MrFlibble

This is definitely the first time I hear of this. I just checked Wayback Machine snapshots of www.westwood.com from late 1997 and Sole Survivor isn't even mentioned. No mirrors of ftp.westwood.com have any builds of the game either IIRC. Maybe these were only available to closed beta testers?

Hopefully not to be off-topic, I just played a bit of Vanilla Conquer source port, and I was wondering, how much effort would it need to make your mod compatible with that port? Would the port provide any advantage compared to using the original C&C binary?

PC Gamer US, UK or some other edition? (IIRC there was also Italian PC Gamer too, maybe other languages/countries as well). BTW, long time no see, Commander.

Those are indeed very good -- possibly the best AI upscales of any CGI/live-action stuff I've seen so far. But of course the original were already in a relatively high resolution.

The OpenSAGE project of open source recreation of the SAGE engine came to my attention recently, and I was wondering if it can be used to run Tiberian Dawn Redux? The project is still under development but since it is open source, perhaps it could provide more flexibility than running TDR as a Generals mod? Maybe it could even make it feasible to create a stand-alone version of TDR?

A very long time ago I found a Russian website with a RA1 TC called Third Revolution. It's a stand-alone total conversion with new campaigns and a setting unrelated to the C&C universe -- rather, it tells the story of a post-1991 restoration of the Soviet Union and its struggle against Capitalist adversaries. The author had problems with the black/transparent colour in the palette but otherwise it was pretty solid all-in-all. Back then I downloaded the Russian version, but later forgot about that TC until recently (had to ask around to remember the title). Anyway, the Russian version of the TC is available from The Red Alert Archive, however the developer's page also lists an English version (thirden.rar) among downloads, as well as a music pack (scores_full.rar). Supposedly, these were hosted at http://ra.afraid.org/thirdrev/, but the Wayback Machine does not have the respective files, and apparently they were at some point removed, for whatever reason. I was wondering if anyone still has these files archived somewhere? Also, it seems that the TC is based on Aftermath 2.02, would it be possible to upgrade to 3.03 Beta?

Yes, the shape of the outer walls is different as I pointed out in my previous post. Ezer_2000, good catch on the screws and rivets, I didn't notice that myself. Indeed that design becomes outright ridiculous when you realise that these shapes are something improbable for a building of that scale.

Not only that, but the shape of the ConYard itself is also inaccurate to the original image - both in-game and as shown in the FMV, and official renders. You can see in this strategy guide scan that the outer walls are not parallel but fan outwards to the front. Neither are they flat on top but slope quite a bit. It seems that the artist used the raw sprite as reference without regard to the aspect ratio correction issue (I'm afraid that the team might not be even aware of this problem, possibly because they're using C&C95 as a reference), resulting in a different height-to-width ratio of the building. But the in-game sprite is still pretty unambiguous about the outer walls being non-parallel. No idea why this was changed. The result is as if someone had played C&C a long while ago and then created the remastered version of the ConYard from a vague memory of what it looked like in the original game. There doesn't seem to be any reason for the developers of the remaster to not use as much original reference material as possible to maintain authenticity of the visuals. There's plenty of high-res renders out there, but Jim Vessella's post only mentions the FMV and the UI icons (presumably from the C&C95 release). Is the team even aware of these other sources? I mean, aren't the sprites being done by the same team as StarCraft Remastered? The sprites in SCR are very close to their original counterparts. Can these criticisms be in any way related to the remaster dev team?

Cool, I've been listening to this track earlier today (cued by the word Mayday) and wondered exactly where those soundbites come from :) BTW, it seems like the jukebox at Frank K's site is down for some reason :(

Just found these articles with some nice analysis of mission design in Command & Conquer: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2013/09/07/real-time-strategy-level-design/ http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2014/04/27/real-time-strategy-level-design-ii/

Added the following sites to the list, all three courtesy of Hallfiry: Hallfiry's CD Index Kult Cover Disks - The Cover CD & Magazine Archive! Kult Game Downloads Details on each site are in the first post.

I'm sorry but I haven't found a separate topic that would be about random feedback (and not suggestions, as in the title of this thread) for your patch. Also it should be noted that I only asked about the changed tileset in a couple of missions.

Yeah, we're going to try that if everything else fails.

The SHP frame size had to be increased to fit a word that was larger in length than a single line. You didn't think that we were messing with the files just for the heck of it, did you?

Nyer, in the view of this discussion, how are the pips sprites aligned over unit/building graphics? IIRC, in Dune II every sprite is positioned by its top left corner, but apparently for C&C and RA it is not the case.

What's "factory missions"?

I have no idea what you're talking about... Apparently the harvested Tiberium/orca ammo/APC & chopper passenger meters have become displaced and are now positioned not at the bottom of selected units but higher. Haven't observed it myself since I haven't checked the latest version of the patch.

I trust that you were going to post this is this thread? And your post from there should be here? Anyway, Nyer, just wanted to ask, is this change still in effect?

Thanks for the explanation! The patch I referred to did not expand the actual game screen to 640x480 dimensions, it just stretched the original 640x400 screen image to the 640x480 screen, effectively making the 640x400 and 640x480 modes indistinguishable. I assumed back then - possibly wrongly - that in case of the "true" 640x400 mode it was the hardware that did the stretching of the output, and in the 640x480 mode in that patch it was the game that did the stretching? Honestly I didn't give this much of a thought, I just noticed that both modes gave the identical result on the screen

I suspected that much. When I said "takes" I referred to the speech clips in the first place, and also the "juvenile" sound effects

I meant to say, was it intended by the developers to have an unstretched screen with black bars in the 640x480 mode? Because the "normal" behaviour as I understand it would be to stretch the image vertically?

Tiberian Sun is actually a good game to start with modding, as it has an open structure and is quite easy to mod. You don't need any particular skills for that, unless you want to edit art or go for some hardcoded game mechanics. For example your suggestion of an Orca truck could be easily implemented as a "mobile helipad" - a unit that can deploy into a helipad (and then undeploy at the player's command). I think I even played some mod a long time ago which had mobile helipads. (That feature can be a balance breaker but anyway.) Just check the Project Perfect Mod website and forums, this is probably the number one place if you want to learn Tiberian Sun modding.

By the looks of how some of the sound files are named in C&C and RA, the numbers might not represent an actual sequence of multiple sounds that are used in the game, but rather it represents the number of "takes" in recording the same sound. So for example with the above crate sound, take #4 was apparently selected as the most appropriate version of that sound. (Alternately those might have been not "takes" per se but maybe they just took random sounds from a sound library that could be useful, and then selected some of them for use in the game.) That's entirely my speculation though, but this is the impression I got from the file names in C&C and RA.

Visceroids could actually fill in the role of "aliens". I wonder why the Visceroid spawn logic, as well as the units themselves, are never encountered in the original single-player campaigns. Nod can build APCs in multiplayer, and have them in certain single-player missions as well. But basically, your ideas could be made a reality with some kind of a mod for a later game. There are several (at least two IIRC) Tiberian Dawn remakes that use the Tiberian Sun engine. TS is quite easily moddable, and there are lots of community resources you can use, so you could try doing something on your own.

Some time ago I used some old community patch (not yours, Nyer) that would fix XP compatibility issues plus do something else, and I think that with this patch the 640x480 mode would actually stretch the image to fit the entire screen, rather than add empty stripes to the top and the bottom. This made me wonder, in retrospect, if this was what the developers actually intended with the 640x480 mode, yet for some reason it didn't work. Can this be somehow confirmed by the actual code of the game?