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Based on this open source project, modders have created an expanded universe encapsulating RA, RA2, Tiberian Sun, Tiberian Dawn and other lore into Combined Arms mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/command-conquer-combined-arms
Worth a look for a new fan made entry into the C&C universe. The scale of the mod is huge...
Oh that first level caught me off-guard in a good way.
Like, at first they fixed that weird error condition how you could detonate the tech lab Einstein is in, which broke a trigger and failed the mission. Now you just blow it up, Einstein is there and you can go from there.
And then I continued with the normal motions of this mission and... no, not gonna spoil it. That was a great introduction of new content to the mission. And the second mission does it in a similar way. Hah!
Thanks my favourite is tiberian sun and I was looking to find a way to play it on mac. I think with this I might be able to do it
I've just finished both campaigns (and moving on to Firestorm!) on my M1 Macbook by running the game through https://www.portingkit.com/ .
It guides you through installation and wraps the game in Wine and other layers as its own .Application for running on arm or intel macs. Porting Kit has bespoke configurations for compatible games.
Also see https://github.com/Kegworks-App/Kegworks (formerly Wineskin, the upstream tech leveraged by Porting Kit without the bespoke angle) which i've used for various modern games to great effect.
I wonder if they did implement C&C funpark command line easter egg (Dinosaur levels) and the Shift-Speaker-click Ant missions from C&C 2 mission packs :-)
Woah this looks awesome, thanks for sharing!
And you don’t need the original game to play this, it appears?
That's right.
This is huuuge. Thanks a lot for mentioning it.
I love how faithful this is to the original games but at the same time they've modernised the gameplay so that it doesn't feel it's age.
When you go back and play the originals (even Red Alert remastered) the modernised gameplay added by Open RA becomes very apparent. I can't go back to the originals now.
I'm like that for Doom. I grew up playing id Software games (Wolfenstein 3D, Catacomb Abyss, Doom, etc). The Brutal Doom mod completely ruined the vanilla experience for me. It's just scatalogically absurd and dialed up the shock value to eleven. Great fun.
Feel the same way with OpenRCT2. I could have sworn the original games had controls for speeding up and slowing down park time but nope. Going back to Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 I just can't play it at 1x speed anymore. OpenRCT2 just has some nice little fixed.
That was so nice about the og though, you have to wait so you just spend the time building some technically useless but nice looking stuff. Fast forward kind of ruins that.
To be honest, I always found Westwood strategy games to be very one dimensional compared to other strategy games even in its own era.
I never understood why people loved them so much. Perhaps it was because of their simplicity thus allowing for more mainstream appeal?
Im sure I’ll get downvoted by the Red Alert fans with their rose tinted glasses for saying this because a lot of people forget just how basic those games were. But I played a hell of a lot of strategy games back then (it was my favourite genre) and Westwood did some of the most simplistic games in the genre.
Where Westwood excelled at was the presentation more than the game play. Great music, FMV in the later games, etc.
Anyhow, I might check out this OpenRA project if they’ve tweaked the mechanics.
I only played a little bit of Red Alert 2. And quite a bit of StarCraft, although non-competitively.
The complexity difference was sort of interesting I think. I recall there was a lot more… stuff the units could do. Basic infantry for one side could lay down, take cover behind sand bags (maybe?), garrison in NPC buildings. Gain experience and level up. And these are just the most basic dudes.
It is neat stuff that makes the game feel good to pick up and play. But designed in complexity in a game can get in the way of developing emergent complexity. I think this is particularly noticeable in an RTS, where there’s already a lot going on.
StarCraft Marines only really have like one thing they can do (stim), otherwise it’s just positioning. This promotes the whole emergent “micro” gameplay skill. Which isn’t to say micro doesn’t exist in C&C (I have no idea what competitive play looks like there), but there are a lot of alternatives (Deploy them? Let them go prone?).
I knew a guy who was high level RA player and he said that the high level game mostly revolved around 2 types of units: tanks and dogs - where you would send the dogs to bait out first shot and then your tanks to finish the job.
What Starcraft 1 does very well and what many other games cannot really emulate is the dynamics of units - that the battles can happen across the whole map - because few units are often still significant enough. There is obviously the whole "death ball" concept too - but Starcraft Brood War is full of mechanics that actually go against the death ball - for example siege tanks, or psionic storm that just annihilate clumped units. This never existed in Westwood games, what meant that most games were mostly just sitting in one place and building 50 tanks.
The whole "you can garrison marines in a building" thing in RA2 was nice.. but at the end again it was static defense.
It seems like it worked OK for campaign mode. It still is a perfectly reasonable choice but especially at the time, to prioritize the single player mode over the competitive scene.
I think this is the same reason why people preferred a "Call of Duty" over "Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory" when playing a multiplayer FPS. You do not necessarily want to invest a lot of time to enjoy something.
On a personal note, I really enjoyed "Dune 2000" and "Emperor: Battle for Dune" but I have never really been a huge fan of the "Age of Empire" series. Recently I tried "Impossible Creatures" and it was frustrating. I suppose for I am a very casual RTS player. Each to their own.
As someone who loved both C&C games and Impossible Creatures growing up and has played them recently, it mostly boils down to the flavour and soul of the game for me personally.
It feels really cool to escape into these worlds, each unit and building feels alive and unique.
They're mechanically not the best games, but that's never gotten in the way of the fun factor for me :)
C&C Generals is up there with StarCraft in terms of gameplay. And yes the RA music is some of the best ever game music. I still blast Hell March from time to time.
That’s from 2003 though. It is one of the last games in the series and was made after Westwood Studios had been disbanded and staff finally merged fully into EA LA. Westwood didn’t even exist as a subsidiary of EA by that point.
Whereas StarCraft was released in 1998. Which, if we are to use your examples, would make C&C 5 years behind StarCraft in terms of game play. Which is a hell of a long time given how games were evolving in the 90s and early 00s
Dustin Browder was hired by Blizzard to direct StarCraft 2 after directing Generals. That's about as big of an endorsement that I can think of.
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I felt that Westwood's strategy games were built around their single-player campaign experience. As a result, their story, FMV, and gameplay were designed to support that focus. The simplity meant that players could get into the game easily.
However, this also meant that the gameplay wasn't well-suited for deep strategy or multiplayer, which was what RTS ended up being about down the road.
What timeframe are you looking at? Dune II was more or less considered the game that established the modern RTS format. C&C is mostly a refinement on the same gameplay loop (down to the spice/tiberium/ore harvesters).
What I remember is a bigger scale for the fights, C&C let you control dozens of units at a time, Warcraft I and II let you control maybe 4 or 6 at a time. The unit cap was larger and you didn't have to spend half of it on resource gathering.
The games did suck (somewhat) arguably but I loved them because I was young enough that I wouldn't have even known what you were talking about if you said the game was "1D" and the lore and world building was cool. I really liked/like the Tiberium stuff, especially the ultra grim TS. Shame C&C3 kind of undid all the grimness. I first played Command and Conquer on the Sega Saturn aged 6 that I had just got for my birthday, so there is huge nostalgia for me.
For me the RA satisfies my Cold War warfare fantasy.
Like I mentioned elsewhere, they were like Quake but as RTS. Easy to get into, fairly hard to master, extremely intense once initial contact with the enemy has been established.
Yes, they're simple, factions don't differ as much as in Starcraft where they demand very different strategies and tactics, and there isn't as much power in 'microing'. One element that matters quite a bit is there's a hurdle to establishing a new base, it's not just to send away a cheap, fast unit, instead you need to spend a chunk on a slow special unit. This means that rushing a base has more impact in the early to mid game, and sometimes that's how you can stop an enemy attacking your base.
No, they are. RA2 and AoE2 came out within a year of each other, and it isn’t even a contest. RA2 is fun, but it’s so much simpler, and games are so much shorter.
I still like RA2 quite a bit, but it’s not in the same league as others.
> I still like RA2 quite a bit, but it’s not in the same league as others.
While I agree with the statement as written, what I take away from it is the polar opposite. RA2 is (to me) the best RTS ever created.
No judgement – I like them both. What is it about RA2 that you prefer to others? Also, YR or original?
(Not the previous poster but) for me wth RA2 there's a slickness to the gameplay, the mechanics, the controls, and the graphics. I've tried to get on with RA several times (via OpenRA) but it never quite clicks for me - it feels old and clunky in comparison.
Have you tried Beyond All Reason? It's a modern take on Total Annihilation, known for having a lot of "player comforts" that reduce the need for micro.
I haven't, but downloading now - thanks.
I've been intermittently grinding Mindustry recently...
YR or original both. There’s a fluency to the animations, sounds and gameplay that I haven’t seen anywhere before or after. It just feels like everythibg comes together perfectly.
The units are all unique. The few differentiators between nations are actually very relevant.
The only thing that comes close is Starcraft.
Well the best thing to come out of the RTS engines were the custom maps in SC1, SC2, WC3 anyway.
Which is to say that so much money has been spent on those designers, whether at Blizzard or Westwood, or later in the near billion dollars that has been handed out to former Blizzard people starting their own thing. And then, some guy Tya in his bedroom in China designed better games.
They should be credited for building communities first and foremost. It wasn't ever really about the games.
What differences do you notice? The remastered has some terrible code behind its UI, you can just feel it.
Menu hangs on start for up to 10 seconds for no apparent reason, people leaving the game during the “connecting to server” stage seems to make everyone else wait indefinitely usually forcing them to quit.
On the multiplayer screen, tab between “Join” and all the other tab buttons and notice how each one moves a few pixels.
Then the obscene inefficiencies overall. Sitting at the main menu not even moving my mouse gets the CPU hot enough to make the fans loud. During gameplay a 4v4 multiplayer match turns into one big lag fest about 15 minutes in.
The UI is fine.
The "connecting to server" player drop bug has been fixed for a while now.
Never noticed any pixels moving.
Yes, OpenRA is, unfortunately, ridiculously inefficient. You're right in that you just sit in the main menu, even with the moving background set to disabled, and your computer will slowly get hot with excessive CPU/GPU usage. It seems like there is no dynamic use of computer resources at all.
He's talking about EA's remastered product rather than Open RA.
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Yeah... OpenRA hits that sweet spot where it respects the originals while improving the experience in ways that make them feel fresh
I play this often. If you play multi-player these build orders help
Great resource. This is my main problem with the game. It's so formulaic in the early stages and you really have to play to the meta to stand a chance of surviving past about ten minutes. Strategy doesn't really come into it unless you survive beyond a certain point.
Nice. Me and my son play coop against the bots and can never win. Maybe this will help.
Heh. I still see they are using my localization library. Not much, but it does give me a small heart warming tug.
That’s awesome! It is such a great feeling.
Previous discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28511076
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37553193
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197091
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730555
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26533422
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42823667
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23120677
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern era - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37553193 - Sept 2023 (169 comments)
OpenRA: Open-source RTS game engine for games such as Command and Conquer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197091 - April 2022 (80 comments)
OpenRA: Red Alert, Command and Conquer, Dune 2000, Rebuilt for the Modern Era - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28511076 - Sept 2021 (199 comments)
OpenRA Release 20210321 (and new website) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26533422 - March 2021 (10 comments)
OpenRA: An open, cross platform and expandable implementation of Command&Conquer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23342320 - May 2020 (3 comments)
OpenRA: AI Development Guidelines (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23120677 - May 2020 (4 comments)
OpenRA: Classic strategy games, rebuilt for the modern era, open source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14065021 - April 2017 (1 comment)
Show HN: OpenRA – RTS project that recreates Command and Conquer games - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730555 - May 2014 (40 comments)
I would absolutely love to see the same sort of project for aoe2. There's OpenAge, but it seems like they're still pretty far from something playable.
Maybe 0 A.D.? https://play0ad.com/ Its's closer to AOE1 in terms of historical period, but gameplay should be close enough.
I think 0 A.D. is a super cool project, but I found it pretty hard to learn.
It made me appreciate how delicate a task it is to teach the player the mechanics of a game like AoE and how good a job AoE did at that. I felt like 0 A.D. isn't approachable in the same way.
I‘ve been playing OpenRA for over a year now. After all the hardcore triple-A games this is the one I‘ve settled on. Maybe because I played it as a kid when it came out. It‘s pretty balanced and the community is awesome. Despite it being very unforgiving at start, as you get up to speed it becomes amazingly deep and competitive. So much fun!
One of the best RTS out there. I go there every night to get my ass kicked once or twice before bed.
I highly recommend it.
And I thought it was just me.
I didn't get my first win until I chose Turtle AI with 40% handicap. After many months of "honing" my skills, I am now about 50/50 against Rush AI on equal standings, but I still have to play larger maps so that there is some lag before they can reach my base.
Just wait until you try playing online. That'll be an interesting experience.. ;-)
To me multiplayer RA is like the Quake 1 of RTS, it's fast, chaotic and exciting, and OpenRA makes it trivial to get running, with some balancing and quality of life adjustments compared to the original.
It would be awesome if someone managed to figure out something similar for Populous: The Beginning, which is a fantastic solo RTS and arguably even more chaotic than RA so multiplayer isn't as cleanly skill based as is common in the RTS genre. I can run it through Wine but it's always a bit messy to install on a new machine.
Great effort, love to see that the game preserved in this way.
However, for me, the nostalgia wore off quickly. I no longer have the feeling of immersion I used to have when I was younger; I've become numb to the magic. What I see is pathfinding, a graphics engine, a sound player...
It's because you need more tesla coils, brrzzing.
Jokes aside, after reading a few of the official tounament strategies, its where the magic disappeared for me - its so much weight towards rushing over the enemy that wins every time, it kinda lost its bliss.
Still, sometimes its fun to just play with some like-minded friends in a multiplayer game
I can recommend the RTS OpenHV, built on the OpenRA engine. https://www.openhv.net/
I checked the link but I can’t find anything on how it’s different from the base game. What do you like about it?
From what I've read HV originally aimed to add things like supply lines, terrain heights, deformable terrain, and "player created landscapes". Since the original was cancelled and many of its ideas implemented elsewhere, this newer fan effort may not appear as innovative as the OG could've been.
I know people (rightfully) loved them for the gameplay (I was more of a WC2 and SC player), but my favourites were the videos in RA3 with Tim Curry et al. It was just the right type of corny
And Lando!
Are there any newish RTSs that are active? It seems like there's way more users for older ones.
Beyond All Reason
someone submitted it <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42826983> if anyone wants to discuss it separately
Best RTS for me, by far.
10x more playable than SC2.
Why? SC2 is too physically exhausting for me. I like strategy, but I don’t like how it makes me micro at all.
Yeah, in SC2 I could not micro units at all.
In BAR micro feels quite good:
* the game pace is overall a bit slower
* projectile weapons actually take time to land
* many quality of life features, in particular, ability to give a whole group of units an order to get to specific positions by 'drawing' where you want them to be
* a lot more options for static defense play
* different options - surround, ranged attacks, kiting, AoE weapons vs evasion
Doesn’t exactly answer your question, but I am hoping zerospace is the ‘next big thing’ / thing to reinvigorate the genre
Recent steam demo is super, super fun
It’s a shame aoe3 didn’t manage to pull over the sizable aoe2 audience and build upon it. That is basically the only major rts release in years. And it is really good but it was never going to be aoe2 and that’s not good enough for that hardcore player base.
Rusted Warfare Sanctuary Tempest Rising
I’d love a project like this, but for Red Alert 2. It works great on my Steam Deck but often stutters on larger battles. A modern, native, Linux port would be amazing.
Works great on Linux
I have seen this in the past, but I figured it was mostly abandonware given the lack of recent commits. I’ll install it and check it out though, thanks for the suggestion.
There have been plans to bring RA2 to OpenRA for some time now. I second this.
It'd be nice to also see support for Tiberian Sun and the C&C Remastered collection.
Any sources? I’d be keen to see if I can help out, even if only financially.
It was posted below: https://github.com/OpenRA/ra2
It works, but it's not an official release yet. Fwiw I haven't played this myself.
I've found the openRA fork/mod, Romanovs-Vengeance, to be a decent RA2 implementation. There seems to be active development on the project.
This might interest you (RA2 in the webbrowser) https://game.chronodivide.com/
It’s not clear from the website but I’ve always been curious if these engines have community built assets that negate the need for real game assets. It would be really nice to sidestep the need to buy the games altogether (legally of course!)
In this case, EA released all the classic c&c games for free so its pretty easy to snag all the assets. I think the OpenRA launcher even has an option to download them for you.
There are 3rd party mods with their own assets too though, its a pretty neat engine.
>> In this case, EA released all the classic c&c games for free
Bless EA. I was wondering how this happened. I have wonderful memories of playing these games in the early 1990s and it has been doubly wonderful playing them now, with my children, in LAN mode.
Yes, it pulls them automatically, which is really nice.
I've been playing Open X-Com + The X-Com Files, pretty addicting.
For those interested in CC games see also upcoming tempest rising game. Doesn’t say as much but it’s clearly a copy. Half CC half Tiberian sun vibes
I love this.
Not that I play it often, however, I guess its the memories.
I remember when RA was released and I was glued to my screen, at home or at lan parties. Multi player or Skirmish, always fantastic way to kill some time with quality game play.
This and blobby volley :)
I love that they fixed so many of the shortcomings of the original gameplay in OpenRA. It's really fun to play.
The OST of this game is amazing. Make sure to download the official CD data from the freeware release, they are a blast.
Can I suggest something? Integrate this with some TTS and LLM so I can say “send my tanks north”, that rough command should translate. I’m not a game dev, so it’ll take me forever to even figure out where in the code to do this interception, but it’s a dream of mine.
I'll assume you meant speech recognition and not TTS. I'm also assuming you intended for the LLM to act as the intent classifier which isn't totally unreasonable although it may be a bit overkill.
Given the precision you'd need to set the target unit(s)/coordinates/waypoints - I just can't see this being very useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt8XYV-IKxY
A fun use of voice recognition I've seen before (Skyrim had it for shouts) is using your voice to cast spells though.
EDIT: Also forgot to mention, at one point I had a utility that you could map voice commands to keyboard shortcuts which I used in Microsoft Flight Simulator for commands like setting trim, adjusting fuel-air mixture, deploying flaps, etc.
Yes my mistake. We’re talking about a feature for a game, so useful, you know, what is useful? I want to walk around my room like a General and shout orders.
Sure I get you - I think it'd be a fun gimmick. But the reality is you'd be a general where all of your subordinates are half-deaf and constantly misinterpreting your orders.
Good premise for an Abbott and Costello skit though.
You might want to try Odama on gamecube. Sort of an RTS with voice commands and pinball.
Pointing at where you want to go/who you want to attack/which thing you want to build is much less clunky in practice...
I remember a game like you describe: https://store.steampowered.com/app/319740/There_Came_an_Echo... (from 2015, so speech recognition wasn't that good)
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Shouldn't be too hard to implement. The only hurdle would be that you need the user to host or pay for the TTS and LLM usage. So you need to ask the users for API key or add some payment solution.
Would you really need a complicated LLM just to bark some instructions to a game? There is a finite way of expressing instructions to the game, you don't want to get into a discussion about what 'my tanks' means in the middle of the action. Siri could do this in 2011 and later versions work fine on device without connectivity.
I would love to see the code of an on device implementation that could accomplish a similar task. Pre LLM I have never seen an app that can take a variety of voice commands and execute on them with a good user experience. Are there any good open source implementations that can run without depending on proprietary calls to the device?
In fact I still haven't seen speech-to-command being implemented well in an end user app regardless of technology. Maybe I have looked at the wrong apps. I haven't used Siri to any large extent. Google home seems very gimmicky.
I recently tried doing a small bit of STT and I was underwhelmed by the quality I get on device. I used Whisper. It was bad enough that I concluded that I'd probably need to call to a hosted service instead.
And even if the TTS works really well, for most use cases you'll need to have an LLM reinterpret what your saying into commands.
IMO voice control is a bad fit for things that can be expressed by a few mouse clicks.
If you just want to interpret a few commands you don't need LLM, just hook up the TTS to the possible commands and it will limit itself to the possible words from the context. That's what Siri does and it works fine for stuff like turning the TV off (provided every action is available to the voice assistant code). My not-connected 2015 car also uses that for handsfree navigation and while it's a bit slow it works quite reliably. I really think you overestimate the amount of stuff you really need an AI service for.
Mechanics in real time strategy games are integral parts of it though.
My favorite RTS game of all time. Love the port. Run my own server for my friends group and it works great
have they fixed the awful pathfinding bugs - especially the Tiberian Dawn ones make it play worse than the official dos one imo.
I would pay a lot of money to have an Apple Silicon native install of Star Trek: Armada. Amazingly, it still runs on recent versions of Windows, though Windows itself has become a lot more annoying over the years.
Why not just run it with Qemu or Box86?
Does it play the single player mode cutscenes though? My PC was underpowered when I was playing Red Alert. Full screen, full motion video still seemed pretty amazing back then. "Hitler is.. out of ze way"
If you have the original CDs, then yes, you can import all the cutscene media files (FMV, music etc.) during the install phase and it will play them just like the original, but they aren't included in the download for obvious reasons.
The site gets blocked by Phantom wallet extension for your information
First time I've ever seen this. Came to the comments to see if anyone else experienced that. I don't see openra in the blocklist but perhaps I need to look again.
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I loved the Command and Conquer games and played them for vast amounts of time.
Don’t seem to be able to play or replay any such real time strategy games now. Don’t know what changed.
You did I expect. I find it so much more difficult to play games now I know i won't live forever and times a-wasting.
Something about the RA aesthetic always looked a bit cartoonish to me. All the other titles had better graphics. I was never sure what it was...
If I remember correctly, people used to mod RA and other C&C games to have custom models, like Tanya nude and such. I wonder if this was born from that.
This looks cool but intimidating - is this something that is accessible to beginners?
"Learning" is always accessible for beginners.
I really wish they’d use the HD graphics from the remastered version on Steam.
There is a version of Tiberian Dawn HD. Red Alert will take more work as there are unique assets in OpenRA Red Alert that don't exist in the original Red Alert. Including vehicles and infantry units that were put in place for balance/fun reasons.
> Updated gameplay designed around modern features like attack-move, unit veterancy, and the fog of war
Modern features: aren't those features as old as RTS's? E.g. fog of war was present as early as Warcraft II :)
Thanks for sharing this. I’m really excited to see scrin here!
I thought constant reposts of the same thing are not allowed on HN.
First time I’ve seen it despite being on HN for many years. Looks like last time was 2023, so seems non-constant to me.
I feel like it gets posted at least yearly.
So about the same rate as those New Year's celebrations we're constantly having.
That is Great. I like this.
Ahh... that's nostalgia coming back
Now do generals
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Crafted by Rajat
Source Code