Matt

https://discord.gg/FX9fkZD is their main chat.

Nice work. The new units really blend in well.

Let's all join forces at http://www.sleipnirstuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=20325

What is the preferred one for Windows 7?

Instead of .NET on Wine you can also try the Windows version of Mono: https://wiki.winehq.org/Mono

To be fair I was skeptic at first as well, but it is indeed an interesting remix demonstrating the power of Open Source at it's best.

It works perfect in DOSBox and is a bit rough on Wine. However last time I tried was 2009. See also https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Spiele/Command_%26_Conquer_-_Alarmstufe_Rot/

I can give you access to http://www.moddb.com/mods/openra-classic if you want to revive it.

Yes, it obviously started as a mod of the Dune 2000 mod. Especially the early versions when the file format code didn't exist a lot of gaps were filled with D2k to allow testing.

That's what I also told them. Nevertheless https://github.com/OpenRA/d2 now exists and already works surprisingly well for an early build: https://streamable.com/9g2z

When I came to find out about the OpenRA project I really loved how easily you can get your hands on it. For example the re-balancing of the engineers was all done by community members. Capturing a construction yard or other vital buildings was a predominant strategy a few years ago. Not walling in your deployed MCV meant you already lost the game which scared away new players. So the Generals style external capturing was implemented and used in the Red Alert mod. It turned the game in favor for more interesting late game battles. For the Tiberian Dawn mod instead the sabotaging where engineers damage the buildings and can only capture badly damaged ones known from RA95 was added to allow more fast pace games, but still avoid game breaking overpowered engineer cheese tactics after just a few minutes of gameplay. The best of it all: the balancing isn't set in stone. To revert back to an instant capture is just a matter of changing a text file. You can also add the rule changes to a map that you can upload at http://resource.openra.net/ to test it against other players who will automatically download your custom map when they join the multiplayer lobby. All in all this is a huge contrast to https://cncnet.org/ which tries to preserve the original game with patches being contributed by very few skilled people who cartographed its byte code and http://redalertpp.org/ which also goes for a conservative approach, but also is very secretive and follows a closed invite-only development model. If all the projects had the very same goals and design principles, they would in turn be quite redundant, so I quite like how the community ecosystem evolved with everyone finding their niche.

Would you agree to license your sprite font under the GNU General Public License v3 terms?

Sorry, you can't. The original Dune 2000 uses Direct X 5.0 for rendering so you need something else to create screenshots. The http://www.openra.net/ Dune 2000 mod utilizes OpenGL for rendering, but I don't know if the Steam overlay works with it.

Which library did you use to achieve robust UPnP port forwarding? We had pretty bad experience with http://www.nuget.org/packages/Mono.Nat/ and are looking for alternatives.

The download link is broken so are the screenshots above. I wonder what library did you use for UPnP port forwarding in that tool and the cncnet client.

Blasphemy!

That would be your least concern. Other intellectual property rights will force you to stay out from app stores of any kind.

The OpenRA Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn mod tilesets are too different for automatic conversions at least at the moment. There were some attempts for a unified tileset when the missing pieces for the Red Alert DESERT theme were painted, but no one worked on it further and it is also not really on our development agenda. Some voices actually wanted to remove SNOW from Tiberian Dawn and DESERT from Red Alert again to differentiate the mods further and keep the original spirit. Not quite right. So far no one bothered to write and maintain a conversion tool into the OpenRA -> legacy RA95 direction. From a technical standpoint you could easily write a converter. The map.bin part is the binary section in the original .mpr and the map.yaml only contains meta data which can also be easily translated back to .ini format.

Nice, feel free to share it at http://resource.openra.net/ to address a wider audience.

I really like the UI design. You imitate the original Westwood style so well that people often confuse you with official patches and the CnCNet branding also looks very modern and professional. Great job!

Was it a CnCNet initiative to get EA to release this for free (on their terms)?

Microsoft with their .NET and the Mono team at Xamarin are doing a pretty good job providing a well designed framework and a fast JIT even AOT and native compilers for some platforms. OpenRA isn't slow because it was written in C#, but because it is slow. Some of that is by design. Being modular and extensible trades off with some inevitable performance overhead. Most of it though, because no one bothered to let the source code go fast routes as that isn't trivial. Real programmers know about that and some professionals recently joined the effort and started optimizing the code and benchmarking the engine. http://changelog.openra.net documents the on-going quest. Some of the recent improvements are major and speed up things by a magnitude. As you can do even further optimizations when choosing C++ or another low-level language, I assume RedAlert++ will run faster compared to an OpenRA mod with an equal feature set. I wonder if it makes a noticeable difference in casual play on modern hardware. Still it is really just guesswork at the moment so I can't wait for the RA++ project to launch so we get the opportunity to see a direct comparison. Sharing code and implementation strategies will probably benefit both projects so I really hope for RA++ to get developed in the open as well.

I wish you every success.

The windowing part and loading screen process bar in Chris Sawyer games was always written in C out of necessity to interact with the Windows API.

I just stumbled upon https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2 whose reverse-engineering development model might be worth imitating if you want binary compatibility and just replace ancient windowing as well as rendering API with something modern platform independent like SDL.