Tiny Combat Arena

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An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or "phone home" to function. While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way. This practice is effectively robbing customers of their purchases and makes restoration impossible. Besides being an affront on consumer rights, videogames themselves are unique creative works. Like film, or music, one cannot be simply substituted with another. By destroying them, it represents a creative loss for everyone involved and erases history in ways not possible in other mediums. Existing laws and consumer agencies are ill-prepared to protect customers against this practice. The ability for a company to destroy an item it has already sold to the customer long after the fact is not something that normally occurs in other industries. With license agreements required to simply run the game, many existing consumer protections are circumvented. This practice challenges the concept of ownership itself, where the customer is left with nothing after "buying" a game.

I play a lot of retro games. I'm spoiled by the fact that you just install a game and play. For the next generation of gamers, this is becoming increasingly untrue with even singleplayer games like The Crew being rendered inoperable due to mandatory server-side connections.

The STANDALONE on the bottom left of the main menu shows that the game is running in standalone mode, and will run everything saving files locally and without any connection to Steam. Even mods can still be loaded and run locally, without Workshop.

Since release, Tiny Combat Arena has been designed to be able to be played 100% offline. This means with no connection to Steam whatsoever. If Steam isn't detected, the game will save all its settings locally, and Steam APIs and features are bypassed/forwarded to local versions.
#StopKillingGames

Tiny Combat Arena - 0.17.2.2 Hotfix - Steam News Fixes the broken sounds on the main branch, along with adding units to the camera infobar when using external views.

See the full changelog on Steam:

Screenshot from Tiny Combat Arena showing the AV8B flying above an island. The info bar at the bottom of the screen reads HEADING: 215 AIRSPEED: 444 KT G: 1.27 ALTITUDE 2022 FT

Hotfix 0.17.2.2 is on the main branch, fixing the newly broken sounds that only happened on the main branch. Units have also been added to the external camera bar, and match the HUD Units setting.

It essentially mirrors the plane's, same as the HUD, but it needs to "remember" what units to use if you look at something after the player dies. This has the unfortunate downside that before the player spawns, you can't know what units to use, so it just defaults to Imperial in that case.

While working on it, I remembered why I didn't do this earlier. The info bar at the bottom is totally unrelated and unaware of the player, so for technical and design reasons I had to make a call on what the "authentic" setting should do.

Screenshot from Tiny Combat Arena showing the AV8B flying above an island. The info bar at the bottom of the screen reads HEADING: 215 AIRSPEED: 444 KT G: 1.27 ALTITUDE 2022 FT

Minor new feature that's part of the hotfix releasing later today is the info bar at the bottom now displays in the correct selectable units.

Tiny Combat Arena - 0.17.2.1 is now available. Engine update, plus optimizations for future terrain. - Steam News The engine update is finally live. As was mentioned before, this is mainly a technical patch, but it does bring the selectable HUD units and moving cockpit parts to main.

Read the full news post on Steam here:

0.17.2.1 is now available on the main branch! This is mainly a technical patch, updating the engine for optimizations to the new terrain. However it does include the oft-requested ability to change the units that appear on the HUD, and cockpit animations for the AV8B.

Screenshot from Tiny Combat Arena featuring BMP-1s, ZSU-57-2s, and T-62s driving down a road.

0.17.2.1 has been released on the Tester's branch. This should (hopefully) fix all the sound sourced issues that cropped up from the last update. If there's no major issues with this, it'll be pushed to the main branch soon.

There's something satisfying about annihilating T-72s in Tiny Combat Area, absolutely amazing feeling. #flightsim #lowpoly

There might be a light at the end of this tunnel now.

It did not go all well. There's a pretty serious FMOD bug. As good as I think FMOD Studio is, the Unity integration has given me so many extremely difficult to debug and solve problems that endlessly frustrate me. It's why I almost NEVER touch the game's audio. FMOD is incredibly fragile.

Tiny Combat Arena - 0.17.1.1 Testers Patch Notes - Steam News Updates the game to a new game engine version, adds selectable units on the HUD, and moving parts in the AV8B cockpit.

If all goes well, this will be on the main branch shortly. Read the full changelog on the Steam news post:

A bunch of buildings in the new map of Tiny Combat Arena being destroyed.

0.17.1.1 has been pushed to the tester's branch. This doesn't make too many changes, but this updated the Unity engine from 2020 to 2023. This touched much low level code in the game, so I want to keep it simple for this patch. The update was important for optimizations to rendering on the new map.

The F-14 has been handy in testing out the selectable HUD units, because the work has involved touching code for how the DLZ, Radar, and Threat Warning Display show their numbers. The long range gives me a lot of numbers to work with.

The 60 second flight time of the AIM-54 Phoenix.
Mods by Viperu Zeiro and nuclearstonk

Thought it'd be fun to animate the flight stick, but then one thing led to another and another and another so now:
Flight stick, throttle, nozzle lever, pedals, gear lever, and gear indicator lights all have animation based on what you're doing.

3D memepoly model of an AV8B cockpit. Notably missing is the joystick.

Today I learned the AV8B cockpit never had a joystick in it. This entire time I could have sworn it did.

The last time I updated TCA's Unity versions (and it was between LTS versions too!) it broke a load bearing bug with regards to the LineRenderer that the bullets used for tracers and it ended with bullets getting a decent refactor to get them working again.

Tiny Combat Arena screenshot featuring a cockpit of F-14A by ViperZero

Migration to 2023.2.20f1 seems to be complete. Still need to do some more testing to make sure exciting new regressions haven't appeared, but so far so good. Even mods still load correctly, which is something I was a bit worried about since their asset bundles would have been made in Unity 2019.

The scene is called "HangarMode" so it's probably what would have happened when you press that Hangar button. I don't think it was ever functional, because I have no screenshots or video of it. At the time, TCA was going to have turn based metagame thing, that I wasn't able to get working well.

Ancient canvas from the bowels of Tiny Combat Arena's Unity project. It's called "HangarMode" and I guess it was a loadout editor of some kind?

Holy cow just came across this ancient screen that, I'm not sure has ever been in the game or if it was just a prototype? The creation date is September 2020, so it predates the game's release by quite a bit. This would have been only about 5 months since the game started development.

AV8B flying over the new terrain. Hills are in the background, with "forests" and farm fields near.

Almost finished with moving the game to Unity 2023 from 2019. There's a lot of optimizations that can be done for the new terrain using features in 2023. Most of the game's packages and assets have had to be updated, which caused some minor havoc.

Side of an A-10 with lots of little panels being applied using the Shrinkwrap modifer in Blender.

I use geometric "decals" on the models as a substitute for not having textures. The shrinkwrap modifier in Blender was such a game changer.

Tiny Combat Arena screenshot showing the updated filter labels in the database.

The formatting for the category and filter database buttons has been polished a bit to make room for the ATGM filter, because a lot of mods add these types of weapons. The TMPro subscript tag came in clutch to squeeze in all the categories.

Screenshot from Tiny Combat Arena. An AV8B strafes some tanks on the ground. Dirt is flying everywhere from the explosions and empty shells rain from the plane's gun.

Hello, this is going to be the official development account for Tiny Combat Arena! Follow here if you want to see updates and random progress-posting on the game.