Today MC2 Classic v0.54.0 is now live and ready to play at the Classic domain, and this release marks the final build of MC2 Classic! Oh no, MC2 Classic going away?!? Let's see what's going on!

With recent improvements and performance gains for the MC2 Classic engine, I decided it's time to resurrect the game out of the "Classic" domain and bring it back as My Colony 2 proper, so within a few weeks here, the Classic code will be updated and ported out as My Colony 2 proper, along with releases for all supported platforms.

I did start work on a complete My Colony 2 rewrite using Basic Modeler based 3D graphics instead of Voxel art, but that is going to be a much larger project. My current plan is to save the handful of models I built for that engine back for a later day, and instead, repurpose that engine for a new Antiquitas 2 game, but that will be a ways off. Instead, voxel based My Colony 2 will be coming back to the forefront and re-entering active development.

What does this mean if you have been playing MC2 Classic? Well, if your save games are on your local filesystem, there will be no real difference, as the save file format between the two games is identical. If you were using cloud sync, you will need to export your saves from MC2 Classic and import them into the updated My Colony 2 once the time comes. It will be trivial to do though.

Until then though, lets see what has changed in this new (and final) build of MC2 Classic!

For starters, a lot of small UI changes were made, including padding, spacing, border colors, etc. Just slight differences, things I thought made the UI look a bit nicer. There were also a ton of sidebar icons missing in the Encyclopedia and Statistics menus, so those have now been corrected.

MC2 now has the cursor-based flashlight that was recently added to MC1 v3.0. Now when it is night time in your colony, the flashlight will follow your cursor so you can see what is going on.

I reworked how water is rendered in the game, and made it quite a bit simpler (and less resource intensive). Its now just a semi-transparent noise textured plane with a slight reflective property, which will react with the sun as the day goes by.

It's hard to tell in a still image, and its not as fancy as the refraction shader that the game had before, but it performs a lot better.

Finally, game save file sizes have been reduced in this release, in some cases quite significantly, depending on what was going on in your save file. The water world map pictured above went from 177mb to under 18mb, which is a considerable change!

In the end, this update gives some final polish to Classic before I start ramping up real production on the game and upgrade it back to My Colony 2 proper. So stay tuned for that, because a lot of cool stuff is about to start happening in the weeks ahead!

Until then, Play MC2 Classic Now or leave your suggestions and feedback in the official My Colony 2 Discord Channel!