not the fastest to run away from mad scientists, so he’s giving you an unusual escape method: The Predator. Here’s the trailer!

Featuring cutscenes along with some quite unique gameplay, there’s definitely an amazing amount of work put into this. Get this map and many others at the Cobalt Vault!

One more thing

Librus is arting! I love art. Do you love art? He’s currently taking requests—check out his thread on the Cobalt Forum!

A short report is better than no report!

Even mysterious intelligence hackers have to attend school, and as a result, some weeks I won’t be able to feed you with my inner wittiness as much as normally. This is one of those. I ran off with a few screenshots nevertheless!

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It’s art time!

Last week, I promised to steal Oxeye’s level art creation process. I can’t believe it, but the lab technicians actually discovered my intentions! They hired a team to counter–hack. Turns out they’re pretty cool people, so we joined forces and formed the Cobalt Investigation Agency! Comrades, get out your inner Leonardo. We’re going to the gallery.

…Just pretend that was cool, okay?! What do you think I am, a wandering wizard of words or something?

First, here’s my favorite piece of fan art as warm–up!

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Ladies and gentlefaces, it’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for: The intel report!

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!

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The fourth episode of Radio Cobalt has been posted on YouTube!

Hi!

Cobalt is now at v124b! The bullet time change in the last version has gotten a tweak and a number of small bugs are fixed. Read more for full change log!

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Hello!

We have updated Cobalt to v124! This time we have focused on bugs, tweaks and some content. The biggest and most interesting change has to do with bullet time. Here is why:

The Problem

As you may know, bullet time is a big part of Cobalt. Lately I’ve been feeling that the combat in Cobalt has started to get a slightly too focused on timing defensive moves, while offensive moves are executed haphazardly or without much effect on the end result. Because of this, I’ve been looking for a long time to a way to put timing back into attacks.

Inspiration

The idea to adjust bullet time came from being inspired by the difference between the first rounds of Team-Strike where there were no reaction enhancer, and the later round when there were. I really liked that you in the beginning had to keep an eye on your enemies to see what they were doing, not just stare at your own character and react to threats. These first rounds would be quicker, and more about doing precise timed attacks when the enemy didn’t expect them. The later rounds would be more about reacting to situations and executing well timed defensive moves. However, i did not like the inconsistency. It was hard to explain and it also felt like a contrived way to cater to both playing styles.

The Solution

I decided to change how the reaction enhancer is activated.  Instead of snapping directly to the incoming threats, the reaction enhancer, when detecting a threat, smoothly activates over time, faster for more dangerous items. The maximum slowdown for a threat was also increased. This changed a number of things:

• Bullet time is more predictable and smoother and easier to time correctly  and adapt to.
• It also means that being cool and timing accurate shots against your opponents is more effective than before.
• It also means that keeping enemies at a distance is more important, because you want there to be space between you and your threat to give your reaction enhancer space to activate.
• It also means that when attacking, you might not want to attack right away, but hold off on the first shot until you get a little closer, as to not activate the enemy’s reaction enhancer too early.
• It also means that you don’t get trapped in bullet time as easy by single or few bullets.
• It also means that when bullet time actually starts to really kick in, it can go even slower and allow even more control than before allowing for a far greater range of gameplay.

Let me know what you think!

/thewreck

In other news!

The community map making is really starting to gain some momentum again! In a future update we want to include more maps made from the community but we have not figured out how to do that from a “legal” standpoint yet. In the meantime, head over to http://cobaltvault.no/ and start downloading all the goodies!

Personally I can especially recommend trying out Janeators Challenge Week (Map Pack) v1.0! Good stuff!! (follow for updates)

/kinten

Hit to jump to read the full log.

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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.

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Here comes a community update:

Hi all!

Apparently a metalface has been marooned on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Surviving in harsh environments with no food or water is not an issue for cyborg metalfaces but how will it avoid succumbing to insanity? How can it trust what it sees with its own two eyes/light bulbs? How will it return to civilization? These questions needs to be answered! (Looking at you Fabio).

The third episode of Radio Cobalt has been posted on YouTube!