All of the hype as of late has gone towards the big My Colony 10th Anniversary Update, but not to be forgotten, the humble voxel-based MC2 Classic has just been updated with some considerable performance gains, so let's take a look at what is new!

One of the primary reasons for abandoning My Colony 2 development and depreciating the code over to MC2 Classic was because I just couldn't get the performance right with the voxel based graphics. For this release though, I have actually made some meaningful improvements to voxel decompression and rendering, especially when scrolling around very large maps. It almost makes me wonder if it makes sense to go back and revive the voxel based My Colony 2 and start improving from there, but I will leave that up to community feedback. Until then, I will focus on the 10th anniversary updates to the original My Colony.

There are still performance issues with the 3D engine on large maps, particularly when lighting effects are enabled. I am not sure if the lighting effects engine can be salvaged. I do like the look of the real time lighting as pictured in the screenshot above, but realtime dynamic lighting with an arbitrary number of point lights is just not practical. I might be able to replace the real physical lights with some sort of fake sprite-based lighting though, which would increase performance even further, although it wouldn't look near as cool.

I have considered having two modes, like a standard play mode with fake sprite-based light effects while you are playing the game, and then a photo-realistic lighting mode that turns on when you are wanting to take screenshots of your scene, but again, right now I will be focusing on My Colony 10th Anniversary.

That said, I have been having a lot of fun playing MC2 Classic while building this update, and there is still merit to the game. There is a lot I learned from coding My Colony v3.x 10th Anniversary, and those lessons could be brought back into a revived voxel-based My Colony 2, in theory. But until then, you can play MC2 Classic right now on the web at:

https://classic.mycolony2.com

And again, if you have feedback on the future of MC2/MC2 Classic, please leave it in the My Colony 2 section of the Discord server.