What is PCC2?

Planets Command Center 2 is an advanced VGA Planets 3.x client for modern operating systems. It is the successor to PCC 1.x, a DOS program.

PCC2 allows you to play VGAP turns. All you need is an official VGA Planets registration.

Features

• can play directly from result files (no unpack/maketurn required, but can be used if desired)
• similar interface to PCC 1.x (and thus planets.exe)
• zoomable map
• starchart database file compatible with PCC 1.x
• plays and simulates combat for Host 3.x, PHost 2.x to 4.x, NuHost, and FLAK, with an integrated, ultra-fast multi-ship battle simulator
• auto-tasks: give commands in advance, plan multi-turn movement routes
• built-in scripting language (link to manual, LARGE!) and support for plugins
• built-in help
• built-in game selection
• Unicode support

What is in the box?

PCC2 is a whole suite of programs. It contains new versions of many programs that came with PCC 1.x or were distributed separately. Here is a list of everything you get with PCC2:

• PCC2, the actual client program. Use it to play your VGAP games without making compromises.
• PlayVCR, a standalone combat viewer and simulator (replaces CCBSim). Probably the fastest and most comprehensive battle simulator for VGAP.
• a set of command-line utilities:
  • c2dump, a tool for developers
  • c2export, a tool to export data for use in Excel or similar
  • c2mgrep, a tool to search for messages (replaces MGrep)
  • c2mkturn, a Maketurn utility
  • c2plugin, to manage plugins
  • c2sweep, a tool to clean up game directories (replaces ccsweep delivered with PCC 1.x)
  • c2unpack, an Unpack utilitiy (replaces ccunpack delivered with PCC 1.x)
  • un-trn, a turn file decompiler (replaces un-trn)

There's one thing that is not included with the standard PCC2 downloads: artwork. Unless you have Winplan or PCC 1.x installed and re-use its artwork, please download and install an artwork plugin.

Operating Systems

You can get PCC2 programs for the following operating systems:

• Windows 32-bit. This version runs on every Windows version from Windows 95 up, including Windows 10, and 64-bit versions of Windows.
• Linux i386 Debian package. This version runs on Debian 3.0 and later, and all its derivatives, including Ubuntu.

You can also compile PCC2 yourself. Here are some operating systems previous PCC2 versions have been run on:

• Linux/AMD64
• Solaris/SPARC
• MacOS X

PCC2 uses libSDL, which means it supports a variety of graphics subsystems. Under Windows, it will use DirectX if available, but will also run without. Under a Unix, it will use X11, but can also use console framebuffer or VGAlib if your version of SDL does that.