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OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era
- Arrath 5y agoDid OpenRA and/or the Remaster ever fix the infinite-range grenadier bug?
- veidelis 5y agoMost definitely it's fixed in OpenRA. I have not heard good comments about remaster other than graphics due to them not addressing mechanics/gameplay issues such as balance.
- hyperstar 5y agoWould be nice to have the original discs with videos &c.
- azalemeth 5y agoYou can legally download them for free at https://archive.org/details/Red_Alert-Cutscenes https://archive.org/details/Red_Alert-Cutscenes, and then install them into open-ra.
- TuringNYC 5y agoIt seems you need the original game CDs to get the music on OpenRA. Incidentally, I have both the original 3 1/2" disk and the remastered CDs from the early 2000s -- but no computers with CDs or floppy drives. I'm willing to even purchase the music a third time, but seems OpenRA wants a CD -- has anyone gotten around this?
- neuronexmachina 5y agoDoes it play the music via Redbook audio? I wonder if you could "burn" mp3s to a virtual audio CD and then mount it.
- fivestarman 5y agoI just installed openRA and it says you can use an installation or cd. Maybe you could find an installation online and use your unlock key?
- spookthesunset 5y agoSo many hours spent playing C&C over our local network at home!
- akamia 5y agoWhen I was a kid I shared the second Red Alert CD with my friend. We used the Modem multiplayer option to dial each other directly to play 1:1. So many great memories.
- pytlicek 5y agoThe same here. I remember very much the hours spent playing this game. Actually, I also still play OpenRA here and there.
- 41209 5y agoI actually own the remasters, did anyone else notice these games are absurdly hard. When I come to think about it, I've never been able to beat the original Red alert. The sequels are pretty easy though
- dragontamer 5y agoC&C gives a huge monetary advantage to the CPU players. Something like 10x the resource collection per harvester/ore truck, or there-abouts. I've found it possible to out-compete in resource count vs the CPU, but only with my "Starcraft" training (huge focus on the economy, harassment of the opponent's harvesters, knowledge of the Lanchester's square-law in determining when to fight vs when to retreat, etc. etc.). Any decently strong player can probably beat the AI through "brute force" (in particular: attacking their harvester forces an "AI alpha strike", where the entirety of the AI's units attack your base). With good tactics, you'll often beat the AI in this exchange (AI is rather bad at tactics actually, you should be trading 2-for-1 in most situations, or even better). 2-for-1 isn't good enough though. You need 10-to-1 trades. That means retreating often, finding defensive positioning (good "concave" positioning, while forcing the opponent to be convex), attacking the opponent while they're on the move, utilizing your repair bay, etc. etc. A lot of defensive buildings are also amazing: not only do you have the "Repair" button (which effectively creates HP at fractions of the cost of a new building), but the defensive buildings are numerically superior against mobile units (higher HP / higher DPS per unit $$$). Note: Defensive buildings are usually terrible vs humans. But vs AI who attacks in "obvious" and predictable angles... they're highly useful. Finally: it means attacking the AI's harvester early and often: to prevent the AI from building up a critical "Death ball" of units that you can't beat. You're not necessarily trying to kill the harvester, but instead just provoking the "alpha strike" before the CPU's death ball is at critical mass. (Of course, kill the harvester if you're given the opportunity. But its easier said than done...) ------- It seems like the "intended" way to beat the AI is through "underhanded" tactics: engineer into the ore refineries and/or silos to steal their money. Taking advantage of the "sandbag AI" (sandbags are effectively immune to the AI's knowledge, the AI will never attack a sandbag), etc. etc. -------- C&C is a very "sharp" game. One mistake will require you to restart the level. The AI's tiberium advantage feels crushing, but you absolutely can work around it: either through brute force, or through underhanded / ai-manipulation methodologies.
- dragontamer 5y agoSomething to note about the 90s-era is that the "death ball" of cheap units was *aggressively* mitigated in almost all strategy games. * Civilization 1, 2, and 3 had "stacks", but if you kill one unit in the stack, you kill ALL units in the stack. As such, "death balls" were incredibly fragile, one well placed attack kills the whole stack. * Command and Conquer has infantry, which get rolled over and instant-killed by tanks. The overall "death ball" of tanks can eventually reach endgame proportions of death, but the cheapest units are fully ineffective at death-balling. * Starcraft had a 12-unit selection cap. It required a lot of clicks (on purpose) to create a death ball, so only the highest levels of players (with high APM) could attack-move with a whole army effectively.
- systemvoltage 5y agoWhat’s a “death ball”?
- Arrath 5y agoA massive, monoculture blob of either the cheapest and fastest to produce, or a reasonably effective as far as cost/time/damage output unit, used to just roll over the opponent's base. So, a few hundred riflemen or dozens and dozens of tanks. The death part of it comes from the numerical advantage, if an enemy unit walks into range of many times its number it'll get blown to hell before it can inflict meaningful damage, even if it is a technologically superior or inherently stronger unit.
- teawrecks 5y agoNot always monoculture. The most effective deathballs have a balanced composition of units which complement each other.
- Arrath 5y agoAbsolutely, this can vary. IME at least in the old days, it did tend to be a single unit type (eg Red Alert Medium/Heavy tank rushes, or a well timed Zerg Rush) but it is by no means a hard and fast rule.
- boboche 5y agoHell march metal song and game play of Red alert 1 was the first time I looked at a PC and felt My beloved Amiga was growing old. Good and bad memories wrapped in an awesome game!
- lolski 5y agohell march is awesome
- hjek 5y agoOpenRA is currently my favourite free/libre computer game. They've done a fabulous job at keeping the feeling of the original game while updating things like cross-platform support, screen resolution and network play and added build queues (and waypoints, I believe) that was present in later C&C games. They've also tweaked the game play, making thieves able to hijack vehicles and cloak (They are probably the most fun unit to micro around) and radar jammers able to deflect / confuse missiles, and added per-country special units like in RA2 (The French invisible phase transport is wild), and changed the tech tree so medium / heavy tanks require service depot. I remember in the original Red Alert, if you ordered an airplane to fly into the shroud, it'd just disappear into the darkness, but in OpenRA you can actually use them for scouting (which totally makes sense). OpenRA also has fog-of-war which suddenly makes planes and helicopters key units for ground support. I don't like war. The arms trade should be abolished. We should help refugees get safe passage and eliminate borders rather than build walls or drop bombs on them. Anyone working with defense in any capacity, like militarizing borders with drones or whatever, should immediately quit or turn whistle blower. Still, I find this war game incredibly enjoyable. Applause to the hackers.
- azalemeth 5y agoI played a round or four with my lab last night. Cross platform play, free hosting, good matchmaking and an excellent experience. The computers on equal number and an equal footing absolutely annihilated us. We were easily able to titrate the difficulty to make it fun. Honestly, a great game and very enjoyable (and I won the 6-player death match at the end with a total Deus ex Machina moment made possible by the fog of war, much to everyone's suprise, including mine). One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to Wesnoth. I second your comments about war.
- hjek 5y ago> One of the best FOSS games I've ever played, possibly second to Wesnoth. Yea, Wesnoth has a lot of what made the earlier Heroes of Might and Magic games great. I like how many open source games are cool with sticking to 2D, making them accessible for older devices. Wesnoth graphics are first class mix of hand drawn and pixel art. (They could do with a few more unit animations though.) > I second your comments about war. There shouldn't be any contradiction in being okay with pixel people being blown up but not real ones, even though sometimes it feels like there is. I played OpenTTD and even though the graphics were awesome, I got a bit sad from clearing trees just to build roads for hordes of lorries to transport coal and oil and cattle to the slaughterhouse for no obvious "win" in the end (except money).
- Ericson2314 5y agoAlso check out https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/Vanilla-Conquer https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/Vanilla-Conquer which is a modernization of the original code (!), rather than a rewrite with liberties.
- hjek 5y agoHow's the network code?
- Ericson2314 5y agoI'm not sure, I haven't had the time I wanted to catch up like I used to in the binary patching days.
- hyperstar 5y agoIs there a bug in Chernobyl? We weren't able to capture the missile silos with engineers.
- lolski 5y agoI love the migs and missile submarines
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoDune 2000 is so underrated, I endorse this game for any Dune fan!
- jandrese 5y agoOn the flipside it is one of the most annoying to play. You can't mass select units and also units won't auto-engage when attacked. So of you have some tanks guarding a harvester and something with longer range starts plinking them they'll just sit there until they get destroyed. And of course moving those tanks up to engage is maximum micromanagement. It works ok on smaller scales, but the bigger maps are really annoying to play, especially when you're being harassed by Sardaukar troops.
- noneeeed 5y agoI loved Dune 2000 when I was a teenager, but I remember never finishing it. The last couple of maps were just too hard for me to beat for all the reasons you listed. I think my sister managed it but it took several goes.
- ido 5y agoAre you sure you're talking about Dune 2000 and not the original Dune 2? IIRC Dune 2000 uses a c&c-like interface.
- jandrese 5y agoI think you are right. It was called Dune 2. Came on a small number of floppy disks. IIRC it was the first title that Westwood developed, and definitely one of the first RTS games.
- ido 5y agoIt the first PC RTS to gain popularity that is more or less similar to modern RTSs (they all in 1 way or another been inspired by it or its successors). Westwood developed a bunch of titles before it (including some very popular RPGs) but their line of RTS are definitely what they're remembered for today!
- josefresco 5y agoI play this 3-4 times a week. It's like therapy for my brain. Simple, hypnotic, perfect. Tiberian Dawn, Skirmish 1v1, Me GDI against the CPU is my jam.
- lolski 5y agoHave you tried playing OpenRA online? It's quite hardcore. I don't think I've ever encountered anyone who isn't really good.
- yur3i__ 5y agoOpenRA is one of my favourite games right now, I play it with a few of my friends on a regular basis and we have forked it to include the building specific construction from tiberian dawn in command and conquer.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoOne thing i remember best about the original C&C is a gorgeous installer [1]! Being one of the first games that came on CD, I thought it is the standard of the things to come. Unfortunately, the future disappointed: every other game came with a boring windows installer. [1]: https://youtu.be/cioyLQ2O6yc https://youtu.be/cioyLQ2O6yc
- Lammy 5y agoRA2's was pretty fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKjPls9YGcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKjPls9YGcI
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoNever saw that one, RA1 left me disappointed, so i never checked next installments. Looks better than average installer, but still, but quite as great as in C&C1 )
- micheljansen 5y agoThis took me way back. What an experience that was back in the day.
- Arrath 5y agoRed Alert 2's was pretty great, though not to the same level as C&C's. When it started it blasted out at full volume, "WARNING! Military Software Detected!" which, at one friend's house, caused his mom to yell up the stairs at us "WHAT ARE YOU BOYS DOING???" Edit: hah, beaten.
- giantrobot 5y agoHere's a nice list of open source remakes of commercial game engines in the spirit of OpenRA: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes Note a lot of these like OpenRA are reimplementations of the game engines but want the original game media. A good deal work with GoG or Steam releases of the old games while some will want original media. For ones that want original media a lot of old game ISOs can be found on the Internet Archive.
- handrous 5y agoOpenMW (for TESIII:Morrowind) is amazing. Strictly an improvement on the original. Far more stable—I finished the main campaign and several major side quest trees with a bunch of mods active and experienced zero crashes, which is unheard of with the original engine—and somewhat better-looking. Runs just about everywhere. It's great.
- stonecharioteer 5y agoDoes this run with Steam?
- ascagnel_ 5y agoYes -- install Morrowind from Steam, run it once (to make sure registry keys and the like are set up correctly), and then the OpenMW installer will copy the files it needs to run out of the existing MW installation directory.
- alfiedotwtf 5y agoWoah that list is amazing! Multi-player Commander Keen :mindblown:
- jploh 5y agoI remember seeing a JS/HTML5/browser version a couple years back. How feasible is it to port this to WASM now?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- postalrat 5y agoI'm sure the major hurdle is how do you get the required artwork to the client without violating copyright.
- rnoorda 5y agoI spent hours playing Red Alert, and loved C&C as well. Something about the absolute craziness made it so much fun. Then RA2 amped it up even more, being able to train giant squid and teleporting infantry that erase units from the timeline.
- vyrotek 5y agoI love the C&C series. Really enjoyed playing through the remaster recently. Way more difficult than I remembered. But what I really want is a remaster of Red Alert 2!
- pixel_tracing 5y agoThis!!! I love the new memes by Scorched Earths YouTube channel. RA2 was my most favorite game back in the day
- vyrotek 5y agoHa, I just checked out those montages. Works of art.
- hermitdev 5y agoI was poking around the github of the OpenRA project - they have an RA2 mod project, but I can't speak for it's readiness. It's not advertised on their homepage, so guessing "not ready". From an official standpoint, I was able to pick up RA2 (not remastered) from Origin this summer. They make it incredibly difficult to find, and it's not part of the C&C Remastered Collection. But, I was able to pick up a collection of the non-remastered C&C games for $10 or $20. RA2 was a bit of a pain to get working in Windows 10. It took some manual tweaking to ini files, startup arguments, compatibility mode and manually reducing the game speed from very fast to medium to be playable (every game you start).
- xahrepap 5y agoFwiw: I just installed RA2:YR via origin on windows 10 and it took zero tweaking. I haven’t tried multiplayer yet though… [edit] I think this is what I bought: https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-the-ultimate-collection https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/command-and-conquer/c...
- bloopernova 5y agoCan someone please give me a billion dollars, so I can fund a modern remake of Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire? Still one of my all-time favourite games. I really enjoyed the unit design and character of the game.
- Thev00d00 5y agoCivilization: Beyond Earth was fun
- ido 5y agoYou don't need a billion $ to remake Alpha Centauri as long as you don't want AAA visuals. I would wager an experienced team of 8-10 people can do it in 2 years (so ~$2m assuming $100k average salary cost per person year).
- bloopernova 5y agoThe rest of the billion is to pay me, the CEO. More seriously though, if I had a billion dollars I'd spend most of it on tree planting. I'd probably keep back maybe 20 million for myself. If I had more, I'd spend it on Emacs and open source development. Or more trees.
- tekkk 5y agoI can give you a dollar. But anyway, EA is sitting on its publishing rights, firaxis has the IP so it's deadlocked as far as I know. I cant recall what was the time for games to expire into public domain but I'd say that's the only way you are getting a remake IMO.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoAre fog of war, veteran units, hotkeys, stances, game replays, mods, custom maps, and custom campaigns really considered "modern" "post-90s" features? Myth: TFL had all of them in 1997.
- arendtio 5y agoI think OpenRA is one of the reasons why the remastered collection [1] exists, as they have kept the community alive. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_Remastered_Collection/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_...
- aliswe 5y agoI assume the circulating camera motion in the menu is still there. It annoyed me that the movement was jerky and didnt seem to use vigh precision math, but actually it had to do with the upscaling of the graphics which happens at the last stage of the rendering pipeline, iirc.
- aliswe 5y agoFor the downvoter, I tried to create a PR :)
- elif 5y agoGenuinely curious at what point in development this team was informed about C&C remastered, released earlier this year... Seems like an awful lot of work for some vaguely quasi-legal 'free-ness'
- peanut_worm 5y agoThese sorts of projects are always my favorite. OpenTyrian and OpenMW are some other great projects similar to this.
- mothsonasloth 5y agoUnfortunately owning the Remaster and playing OpenRA, they are two very divergent projects that cannot be merged. OpenRA is a rewrite whilst Remastered was a rework on the original code. I would have loved some of the OpenRA features to make it into the Remaster, and likewise the updated assets (sound, music and textures) into the OpenRA game
- wyuenho 5y agoOhhhh the glorious days of dialing to your friend's PC directly for a match after school!
- skunkjoe 5y agoI tried that, but my favourite for C&C is "Dawn of the Tiberium Age" [0]. It combines the units of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert. Plus there are a lot of extra units, it's super fun in multiplayer! I love it... [0] https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age
- imwillofficial 5y agoI loved the original C&C so much. C&C rivals was a surprisingly interesting game, it has none of the fun of the originals.
- ww520 5y agoAh, CC and Red Alert, the joy of LAN party. We played so many hours on company's dime on the office network. The controller from finance was actually a pretty good player. One day he brought his teenage son to the office to play with us, and that's the time I introduced the uneven pincer movement to his awareness with a crushing defeat. Good time.
- hunter-gatherer 5y agoI'm happy to see this on the front page. My friends and I played the originals as kids and have revisted the game with openra about 7 years ago. The devs have done a fantastic job.
- Aeolun 5y agoIf only we could get tiberian sun.
- zahllos 5y agoIMO this: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/fe129956bb1b3f7e3231c11f306f7387d36f0630/mods/ts/installer/tibsun.yaml https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/fe129956bb1b3f7e3231c1... is the most exciting part. Tiberian Sun remains my favourite C&C game. I know it was rushed and had some bugs but... I mean: The Forgotten? Absolutely there should be a mutant commando walking around with a portable railgun, physics be damned! I like C&C3, but it isn't TS and I feel it abandoned a bit the direction TS was taking us.
- jumelles 5y agoI understand this sort of thing is a massive undertaking, but how does one begin to reverse a game (engine) like this?
- DantesKite 5y agoVery cool. I think so many of the best games evolve randomly and unexpectedly while top down control from developers has stifled game play. Not against developers protecting their IP. Do what you gotta do to make money. But I enjoy seeing open source games giving players the ability to edit and improve game systems. I think back to how many times Nintendo has shut down Super Smash Melee edits, how many hours of skill have been lost every time Riot made a change to League of Legends nobody enjoyed, how much World of Warcraft has essentially stagnated. You want something like chess where the rules don't change drastically every couple months if you want to build a competitive scene. Something stable so strategies and a stable metagame can occur.
- fivestarman 5y agoLeague of legends. I stopped playing that game in 2017 after playing a couple of years. I couldn't stand the game changing every other month.
- lloydatkinson 5y agoWow, it's written in C#. This could be amazing.
- dojourner 5y agoIt would be nice if this was further converted to an NFT game P2E style.
- mukeshsoni 5y agof
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoDamn, AppImages are so nice. You download a thing, and click it to run it. No messing with a package manager or installer, no dependency hell, nothing but the software you wanted to run.
- G0ther 5y agofor the modern era? I would rather call it for the 90's, it would be more accurate description. the graphics and level of realism c&c zero hour had is years ahead of this.