Blade

My maths was off, it was late when I tested this last night in my defense, it actually shaved around 60k off of each radar animation. This was through a combination of actually using the keyframe compression which uses XORDelta and the fact that my XORDelta makes a few extra savings in space over the WW implementation. I still need to test if the issues Kilkakon are due to differences in the compression scheme between my tool and the original though for WSA.

That is why you use shapeset for them and not wsaset

Well then frankly, your reply came across as incoherent. Regardless, let's accept for a moment that using the original game logos with youtube videos, tournaments, forums and articles related to OpenRA are controversial (outside a selective group of concerned fans), exactly how and why should the OpenRA developers take it upon themselves to control this? My personal suggestion would be for OpenRA as a community to produce a dev endorsed "press kit" of sorts with their own stylised logos for the various mods to be used in promotional materials and point people to them who show an interest in doing such promotion. Along with some guidelines for trying to avoid confusion with the original game while it still has an active community, I think that is all anyone can really ask. As pchote said, its not really the developers jobs to police the internet for people who promote OpenRA with material that could confuse it with the original.

Out of interest i tried recompressing the radar anims with shapeset and it shaved ~6MB off of each file. It looks like the originals were compressed without keyframing so only LCW was used, no XORDelta. It looks like all the Radar animations apart from the ones in Sole were compressed the same way. The Sole one does appear to use keyframing however.

To be fair, by that wikipedia defintion, the OpenRA mods could be considered fan remakes of sorts. Most of the remakes used as examples in that article are much more conservative in their alterations to the games that were remade however and many remakes that aren't faithful to the originals tend to come under heavy criticism for their failure to capture the feel of the original (FFV is a recent example I'm aware of, but there will be plenty of others). Mods such as Tiberian Dawn Redux would also be considered remakes in the same sense. I think part of the rift between the OpenRA community and the CNCNet C&C community is that there have been a few instances of somewhat evangelical promotion of OpenRA as a replacement for the original games despite not being particularly faithful in the recreation. This rankled those who liked the originals and didn't see any need for replacements since the originals still run with a bit of patching, especially ones that didn't play the same. Ironically, OpenRA isn't actually mentioned in the remakes section of wikipedia where it probably most rightfully belongs, instead its mentioned in the game engine recreation as an example of a top down "recreation" of the WW engines which I don't really agree it is, certainly not in its current state anyway, since it doesn't seek to emulate the behaviour of the original engine with regards to handling the original content. This of course starts to conflate OpenRA the engine with the various games or "mods" that run on top of it and we all get into a nice game of arguing its one thing or another when we don't even agree on the definitions of the things we are arguing it is or isn't.

I've updated a few of the tools, give WSASet from this zip a try and see if the game behaves any better. http://www.mediafire.com/download/0e2k8z66vgg197s/tools_testing.zip

I think there is one thing we can all agree on here, no matter which RTS (or RA version for those who feel more connection) we prefer, and that is that 12345 is clearly an idiot that neither camp wants to be associated with. Though the debate over whether the OpenRA RA mod is legitimately a decendant of C&C RA or a cousin on the RTS family tree may rage on eternally at least we have that. 12345 you are the weakest link, you are fired and must leave the big brother house immediately. GTFO.

I think WSASet needs to set the Delta size to slightly larger than I currently have it set to which could be causing some issues. I'll compile a new version at some point for you to try out.

Do you not perhaps think that in your love for OpenRA and your desire to link it to C&C RA which inspired it that you have created something that is somewhat misleading? I don't think your reply can be interpreted as an insult to the OpenRA devs, I was referring to the almost complete lack of reference to it in your advertising banner when the league is in fact all about OpenRA and nothing really to do with C&C RA, like you are trying to hide the OpenRAness of it. On the topic of OpenRA carrying any legacy of C&C RA, i don't see how it can be considered to when looked at rationally. For one thing, C&C RA still exists in a playable form, its not like there aren't multiplayer servers online any more, so C&C RA in fact carries the C&C RA legacy still. For a second point, the OpenRA devs never started from the original formula of RA and moved over time. The OpenRA engine does not work anything like the original engine does as as such cannot really be said to have been the original formula at any point. Even taking the unit stats from rules.ini means nothing if there is no understanding of how the engine interprets those values. You also contradict yourself in saying the OpenRA devs are ultra conservative in their changes... perhaps they are now, but the fact you mention that there are additional units and features taken from later games demonstrates an extremely liberal take on how to modify the game in its early development. The units might look like the units from C&C RA because of the shared graphics set, but they sure don't act like them in a lot of cases. Despite your feelings, from a rational POV, the game that is OpenRA Red Alert is a completely different RTS game from the game C&C Red Alert and any attempt to portray them as being similar is misleading. Tiberian Dawn is probably more like Red Alert than the OpenRA Red Alert mod is. People like you who love OpenRA, love it because its not Red Alert, so why try and attract people by conflating it with Red Alert, sell it for what it really is and make it clear that it isn't C&C Red Alert. Sell it on why you think its a better game.

So basically, you are saying that because you feel that the OpenRA Red Alert mod is descended in some way from Red Alert that it justifies advertising a competition for it by downplaying the use of the OpenRA engine and mod and emphasizing the link to the actual game of C&C Red Alert to the point that a casual glance would think this was a C&C Red Alert league and not anything to do with OpenRA? Frankly I think that is an insult to the developers of OpenRA to downplay their work which this league is going to rely on and misleading to people who might want to join a league for C&C Red Alert and not OpenRA Red Alert. Your response reads like an advertising blurb trying to sell me on the idea that OpenRA RA is somehow opening up the multiplayer scene for RA when RA already has a strong multiplayer scene. I get it, you like OpenRA RA and want more people to play it, so sell it on its own merits, an open source RTS with ongoing balance development with familiar looking graphics. Don't try and sell it by fostering confusion with C&C RA, you'll just attract people who will complain it doesn't play like they expect it to. Especially here

The banner for it is itself quite misleading, its prominently shows the C&C Red Alert logo, but there is very little to make it clear that its actually the OpenRA Red Alert mod being played and not C&C RA. At sleipnirstuff, that isn't likely to cause much confusion since its pretty much an OpenRA forum these days, but elsewhere it will. For future promotions of this sort I would suggest including the OpenRA logo and making that the prominent focus and either including a small RA logo as part of indicating the league is for the RA mod or not including it at all.

Progress continues this month on getting the games loading and drawing functions implemented and hooked up. All the major game objects can now be loaded from a map and drawn and a few more UI element have been implemented, including the sidebar tab which is never used in RA95, but is used to toggle the side bar on and off in C&C DOS, C&C95 and RA DOS. We even implemented loading overlay buildings from the [buildings] section of a map which crashes the original. Also implemented this month is Nyergud's favourite, palette scrolling, so the water effects and glowing ember effects are now drawn as well. Turret positions on Vessels continue to cause some problems, but are being ironed out. The coming month will probably be focused on getting more of the UI hooked up and implemented where there are just black spaces now.

The function is empty in the binaries I have symbols for for RA, guess you could use the patching system to patch in a reverse engineered version from edwin or something though.

No, not that type of scrolling yet

Its not always a case of just forcing the game to load an older format, parts of the save games a just binary dumps of the in memory data structures the game uses. These tend to change between versions (especially between vanilla and cs to add the ant stuff and between cs and am for the new units), so one version can't always correctly load another versions saves.

Work continues to developed RA++, with this month building on our initial map rendering to fix a few of the issues. The left border cells draw correctly and the trees are positioned where they are supposed to be now. There was also an issue with the wrong overlay image being rendered in some cases which is now fixed. There is still an issue with overlay overdrawing the top and right borders slightly, but we are leaving that until the code for the other UI elements is more developed. More importantly, we have started hooking up basic input so we can now scroll around our maps as this slightly scrolled view shows. We now have a scrolling map viewer minus a lot of units and buildings. Current development is going into getting loading code in place for units and structures so we can get those drawing and check our in memory structures and object creation code is working correctly. Soon we should have a fully working map viewer that draws the map just like the original game did.

Not go much more done this month because of RealLife tm. However we have managed to hook up a few more things. Here is the same map again, but this time trees and overlay are being drawn.

No, it just means that the data encoded in the MapPack section is laid out more like a C&C bin file where it goes [tileset, icon, tileset, icon...] instead of [tileset, tileset... icon, icon...] as it does for NewINIFormat=3. no, that arrow tile isn't usable too in new naps too. Is that arrow tile fixable? Not easily, the heap would need expanding and the initialisation of that tile would need duplicating at the end of the TerrainTypes initialisation. Then in theory it would be usable as the tile set one higher than the current maximum. It would need the map editor to use the new id for the tile set as well.

Terrain object count limits are controlled in rules.ini under [Maximums], specifically the entry Terrain=500. You can only set this from rules.ini, not from within a map.

I think its likely to be 128 actually as it looks like its treated as a signed byte, if we treat it as unsigned in RA++ we could go up to 255 though without messing with the map format. Also, both 0x00FF and 0xFFFF for the tileset are treated as being the clear tile which has very odd implications for the internal theatre in that one of its tile sets is unuseable (Its one of the arrow tiles). Looks like they initially developed maps with the same max number of tile sets as C&C but expanded it somewhere later in development and existing maps weren't converted properly to the new system. Interestingly, NewINIFormat=1 or 2 makes the MapPack section be read as though it was laid out the same as the C&C bin files after its decoded, int16 for the tileset immediately followed by int8 for the icon number. No idea why it was changed, maybe it improves load times through some cache locality optimisation or something.

MapPack and Overlay pack have multiple levels of encoding, you need to strip the ini key from each line (1=, 2= etc...) and concatenate them into a single string, then base64 decode them, then decode them as an LCW stream. The LCW stream format is chunks of LCW compressed data preceded by a small 4 byte header. The header is an unsigned int16 indicating the compressed size of the chunk and and unsigned int16 indicating the uncompressed size. You may see LCW referred to as Format80, but LCW is the correct name. For the MapPack, once you have decoded it you have the RA equivalent of the C&C bin file data. For NewINIFormat=3 maps, it has 16384 int16 entries that indicate which tile set each cells "icon" (internal name for cell image data) comes from and then 16384 int8 entries that indicate which "icon" within the tile set each cell uses. All maps are 128x128 internally so one entry per cell starting in the top left. For OverlayPack there are just 16384 int8 entries that indicate the overlay used. 0xFF (or -1) indicates no overlay for that cell.

I've been trying to report something around once a month to let people know this is still being worked on, but progress has all been on implementing the guts of the map loading, distance calculating and such which is all a prerequisite to having it draw. Its been a lot of work, but not a lot of pretty pictures showing any progress.

Progress has finally reached the point where the engine can draw the map. This shot shows the starting point of the first allied mission, though it doesn't yet draw units, overlay or terrain objects. Hopefully progress on those will be much quicker now that we've reached this point.

Off the top of my head, the way urban combat works was changed under the hood though I don't believe it affects gameplay and the cloning vats can no longer grind infantry. There are probably a couple of others I'm forgetting. In general, most of the changes are rules.ini based so its possible to almost perfectly replicate RA2 in YR.

100x bigger sounds a bit of an exaggeration, that would mean they were over 12000 cells across. It would be difficult if not impossible to extend the maps as so much is based on the 128*128 nature of the grid and the references to this number are all over the place thanks to macros and inlined functions in the original code. Also bare in mind that this game was written to run on 486 class CPU's and 8Mb of ram so there were practical limitations at the time and I think they did a pretty good job with such constraints.