Cortex Commander

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a lets play video for the Cortex Command Community Project. Instantly, I was transported back in time - spending hundreds of my teenage hours wrestling with this absolute gem of a game.

I always loved physics based games and the destructible world of CC with it's absolutely unhinged character movement system and pixel terrain destruction was so much fun to play around with. It's a game, like many, who's longevity can be substantially attributed to it's fantastic modding scene, with countless new factions / weapons / vehicles (sorta, we'll get to that...) being created by a seriously passionate community.

That said, it always felt like the games potential was somehow untapped. Poor performance, systems that half worked and questionable AI were obvious issues, but the community carried on playing and loving the game regardless.

Many years later, in 2019, Data Realms open sourced Cortex Command - a huge boost for the community. Since then, the Cortex Command Community Project have worked wonders - improving performance, making the game work properly on modern systems / displays, improved stability and added new content. It is entirely thanks to their efforts to modernise and improve the codebase that I am even making this post now.

When I played it, a few things really stuck out:

• The art is fantastic, but the overall in-game look feels dated - CC never had a lighting / shadow system, meaning glowing weapons, shading, explosions are all pixel drawn.
• Gameplay wise, I always felt it would've been better to treat the game like an RTS where you could control a character, and have the in game UI / UX reflect that. In the original, the focus is very much on controlling the characters directly, with RTS commands you can issue to units as you switch between them.

With recent advances in AI code gen, and after seeing it provide serious benefit in real world use, I decided to jump on the bandwagon and attempt to create my own dream version of CC - which, in line with its increased focus on RTS style gameplay, will be called Cortex Commander.

I've taken a fork of the community project (where work was already well underway on a modern GPU renderer) and started development, using Claude Code almost entirely. If nothing else, this will provide a solid experiment on the usefulness of agenting coding in game development. Whilst I have 10+ years of software development & architecture experience, none of that is in game development!

Put simply, I am staggered at the progress the agents have been able to make in such a short space of time.

In the space of a week, we have :

• Completed the modern GPU render
• Implemented full real time lighting systems with light, shadows, global illumination and day / night cycles
• Post Processing system
• Weather system that influences the environment
• Significantly expand the physics system to support liquids & more complex material types
• Created collapsable / falling terrain - this is a big one, while CC allowed you to destroy terrain and turn it into loose pixels, chunks would never fall or collapse under weight. Now they can!
• Version 1 of properly implemented flying / land vehicles, something CC fans have wanted since release
• Sandbox mode that allows paining of terrain, spawning of units / lights / effects.
• Battle Command (this will become the main mode of my fork) RTS game mode with traditional RTS style command systems (selecting units, creating squads, issuing various types of orders
• Risk based movement system that gives the player much more granular control over how units reach their destination and what routes are followed by the AI.
• Improved AI units usage of the jetpack / ability to navigate inside bunkers, use ladders and handle vertical shafts.
• Battle Designer to allow creation of scenarios on existing maps for game modes like King of the Hill, Capture the Flag and more
• Improved unit / building / item browsers with favourites, search, filters and other QoL features expected in modern user interfaces.

And this isn't even everything. The new systems are all available to mod authors, and a new settings panel allows deep tuning of everything. Even more amazingly, the performance is actually decent!

While it needs much more iteration before a public release / tech demo, it's clear that the project has legs. Besides working towards my focussed vision of the game, I'm also working on back porting the visual changes (lighting / weather / post processing) back into the community version, as they have no direct impact on gameplay systems.

I'll continue providing updates on this blog and occasionally in the CCCP discord (if they don't get sick of me!).

Once again, a big thank you to Data Realms for creating and open sourcing this modern classic and also to the Cortex Command Community Project for keeping the project alive and making countless improvements to the engine that've made all this possible. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that their work over the past few years has directly unlocked the speed of progress here.

You can check out the project in its current state @ https://github.com/hotsake-uk/Cortex-Commander.