PCC Screenshots

This page presents some screenshots of PCC, along with a description of the photographed function. Click on one of the small pictures to view it full-screen (640x480, between 20k and 60k per picture).

	The message reader in front of the player main screen. PCC includes a powerful message system: incoming messages are parsed and displayed in the starcharts, you can reply to your fellow player's messages, there is a killfile to hide bulk mail from Host, and you can share information with Informer, EchoView and VPA users.
	The starcharts display everything in the game: mine fields, ion storms, UFOs, explosions. You can add your own markers (lines, circles, small symbols). You can let PCC automatically label your planets and ships. PCC also tracks ship positions, and stores planetary scanner reports so you can recall them later. PCC supports Sphere.
	PCC remembers all scores and PBPs from the whole game. You can view nice diagrams, or a tabular chart of a single turn. PCC can also group scores by team, or compute differences between any two turns.
	The Imperial Statistics summarize your empire. You can use them to find out what kinds of ships you own, or where your minerals are buried. The blue-shaded lines are "hyperlinks", click them to go directly to those items.
	The search function is another way to locate things in your huge empire. You can search objects by name, or by a complex condition. You can even roll your own search queries with a BASIC-like expression syntax. A very neat feature is the global button: you can then apply a random action to all found objects; for example, find all planets with unhappy natives and set their taxes to 0 at once.
	The Planet Screen lets you do everything you would want to do on a planet: building structures, raising taxes (PCC can also find an optimum tax value for you) and transferring things to ships.
	The Ship Screen is used to control your ships. Here you can set missions and waypoints (exact hyper-jumps!), and transfer cargo. Ships can also be grouped into fleets with the same waypoint, so you need not command each single ship in a huge invasion fleet.
	Each ship was built someday - probably with this build screen. It will build all parts you need automatically, and get the necessary tech levels. It will permanently display the cost to build your dream ship, so you can experiment with your resources. A ``simulation'' of this screen can be used to compute the costs for building a ship -- even if you can't actually build that hull.
	The Combat Recorder in PCC is very convenient to use. It has all features you'd normally expect from your "real" VCR: forward & rewind, pause, single-stepping. A combat diagram gives you an overview about large battles. The warrior information window can try to guess a planet's equipment from a VCR.
	Before you fight, it's a good idea to simulate. PCC has a built-in Battle Simulator for battles with up to 200 ships and a planet/starbase. It supports both PHost and THost combat rules (including PHost 3 and alternative combat!). And it is fast, it generates up to 200 VCRs per second on my computer. The simulator is also available standalone.
	And, finally, a fancy gimmick: PCC is the first Planets client with Ion storm forecast ;-)

Not all parts of PCC have a screenshot here. Some of them are hard to explain with a picture anyway: PCC has a report generator which can print arbitrary reports on your game (requires the CCPrint addon), a comprehensive hypertext help system, and the currently only Planets Scripting Language: if you're missing a feature, just do it yourself!

If you're now asking yourself: hey, this looks almost like good old Dosplan, does it also have the same keys? Yes, it does. PCC supports the well-known F1/F2/F3 keys to access things, and letters to do stuff. If you know Dosplan, you'll feel at home in PCC. However, you get the benefit of a much more modern program core: support for current file formats, exact predictions, and many new and original features.

Note about the screenshots: the debugging version of PCC can take screenshots. However, it also sometimes prints fancy numbers in screen corners which are not there usually. And, the default font of PCC looks somewhat different. I use the CCFonts add-on to set PCC's font scheme to Lucida Bright/8x15/Helvetica/Lucida Sans/Tiny (font 1 to 5).