Universal Combat CE News

My fellow commanders!

From the dev changelog, it has been five years since the last version release of 3.00.20.04 back on 01-02-2019. Yes - time flies.

A lot has happened in those five years, both personally and professionally. But, as you all expect, I am still here. We did lose some of our friends and family along the way, but one day we will see them again.

Back in 2015 when I decided to refresh the UC game via a DLC instead of doing a new Battlecruiser/Universal Combat game, it was supposed to be a relatively easy 12-14 month affair. As these things go, the more that I peeled back the layers of legacy code in a bid to upgrade them for one last dance, the more I discovered dependencies that either couldn't be left untouched or which stifled the implementation of other improvements.

The challenges were further compounded by the fact that I was not only porting updated versions of various code and assets from the All Aspects Engine (in-house game engine used in AAW/AOA) to the legacy engine used in UCCE20, but I was also merging newer 2D/3D game assets as well. You can look through the changelog to see the progress that has been made in that regard.

Lots and lots of things broke. At that point, I decided that it wasn't a good use of my time to keep releasing dev updates (the last one was in 2019) which broke more things.

Last year, I came up with a new and improved plan so that I could get UCCE30 completed inside of 12-14 months. Aside from some crash bugs and anomalies, most of what's left to do is related to various odd anomalies as well as some miscellaneous content creation. Refer to the recently updated Trello dev board for more on this.

My current plan is as follows:

1. Address any/all FATAL crash bugs
   
2. Integrate the completed exported game model assets (from AAW to UCCE30)
   
3. Move the more problematic engine improvements (see Dev Plan in Trello board) to the wish list card
   
4. Final testing of the completed Lyrius Conflict campaign due to the planetary scene revisions in the major 3.00.20 update
   
5. Release a 3.01 build as a point release
   

From that point onward, I can then tackle the deferred and maybe some wish list items as part of the improvement process. I have absolutely no idea how long that would take, nor if I will ever be able to complete it all - but I will continue to work on it.

Hello Fans!

Some people have been asking for multiplayer in the Universal Combat suite of games released here on Steam. Here's an explainer.

As I mentioned in the forums, multiplayer was implemented in the original Universal Combat (2004) and up to the first Collectors Edition (2007). Maintenance and server backend issues, coupled with new features and updates made the multiplayer version lag behind the single-player version with each new point release.

Unlike the All Aspects series, the Universal Combat series - which use different core engines - were never developed with multiplayer in mind because they were derived off the original Battlecruiser series. Thus, having to add multiplayer to a single-player game was fraught with all the usual challenges that such an endeavor entails. So, in the long run, having to sync the multiplayer with single-player features, bug fixes etc. was an on-going time-wasting challenge that eventually became insurmountable.

And with that, multiplayer was disabled in the 2.0 release back in 2009.

Thereafter, my plan was to spend some time fully developing an updated multiplayer component as a DLC to the on-going expansion and improvement of the Universal Combat 3.0 series; similar to The Lyrius Conflict DLC which expands and improves on various parts of the core engine.

Though I haven't been able to spend as much time on 3.0 as I would like to, due to other projects and the fact that I ripped out a large swath of legacy UC code that I had always planned to re-write, I still plan to develop a multiplayer component. And the quickest way forward in this regard is to integrate the more advanced multiplayer engine from the All Aspects series to the UCCE 3.0 core as a separate DLC once I have completed and released the final version of the single-player The Lyrius Conflict DLC.

Until then, I have now added the original 2007 version of UCCE as a free game to the base game here on Steam. As it's not a separate game on Steam nor a DLC, you will have to manually install it - then add it to your Steam library manually. You can view the changelog here.

Once you have this update, look in the Steam install folder for the UniversalCombatCE_10104_STM.exe file and run it. That's it!

Enjoy!

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As a legacy title that no longer has updates, this release is unsupported.

The backend master server used for multiplayer server browsing has been off-line for many years now. So, you can only setup and join a multiplayer game using the command-line options and the console server build. See Section 13 of the included PDF manual for more info on this.

Minor cleanup

Minor revision/cleanup. No data or code changes.

So there's a restoration project for BCM Gold underway. More details are in this forum thread