7 ms·
The Making of Dune II: The birth of the real-time strategy game
- throw0101c 4y agoReleased December 1992, thirty years ago: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_II
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoI played that, then, and liked it.
- kristianp 4y agoI played it in the late 90s years after its release, was really good game. Maybe I'll fire up dosbox and have a look at it again. Would be interested to hear the soundtrack after all those years.
- Tarq0n 4y agoThe controls are very dated by modern standards. Which is a shame, because I have a ton of nostalgia for the base building and resource gathering. Ah, to lay down concrete slabs again.
- tom_ 4y agoAgree. After playing Command & Conquer in the mid 90s, I revisited my favourite Dune II from just a couple of years previously... and oh dear! It scarcely held up even back then. It's not that it had turned into a bad game in the meantime, it was just that C&C had some significant UX improvements in terms of commanding multiple units, and now doing anything significant in Dune II felt like a big pile of hassle. Was like being stuck with EDIT.COM again, after a good stint on Emacs :( There was a later remake, Dune 2000, which I've never played. But it postdates both Command & Conquer and Red Alert, so maybe it's a bit better?
- Rimintil 4y agoC&C has really dated controls today, too. The C&C remaster added a lot of modern QoL improvements.
- ethbr0 4y agoTry Populus again.
- viraptor 4y agoOr not... I had such good memories of it, but then tried it again a few years ago and, uh, it's just terrible. The concept is still cool, but it's just pain to play. The memories were way better.
- ethbr0 4y agoYeah... the whole "put esoteric graphical buttons required for frequent and repetitive game actions on a static background around the viewport" is thankfully consigned to the dustbin of history. I realize why it was done: maximizing interactive graphics on the limited hardware of the day by shrinking the rendering region. But good god, making core user interface elements that unusable is a fever dream only someone completely unfamiliar with time-motion studies or prior mainframe keyboard art could dream up. They could have at least made it hands-on-keyboard and had a shrunken viewport.
- Agentlien 4y agoMy wife played a lot of strategy games as a kid, including Dune 2 when it came out. She also speaks fondly of Dune 2000.
- danielheath 4y agoIt was better than Dune 2, but IMO it tried too hard to be faithful (other than art & controls), resulting in something that: * Didn't look like the original (new art!) * Didn't play like the original (multi-select completely changes the tactics) * Kept the originals level designs (mostly bad, because nobody knew how to do them well yet)
- terlisimo 4y agoBetter download a modernized version https://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/ https://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/ It's a souped-up Dune II that runs on Linux/Windows/Mac. Uses original graphics and sound but has quality of life improvements like higher resolition, group select, map editor, network play, different AI engines/difficulties etc. IMO the Dune2 AdLib soundtrack is one of the best demonstrations of the FM capabilities of the OPL chip. Soundtrack here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKBjmJCBHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKBjmJCBHw
- radarsat1 4y agoI always thought the original Dune game doesn't get enough love. Dune II was obviously more influential being a template for a successful new type of game, but Dune actually told the story with beautiful pixelart cut scenes and required you to follow the steps in the book, (or maybe more based on the Lynch film.) Actually my teenage self discovered Dune through playing the Amiga version and only read and watched it after so it will always have a special place for me.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoAnd let's not forget about its excellent ambient electronica soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF_0W1cYPYo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF_0W1cYPYo
- gman83 4y agoOhh wow, I only ever heard the Adlib version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHon6yg-r8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHon6yg-r8
- robinei 4y agoI actually prefer the Adlib version!
- minusf 4y agothe dune ost by stephane picq is a master course in how to take full advantage of the fm chip, and that's where it sounds the best and i believe how it was intended. it's beautiful analogue electronica. the spice opera is a nice addition, but it's trying a bit too hard...
- boyter 4y agoStill one of my “I need this code today” soundtracks. I absolutely adore it.
- suprjami 4y ago
- b20000 4y agoIt would have been interesting to see a breakdown of the architecture of Dune II including key datastructures and algorithms, but no.
- serf 4y agoif that's something that intrigues you then might I mention that older games like Dune II tend to be very friendly to disassembly.
- tralarpa 4y agoI was just hoping for a moment to have found a new reverse engineering project for the Christmas holidays, but then I see that there is already an open source implementation (Open Dune), which kind of takes the fun away (even if it was developed without RE).
- djmips 4y agoDespite the hyperbolic title, this is a good article in that actually researches the precursors and shows how they helped synthesize Dune II - nothing comes out of thin air and I came away convinced that Dune II was an important moment in RT strategy games.
- julianeon 4y agoFirst download Dosbox, then download Dune and Dune II here. https://bestoldgames.net/dune https://bestoldgames.net/dune
- keyle 4y agoI have extremely fond memories of Dune and Dune 2. Two very different games indeed. There was also a remake with a 4th house if I remember, Dune 2000? Or it brought out the sardaukars, I can't remember. I think this game then menta spoke to you and you could click around his face and do funny stuff, if my memory serves me well. Epic game and a trend setter.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nunodonato 4y agoyes, eyebrows and mouth, had some laughs making funny faces during mission briefings :D
- jweir 4y agoI had the pleasure of QAing Dune II on the PC while I worked at Virgin Games in 92. The game really sucked me in and was fun to play, despite the bugs.
- ethbr0 4y agoThis is why I'm amazed really bad games get made! "Playing games and recognizing if you're having fun" isn't some rare skill set that only certain people have. It's universal. We may have different tastes, but I can't see how some games went through development, QA, management, etc. and no one said "This isn't much fun to play." Or even recognized that people weren't excited and smiling at the game! How screwed up of an organization does one have to have for there to be that little feedback shared and listened to?
- syntheweave 4y agoThe majority of the work in games is making assets and delivering code. Neither of these have fun as a KPI. Further, defining fun as a KPI presents challenges of sociology, psychology, and philosophy: People are happy to exclaim "this is fun!" And then quit playing within a few minutes. Absent a very, very careful understanding of the belief structures that drive the combination of purchase and interest that makes someone a "fan", the metric degrades to raw "engagement", which leads to meetings where it is determined that the engagement metric should be boosted through the introduction of gambling-style addictive loops. In other words: lots of people like playing good games. Almost nobody knows precisely why they like a game, and therefore they do not know how to make a game equivalent to what they like. What the industry does instead is to clone whatever worked last time and try to give it a twist or add a little more scope. Whatever formula worked for another game, everyone is going to try adding to theirs, whether or not it's sensible. Specific game teams manage to see farther and make exceptional work by dint of being able to frame the discussion appropriately, so that it brings in everyone's perspective. Without that, every meeting is just a discussion of deliverables. But in many, many cases, the team has to make the game twice to be able to sink their teeth into the problem. Hence the common thing of game sequels being much better than the first entry.
- 4y ago
- gernb 4y agoThere are older real time strategy games. Here's one on the Atari 800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G5CEA_P9Hc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G5CEA_P9Hc not denying that Dune II was the first "successful" RTS but that Atari 800 game runs in real time (it is not turn based), you select units and tell them what to do (go to X, fire at Y) etc using the joystick to move a cursor and shortcut keys to select units and groups.
- Ishmaeli 4y agoUtopia on the Intellivision was a good one.
- aidenn0 4y agoThere are many predecessors that were strategy games that run in real-time, but they aren't RTS games in the modern sense. One historian defines it as a game which: > ...runs in real time, ... also one where players start with a largely blank slate, gather resources, and use them to build a variety of structures. These structures can in turn build military units who can carry out simple orders of the “attack there” or “defend this” stripe autonomously. The whole game plays on an accelerated time scale which yields bursts if not sustained plateaus of activity as frantic as any action game[1]. 1: https://www.filfre.net/2018/12/controlling-the-spice-part-3-westwoods-dune/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/12/controlling-the-spice-part-3-...
- bicknergseng 4y agoHijacking for another Dune-themed game: anyone successfully played Emperor: Battle for Dune on Windows > 10? Easily one of my favorite RTS's all time, but not as nostalgic as Dune 1/2/2k or other RTS's and definitely won't get the remaster/remake treatment :(
- zaggynl 4y agoI've briefly tried Emperor: Battle for Dune via Linux with Lutris, this seems to work well.
- 1MachineElf 4y agoThat's great. Trying the Lutris installation guide for this is on my to-do list. Did you get it working with just the instructions alone, or did you have to take additional steps?
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoI played Emperor: Battle for Dune when it came out in ~2003 and loved it as a child, especially house Ordos and the cobra cannon, but boy, are those some rose tinted glasses. The switch to an early 3D engine made the game look and feel janky as hell, and you could tell from the lack of polish Westowood was in pain from the EA take over. Placing buildings, moving units across the map, path-finding, everything felt ... unfinished. The low-poly 3D models made everything look like textured cardboard boxes. Hell, even the UI and HUD elements were real time 3D rendered, but really low-poly and fugly. It seemed unnecessary, as if the game devs and designers had no experience yet how to make a 3D RTS game right, but the marketing guys told them everything must be full 3D because every cool game is 3D now. I much would have preferred they stuck with per-rendered 2.5D isometric graphics from the Red Alert 2 engine. But the story, cut-scenes and missions had me captivated enough to spend too many hours in the game, that had my parents worried. Good times.
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoEvery day I light a candle hoping the original source code of Red Alert II turns up somwhere.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoOpenRA will eventually get around to reimplementing it. They're now on Tiberian Sun, which has the same engine, so RA2 should be next.
- bokchoi 4y agoOh wow, the Herog Zwei reference brought back a lot of memories for me. I loved playing that with my friends. We had the same gentleman's agreement mentioned in the article. We also sometimes started the game and went away for 15min or so to accumulate lots of money before starting in.
- fuzzythinker 4y agoNice tips! The wait time will make the game go faster and less time idling. The no transform will make playing vs. cpu harder. Time to dust it off & replay!
- dvh 4y agoDune II was the reason I bought computer mouse. It was A4 Tech and it didn't work when sun was shining on it.
- mcv 4y agoI feel a bit like Dune 2 may have been one of the last games that everybody played. (Doom 2 was probably the last.) I never played much Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Warcraft or Starcraft, but I loved Dune 2 and played the hell out of it. I guess this was about the period that the computer gaming hobby started to separate into different genres where people started sticking to just one or two favourite genres.
- RF_Savage 4y agoI suspect it's a generational thing. I have never played Dune 2, but everybody played Counter-Strike and Half-Life. Warcraft 3, Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament ware also common and popular.
- mcv 4y agoYeah, I didn't play any of those. I played quite a bit of Doom and Doom 2, but after that, I was mostly done with FPS games. Same as playing Dune 2 but being done with RTS games. I mostly played RPGs and turn-based strategy after that, which is why to me, this period feels like a turning point between everybody playing all the great games across genres, and people gravitating towards their favourite genre. But it's entirely possible that it's more a matter of age. It makes sense that when you're young, you try everything and when you get older, you stick with your favourites. Although some classics still break through genre barriers. Like Portal or Minecraft.
- ido 4y agoYeah I'm pretty sure it is - I'm 39 (so a bit younger than you) and for me "everyone played" Half Life and Starcraft! When I graduated high school at 2001 I played a lot less for quite a few years.
- dagw 4y agoI feel a bit like Dune 2 may have been one of the last games that everybody played. Where? I was a pretty active gamer at that time and not only never played it, but I don't even recall people really talking about it. I recall C&C being a much bigger deal for example.
- nunodonato 4y agoDune 2 is one of my all-time favorite games. I still play it once a year, every year.
- hoseja 4y agoThose are some beautiful illustrations.
- causi 4y agoDune II may have coined the term "real time strategy game" but it was not the first RTS. That title belongs to 1981's Utopia or 1983's Stonkers.
- henpa 4y agoAround 1993 playing Dune 2 was all I wanted to do with my life as a young teenager. I really loved this game and played over and over..... wow.... I really miss those days! :-) Sometimes I watch a recorded gameplay on YouTube just for fun... and I still think the intro and the soundtrack is amazing to this day! I loved reading about how this game came together!
- sandos 4y agoI suspect this game was kind of easy? I only had the chance to play it at a friends' house, and I remember me trying to just building turrets... all the way to the enemy base. And I won with that very silly strategy. You were not able to freely place buildings so that's why I just built a thin wall of turrets all the way, expanding the fingerprint of "my" base.
- mnky9800n 4y agoThis was a protoss strategy in StarCraft that was fun as well. Except you just built them right next to their base you didn't need to build out from yours.
- aliswe 4y agoThis reminds me of an IRC chat of two friends who bickered about their respective RA2 multiplayer strategies: A: Dont play with B, his only strategy is "lots of planes" B: Yeah, because that generally avoids your "lots of tanks"
- hooby 4y ago> But unless you own a ’90s era PC, an Amiga or a 16-bit console, your chances of playing Dune II in its original glory are slim, which is a shame. Well, except for: * DosBOX [https://www.dosbox.com/ https://www.dosbox.com/] * OpenDune [https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE] * Dune Legacy [https://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/ https://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/] * Dune Dynasty [https://dunedynasty.sourceforge.net/ https://dunedynasty.sourceforge.net/] * Dune2 The Maker [https://dune2themaker.fundynamic.com/ https://dune2themaker.fundynamic.com/] and possibly some other ways of playing it...
- donohoe 4y agoHow can you do an article this like this and have illustrations but no screenshots!?
- 1MachineElf 4y agoWhat's also noteworthy is Emperor: Battle for Dune. Released by the same Westwood Studios in 2001, it was their first foray into 3D RTS. It was a great game IMO. Excellent soundtrack. The only problem was they replaced House Camino with a new House Ordos - a change that was unpopular among some Dune fans.
- msh 4y agoWhat? The original dune 2 was house ordos.
- 1MachineElf 4y agoHah. I should have read the article. Assumed the unpopularity of Ordos in Emperor happened in isolation.
- feydaykyn 4y agoThere's a really well written serie of three articles about Dune and Dune 2 history on the Digital Antiquarian, if you want to find out a lot more about theses you can find them here: https://www.filfre.net/tag/dune/ https://www.filfre.net/tag/dune/ First part is about Dune the book and its author Franck Herbert, the second one about Dune 1, and the last one about Dune 2. Each article is well documented and describe in great details the technical, economic and artistic background of the people who made these three projects.