hifi

A small site change. The CnCNet player chat (#cncnet) is now hosted on CnCNet 5 aka irc.cncnet.org which brings CnCNet 5 alpha testing and the player base closer together. The old channel on freenode is now dedicated for development of CnCNet, general hacking and related projects (ra303p, C&C v1.06c, cncspawn, patching tools etc.). The "Chat" link in the main menu has been updated to point to a new webchat interface provided by KiwiIRC. The new CnCNet (IRC) server was donated to us for free to use, so kudos to the mystery man behind it.

Not any "official" Red Alert package will have this included before CnCNet 5 is ready. Tip: CnCNet 5 is not done yet.

Hello Commanders! After a complete reboot on project "C&C spawner" - the code that loads up C&C95 with CnCNet 5 support - it finally seems to work quite fine. We have successfully played up to 5 player games without any problems. So what does this mean? It now means TD fans can have a decent lobby in favor of the old CnCNet 4 one! The only drawback currently is it doesn't support tunneling so you do need the CnCNet port (8054 UDP) forwarded to play on CnCNet 5 lobby. Again, thanks to FunkyFr3sh, we have a client for you to test this new development on. It is still missing some features and maps but they will be added one by one when Funky has the time. http://cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=2314 Please report all problems in that thread, I will be noted if there is something related to the code I've written that I should look into. Next up, tunneling!

Binaries mean the game executables, C&C95.exe and RA95.exe. They need major modifications to support CnCNet 5 launching. For the player, CnCNet 5 works much like the original Westwood Chat, only with more options and better networking (tunneling possibility). We will have an extensive map library available by default for each supported game.

What Iran said, and if someone steps up to write the client modifications (with Ares, for example) they will most probably get supported. Though, as RA2 is still sold by EA and XWIS and has a working cd-key system I'm a bit reluctant to keep RA2 support in. I'm working on the TD part now that Iran sort of took the RA one under his wing (ok, I forced him , trying to find a way to have stable games with the new system. Everything is so hit-and-miss with hacking it always requires some sort of miracle to get something running properly. RA seems to work now thanks to Iran's fixes so we at least have something to go forward with. FunkyFr3sh's client plays an important part in testing and it only supports RA. So, currently limited resources and interest are the biggest issues. TS support relies on CCHyper or someone outside the main CnCNet "hacking group" (hello Iran and Nyer) needs to take initiative to get it supported.

Hello Commanders, It has been a long time since the last news post. I felt it was time to post some progress updates even though they are not *mine* exactly. The next version of CnCNet as has been stated before requires modified game binaries. These binaries for TD and RA are on the way. The RA version is getting along nicely with Iran fixing some remaining issues and adding new interesting features. The TD version still has too many issues to be usable. TS version is not yet started and will probably not be until CnCNet 5 is released with full RA support the very least and solely depends on the motivation of CCHyper. RA2 will most probably not be supported at all, sorry. Some of the design ideas that were in the old thread have been revisited and it seems CnCNet 5 is going towards being fully IRC compatible and uses Westwood Chat like client program to operate. FunkyFr3sh from the Red Alert community has worked hard on his (testing) CnCNet 5 client for RA. It is free to download right now and will provide valuable feedback about the modified RA binary so please play some games with it when you have the time. It provides some features the LAN lobby doesn't like selectable spawn points, predetermined teams, private rooms and much more. http://cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=2242.0 There is no release date for CnCNet 5 and the work continues on its own pace whenever everyone participating has the time and interest.

It's now added even though it took months. When you have something to ask me and I don't reply in 24 hours, please use IRC, I don't really follow the forums.

Unfortunately what Tore said is right. There is currently no way to filter or censor messages in the lobby or in-game. Westwood did not implement such things for LAN games because it would have not had much practical use. Also for technical reasons when a peer-to-peer game is commencing (even on CnCNet 5), the traffic does not even go through the CnCNet server so such filter will be impossible to add at our end. CnCNet 5 is done in such way it will be possible to add optional language filter in the pre-game chat. At this point, the only way to avoid is to not play on CnCNet if people are using offensive language that you or your parents do not approve of. My personal advice is to "get used to" such people and ignore them. The internet is full of them anyway and it is impossible to avoid them everywhere.

And what would use the simple game list? Oh, I know, a client! How would that simplify anything? We still need a client and some code to wrap around the actual game. The web interface will work as our lobby and the game will be used only for games. How do OpenRA maps help us at all? They are not compatible with RA. OpenRA is not RA, so it can't be used as a "drop in replacement" for RA. Until OpenRA mimics RA completely (the WIP Classic mod or something), there is always a place for the original Red Alert and CnCNet. I said today on IRC that I would gladly kill off CnCNet once there is a completely free and better written replacement client for TD and RA. I haven't seen any effort in that direction.

The idea is to keep the interface familiar so people who have played on CnCNet 4 can just upgrade and continue. Also, I don't see how complicated a game lobby needs to be so you need to "learn" it. Incompatibilities are a problem regardless the interface. People need to use a commonly accepted package which currently is the redalert1.com one because of it's popularity. And as CnCNet 5 *requires* a special 3.03 exe to work at all I don't see that being a big problem either.

Hello Commanders! Was just going to sleep and got this message. Sorry for the inconvenience and let's all hope the server will come up cleanly.

Ok... it seems we don't have much to discuss or debate anymore. Though, I feel like correcting some tiny misunderstandings Actually, no, tests were never private. I always ask people in the CnCNet IRC channel to test, whoever just happens to be there. If you'd care enough about CnCNet development, you would hang around there. Let's call that semi-public. Red Alert Online was played by like 20 people when I released it. Mostly just players from other games I played who I got to join the project IRC channel. I never advertised it anywhere so it wasn't such a big deal. I didn't have any ties to the C&C community and actually thought there wasn't any for the older games. It didn't live longer than a few weeks when I lost interest in it and the people who played as they were all casual who had played RA when they were kids and not hardcore online fanatics. After abandoning the project it took two years to regain interest in RA and that's when I found the original CnCNet and as being my kind self told Myg it sucked and I wanted to improve it. CnCNet 2 was in fact quite clean copy of Red Alert Online. It was a direct drop of my original code to Google Code project. It has "rao" references all over it. It only supported thipx32 so it magically also had TD support and up to RA 1.08 (including CS/AM expansions, that'd be 2.00 or something) and after some complaints about no 3.03 support I added the wsock32 version and that became the final CnCNet 2 that ran until 3.

I just happen to agree on some of their ideas (because some of them were mine to begin with). Without login, use anyone's public map repo or the official repo. With login, you can store your own. It doesn't change much for casual players and those who care enough to make maps can certainly create an account. No. It would be a major change and wouldn't work in p2p mode because in p2p mode the chat messages never reach the server.

I see only you complaining - and still without seeing the final product. Chad is just being silly. Also it's just me who is doing this, how I became plural? Don't mix the RA scene with CnCNet development. Though, I do have a web developer now who will work on the web thingy with me, but it's irrelevant as I'm calling the frontend shots. As I've already said, all features are accessible without the web interface. You just need to know how to start the game properly. All CnCNet 5 parts are independent of each other. Uh, and how that differs from having a different version of the map on the hosts computer with the same name? The web interface will PREVENT exploiting by having official map repositories that contain safe and known versions of maps. That removes map cheating completely (to some extent, I'm not saying you *can't* cheat). Overall, you sound like I'm dropping the ball in a month and everything will change. It will not happen like that. CnCNet 5 will be slowly developed and it will have feedback rounds regarding the interface. I'm pressing now that the interface will be a lot like the LAN/WOL interface of RA and it should be familiar. I *never* said login would be required, instead it allows you to get access to more features and more privacy.

The more and more I think about the upgrade I've come to the conclusion it can't be forced because the style of the new CnCNet is so different auto-upgrade would be confusing. That said, play on 4 if you want to. Everyone wins. Apparently you didn't read the actual first post where I described CnCNet 5 consists of separate parts that work independantly. So does the "spawner" code that actually launches the game and if someone wants to crap on my porch they are free to do so. I will say this again: you have not seen the final product, don't be so anal about it. It will more likely to be a manual update so you can keep on playing on 4 for some time. I'm still predicting people will switch to 5 because of the actual benefits. Stop worrying about that. As I said ALREADY, you can have a PERSONAL map repository on the site that will not CONFLICT with anyone else. Please drop this argument as you have definitely NOT seen the final product. Your concerns HAVE been noted. And you tell me this now after I have to force you to describe the problem? No one ever reported this kind of behaviour and it is certainly something that should be fixed if that is what actually happens. If you had reported this long ago with accurate description of the problem and a possible test case for it I could have tried to fix it. Instead, you just whined p2 sucks.

1) If it did not fix something completely then give me a test that proves the unit build cap is broken and I'll see about fixing it for good. AFAIK it properly capped to the limit and when units died you could rebuild up to the cap. It's a cap, it should work like a cap. Going over the cap is a bug and causes the game to crash. 5) How do YOU distinguish between 10 different versions of P4? Even if it meant giving them extra long online names to state the differences, it's not a problem. The maps are not stored in a directory with their original file names, you could tag them however you want when you upload. I haven't designed it yet but as far as the uploader can somehow tell people what's so different about this version, it is doable. You could have your personal map repository that only contains your uploaded maps. There are endless possibilities. Map uploading is not a problem. Also, this is getting ridiculous. We will just need to see how it goes, aye?

Never again. I'd rather eat donkey diarrhea than touch WOL again. Adding tunneling support to WOL is almost impossible and it is one of the reasons CnCNet is so popular - it just works. With the spawner code I can redesign tunneling in a way it doesn't depend on a single server and can be localized to different regions in the world so people will have less lag when playing tunneled more local games than international. Also it won't fix TD as it only had Westwood Chat support. You remember CnCNet was originally only for TD? I don't play TD, I hate the gameplay (though I don't play RA either to be fair) but TD is still important part of CnCNet. This makes CnCNet unified between TD and RA and hopefully the new code will be ported to TS and RA2 to make CnCNet complete again. Total modding support is also easier as we don't need per-mod hacks to CnCNet or the mod exe itself, just the unified generic launcher code and a small addition to CnCNet so they have their own lobbies.

What? No one guaranteed the p series fixes ALL crashes, it just fixes the most frequent ones. The worst being unit build limit that didn't work. It does not change the gameplay in any way, it is not intended to either. It just fixed FATAL bugs like crashing, it will not change gameplay stuff like the England/France one. Because I don't like Windows GUI programming. A web interface is easier to set up and is more 2012 than anything else. Everyone has a browser open these days so I don't see a problem. Again, things evolve, browser is the way to go today. If you have a problem with JavaScript, you don't use Facebook or anything else made in the past 5 years? JavaScript makes the internet tick today. Now you are just proving my point you don't know what you are talking about. Multiple maps with the same filename and same internal name does not matter. You have not tried it yet. 500 players in the RA LAN lobby? I *don't* want to see that. Nuff' said. You can boycott the new interface when finished if you want, but the majority will be the target, not you. If the majority does not like the new interface, it will be put back to drawing board. I won't guarantee compatibility with vanilla 3.03. If I made a launcher that does the job by modifying the game on-the-fly you would be happy with it but if I integrate the changes into the game, you aren't. I chose integration over even nastier hacks. What I could do is add the same modifications to vanilla 3.03 without p series fixes but that would be absurd, it doesn't have any benefits. I do this for my own amusement and all CnCNet versions have started from some random idea I've had. I'm also only one person so I have a lot of responsibility over the RA players and I work with good intentions. The thing is I don't see any better way to expand the game beyond 100 online players than to redesign everything completely using the skills I have. One good thing is that the spawner code is *entirely* independent of the CnCNet implementation. If the interface sucks so bad, someone can make a better one. Writing desktop applications is so 90's I'm not going to even think about it. Writing cncnet.exe as it currently is was a big stretch and I didn't enjoy it at all.

That depends on the Ares team completely. I've already talked to them that RA2 modders/players probably want that and I will give all possible help and support to someone who does the port from TD/RA1 to RA2. On a side note, the TD spawner code is starting to get shape and we had the first "successful" online game with it. It has some networking problems but I will sort them out soon.

WHY? It's just meant for LAN games. It has no neat features like WOL had. You will have completely private rooms and games in the new web interface, it will not be anything less than WOL. I doubt they undrestand what it means, nor you yet. You are ok with another application but not with a web interface? Didn't you just say installing new software to handle games was a bad thing? Maps are transferred from the website, not within the game. It ensures everyone will get the map without delay and allow us to have a huge online database and to even add automatic rules modifications on-the-fly like Tiberium Alert. No maps are *stored* in the client, a temporary file is used instead. I have made a modification to the game that allows me to do this. It can even start a skirmish game or any scenario for that matter. We could even have custom online campaigns with it that just keep track of your progress and sends the next campaign map when you finish one. It's a neat magic box. What motto is that? Never heard of it or at least signed it. I can and I have updated the game code, heard of 3.03p series? No one objected about using that. In fact, it is packaged in redalert1.com package and most players use it. The new spawner code is included in 3.03p4 and works side-by-side with LAN and WOL, you don't need to use it at all. I understand that people are ALWAYS against change regardless what it is. You just need to sell them enough good things about the new interface for them to understand it's the way of the future and in fact better than the old one.

There is no LAN lobby at all, it is completely controlled by the browser. I'm also taking portability into account and will provide a way to launch the game through the browser with some manual work without installing anything into the Windows registry. It will probably involve copying and pasting the launch command into cncnet.exe. I'm also planning distributing a small RA just for CnCNet play that is independant from your single player game. There will be no maps in the game, they will be transferred on-demand when the game is launched. This will keep the games consistent and supplying updates to the game code is easier. There is no in-game lobby at all, none, zip. The game will directly start when it is launched and it will quit after you have finished. The spawner code what I call it is already in ask-and-you'll-get-it-semi-public testing that does the game side of stuff and it seems to work well. CnCNet 4 will probably run in the background for quite some time so if you really insist using the old way, it will still be there. You haven't yet seen the final product so it's a bit early to shoot it down, don't you think?

It will be in four separate and invidual parts: * Game modification that loads online/skirmish rules either from .ini file or command line arguments, the initial implementation is based on ini * cncnet.exe that works as a safe local protocol handler (cncnet://) to download the "spawn.ini" and map file off cncnet.org * cncnet.org that hosts the game lobbies and chat * Tunnel services that can be used per-session and selected within the game lobby, user hosted tunnels should be possible So no, it's not only in C anymore but consists of multiple components that are in Assembly, C or PHP.

Heads up, Commanders! TL;DR Switch to peer-to-peer mode in CnCNet settings or the kittens will die! CnCNet 5 is slowly on the way to address a few issues that rose from CnCNet 4. Back when CnCNet 4 was first launched, it was more than enough for this community. It tied together the tunneled mode that allowed anyone to play without forwarding any ports and the faster peer-to-peer mode that kept pro gamers happy. However, we have come to a point where the current system can't support the amount of players, mostly in Red Alert. There are the main problems that I see now: * The LAN lobby is way too crowded in RA * There is no way to moderate the lobby nor to control who joins your game * CnCNet server runs on a single server (cncnet.org) and hogs way too much bandwidth because of the popularity I would like to address all of these problems in CnCNet 5. The main motivator for CnCNet 5 was that the RA LAN lobby is full and spammers cause problems. The networking protocol in RA also has problems coping with so many players in the lobby and that causes chat flood all over. But, there is a bigger problem right now that affects everyone - we are going to go over our bandwidth cap this month and I can't do anything about it. Money wise, we have enough to buy whatever we need to get that bandwidth, but it breaks the current setup and when we reach CnCNet 5 it will no longer be a problem as I can distribute the tunnel services all over the world and leave the CnCNet web server alone. So before going into CnCNet 5 details, I would like to ask all CnCNet users who are not using peer-to-peer mode to check if they can forward the CnCNet port and switch to peer-to-peer mode. It will be better for everyone if you are able to do that. It is also possible that the first time you launched CnCNet your firewall blocked the p2p checker and you just need to hit the [ Retest ] button once. MNdakota contributed a motivation image for all of you without p2p: If you don't switch to p2p mode, CnCNet and these forums will be unavailable around 29th to 31st when we run out of juice. Now, about CnCNet 5. It will be a lot like the long buried CnCNet 3.1 or whatever I called it back then but more awesome. These are the highlights: * Full web interface to chat and create game lobbies, no LAN lobby in between, you get in-game directly from your browser * Big online map database to choose from, no need to download maps anymore * Password protected game rooms & moderated chat - no more spammers! * Less OOS problems with Red Alert because the game is freshly started for every game (rules.ini reloading problems in the game) * C&C will get a full 6 player online support later from the same web interface As you can see, CnCNet 5 is very much web and Red Alert oriented. I'm addressing the demand that I currently see in the community. Because CnCNet was originally about C&C, I'm also putting a lot of work into getting full online support for it too. So what about Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2 and their mods? They will be supported through CnCNet 4 until they gain CnCNet 5 support. It's not planned yet as I have limited time and resources. In another news CnCNet 5 is heavily web based, so it needs web developer(s). If you are or know a real good web developer, let me know! The required skill set would include: * JavaScript with jQuery * Object-oriented PHP 5.3+ * Strong relational SQL knowledge (SQLite and MySQL) * Zend Framework * MVC (with Zend) * Years of experience in all of above, if you are a professional web developer, you should qualify * Love for the games I have strong requirements for this "position", but I want quality and I can only work with professionals. If no one pops up, it will just take longer. UI designer would also be nice to work on UX.

You found me It's not about the cost but the work. CnCNet is very minimal and currently I consider CnCNet 4 "finished" with the LAN lobby. The technology will not scale further and the next version of CnCNet might be more what you described and use a different approach. When that happens is anyone's guess. It all depends on my motivation and dedication to the C&C community which varies from time to time. I have many projects and jump between them when I lose the interest in one. CnCNet is free to use and I develop it on my free time. If you want to support CnCNet and it's development, the best way to do that is to donate through PayPal. All money is used to further improve the service and pay for the servers. Thank you.

Hello, Commanders! The Red Alert community leaders FunkyFr3sh and ehy have come up with fixes to Red Alert that prevent out of sync errors and increase stability. This fix is currently in testing and requires feedback from community members. When approved it will be distributed to all CnCNet Red Alert players through regular CnCNet updates. Head to http://cnc-comm.com/community/index.php?topic=1951.0 for more information and to post your feedback.