BCMM

BCMM Huge Ship Battles

As I've mentioned in previous articles, BC is a very old game. It uses an old game engine called NetImmerse and runs on a single core. That cannot be changed. Without any optimizations or tweaks, you cannot achieve ship battles larger than 30–40 ships on an average computer without the game turning into a PowerPoint presentation.

You might ask yourself, "What if I get a better GPU or CPU? Will that help?" Not in the slightest.

What is the bottleneck, and can anything be done about it?

1. It's the AI
2. It's the modern hardware

And as you can see …

BCMM November 2024 Progress Report

It hasn't been a quiet month, though the other team members are working diligently behind the scenes. Cordy has made some truly remarkable things; hopefully they can be revealed soon. Sadly, we haven't started the new campaign yet as we're working on accumulated reported issues and new features we want to introduce in the current build(s).

As for me, what I've done: Lots of small fixes behind the scenes.

Things to note from me:

• The BC screenshots functionality has been replaced with a new one that produces PNGs
• Added semver module (this is more for modders)
• Bypass some limitations …

BCMM October 2024 Progress Report

We got back from our extended summer break and time to show what we've been doing.

Our cordanilus has been doing some awesome innovative progress with new graphics and effects.

Other team members have been doing a lot of things behind the scenes (you'll see when it's ready).

As for myself, another performance preview.

Simulated Universe Intro

If you read regularly and have seen some of my blog posts or Discord messages, you will notice I've frequently mentioned the concept of a "Simulated Universe".

I've recently released a simple video showcasing nothing out of the ordinary:

This is all but ordinary. The mission itself and parameters were generated using a local large language model (LLM), passed onto the Bridge Commander (BC) via IPC, then dynamically inserted into the game. This alone isn't extraordinary either. But let's ask ourselves the question, "What am I getting at here?"

What is the point?

My ideal version of a BC game …

BCMM SFC3 Romulan Campaign Ship Vote Results

The poll was supposed to be open until Sunday, but given that the winner is clearly evident now, we decided to declare the winner early.

Here are the results:

Congratulations to all who voted for the Romulan Warbird.

BCMM Voice Commands Intro

Yes, BC has a voice command profile already, which is old. And yes, it's possible to hack a way to send keystrokes via "user32.dll" and an external speech API to have voice command support.

What's the big deal?

1. The BC voice command profile is very old and probably obsolete.
2. Having an external application does offer limited support, where you can only support actions that have keybindings.

So what then?

Enter the IPC support, which we demonstrated and wrote about here.

Here's the demo in action.

What is different?

This directly talks to the game and passes on messages. With …

BCMM SFC3 Romulan Campaign Ship Vote

The Klingon campaign is done. And as we've promised, you can vote for the next campaign, which is the Romulan campaign. Tal Shiar agents vote for the ship you want to use in the Campaign.

Preview ships:

Vote here

BCMM IPC Intro

What is IPC?

IPC stands for inter-process communication. There are many uses and techniques for how one can go about doing IPC. But in short, it allows two separate processes to communicate with each other and exchange data. 

For example, we can have one process let another process know that an event has occurred. There are many ways one can go about exchanging data between each other:

• Pipes
• Sockets
• Signals
• Shared memory

And more.

What's this got to do with BC?

BC in multiplayer does have a way to communicate with other players, depending on how you look at it …

BCMM Tools

Intro

As I've mentioned in one of the previous articles, BC tools are very old, and so is the game. With that in mind, we do plan to develop some new tools. Some of which have been previously showcased.

TGL Editor

This one is actually already done, and a version of it is floating around. I noticed some bugs with large TGL files, all of which are resolved in the dev version we're using.

BC HP Editor

This tool was in early development last year and should have been a replacement for BCUT. At the moment, it fully supports editing …

BCMM Performance Goals

Intro

BC is an old game—a very old game. It uses a very old and defunct game engine called NetImmerse. The NIF format it uses for models is ancient as well, and most official tools don't even work if you want to port a new ship or model to the game. If you want to use official SDK plugins to play around with NIF models, you have to use an ancient 3D Studio Max 3.1 on a virtual machine running Windows XP. I hope this illustrates how old the game is.

Anyway, it's one of the most modded …