PlanetsCentral

Hi there,

a few days ago, I have uploaded PCC2ng 2.41.

Basically, this is a rework of PCC2 to a more modern foundation. All the software running on this server is based on it, front-end and back-end.

Originally, I had planned this to be a major milestone, because it now has reached feature-completeness, and is fully playable at the same level as PCC2. Unfortunately, I found in testing that its flagship feature, playing directly from the server, is less stable than I like it to be. It seems to be related to encryption (HTTPS), and you probably don't want to use it without that. However, for playing locally, it seems to be rock-solid, and I played my most recent turns exclusively with it.

Other tasty features:

• Uses SDL2 graphics library, thus, full-screen mode works much better;
• Universe Almanac (Shift-A on main screen), to answer questions like "who has cloakers?", "what are my racial advantages?";
• Battle simulator can use multiple cores, and is much faster;
• Supports VPA data transmissions (a feature of PCC1 that never made it into PCC2);
• 100% compatible with PCC2; it will use installed plugins, you can switch mid-game or even mid-turn.

On the non-features list: the user-interface is still rough at some times, and there is no user-friendly installer yet (Windows 10 will spread panic if you unpack a *.exe file from a *.zip that you downloaded from the internet).

Anyway, if you're bold, you can give it a try.

--Stefan

Great news!

I tried to compile on Linux following the instructions in the HackingGuide.

The test target in make -r all test install was not working due to

make: *** No rule to make target 'test'.  Stop.

Leaving away test appeared to work. After the installation I have all the binaries in the cn2g-build/result/bin folder, but c2ng itself is missing. Any ideas?

make: *** No rule to make target 'test'.  Stop.

Dammit, I always forget about that one. You need (an ancient version of) cxxtest. I placed the version that I'm using right now here. This is not an official version of cxxtest.

Leaving away test appeared to work. After the installation I have all the binaries in the cn2g-build/result/bin folder, but c2ng itself is missing. Any ideas?

This probably means you do not have libSDL installed. On Debian, you need the packages libsdl2-2.0-0, libsdl2-dev, libsdl2-image-2.0-0, libsdl2-image-dev. Alternatively, if you want to go with the old SDL1, libsdl-image1.2, libsdl-image1.2-dev, libsdl1.2-dev, libsdl1.2debian. When you run Make.pl, it should tell you what it found.

Otherwise, congratulation that you made it that far. The build process is much too complex for my taste.

--Stefan

Thanks, now compilation is working well!

I tried out pcc2-ng on my PC, it is also working well. I am going to write a mail about some bugs I encountered.