SoScared

Hi! Sorry for the previous post, I managed to link to a faulty url. Anyhow, I just now published a teaser trailer for a new standalone mod Red Alert - Unplugged, based off the OpenRA engine! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIbQS8Q-ppI Here is a working shared folder of Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Curmvoc538RBrWbPwXikFxLpGxN_vIyp Put shortly, RA - Unplugged aims to continue on the original lore of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 1 (1996) with new fresh campaigns + video briefings! With its modernized game experience through OpenRA, Red Alert - Unplugged wish to serve both single player and online play with the RTS playing community. This mod is hosted on ModDB at: http://www.moddb.com/mods/red-alert-unplugged If feasible, I'd hope to see the the video game trailer and/or news on your website's main space. Sincerely, Jonas (SoScared) http://redalertunplugged.com/ [email protected]

Hi! I'm running a promo campaign for a tournament, based on a new OpenRA mod in Early Access: http://www.moddb.com/mods/red-alert-unplugged Would love to see you guys put the video up in you channel! link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Sz0u7NP12SP95f2EMi-JsB6kOAskDxTq Cheers!

Back with the topic to CnCNet after a less successful earlier probe with https://forums.cncnet.org/index.php?topic=5582.0 about a year ago. The RAGL has grown significantly since, with full divisions and over $800 worth of prize money for Season 2 alone. This season represents OpenRA's most dedicated players, scaled in skill level across 4 divisions with the upper two divisions looking scary good after a few seasons of promotions and relegations. All matches are easily accessible through our file server at http://64h.mine.nu:5534/mIRROR/ora_replays/ to which if you've installed OpenRA, the replay file will launch the client automatically! The RA Global League runs two event each year, one in spring and one in the fall. Beyond Season 3 (this spring) the competitive event is looking to promote itself thoroughly now that the format is stabilizing and has proven it will run smooth regardless of the number of participants and overall scope of the league setup. To get a glimpse of what some of these high competitive matches look like, look no further than the RA Global League's two-times Champion FiveAces' own YouTube shoutcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/CovertFlobert We're looking to raise awareness of this competition and will welcome any discussion, feedback and criticism from the CnCNet community which above all else value the core of what represents Command & Conquer.

All replays for the league are uploaded to Jazz_KCS' file server. File server status thread. The tables are updated shortly after the end of each round. Also see: Season 3, The Rulebook and Public Registration (closed for Season 3) Live updated Fixtures and Results, Season 3 Masters' Division Minions' Division Recruit Division Alpha Recruit Division Beta Post-Season Feedback and Discussion thread for Season 2 All inquiries and official league business are conducted through [email protected], currently mananged by Jazz_KCS and SoScared.

Round 11 (Final Standing) tables has been updated and a season conclusion has been written into the main post!

http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/ http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/output/0044404001466118742/13737704.mp3

Updated tables for round 10! The last round is coming up and we have some interesting contentions across the divisions. In the Masters' Division, FiveAces beat Murto The Ray 2-0 on their match the previous week and put himself up as a big favourite in before the last round of the season. Both FiveAces and Murto The Ray have a delay match in addition to their week 11 (last round) match so it's not completely decided yet, but Murto needs 5A to lose a point or 2 in order to have a shot at taking the #1 spot and the 1st prize loot of $145. 2nd place gives $55. Funny enough, 3rd place (gives $25) is open season for most of the remaining players. Medium Tank with 5 points has FiveAces and Barf as the remaining opponents. Gatekeeper's remaining opponents are Murto The Ray and Klaas. Klaas is playing title favourites FiveAces and Murto The Ray for his last 2 matches! Barf with his 2 points over the course of 6 matches also has a chance, as he has 2 delay rounds in addition to his round 11 match! Should he take home his remaining points (vs Gatekeeper, Medium Tank and Anjew), given the thinned out competition in the Maters', then that would likely shoot him up to 3rd place. In the Minions' Division there's an interesting trio battle at the top. Although I (SoScared) currently hold the 1st place ($40 prize) I have played all my league matches for the season and will be looking for a certain outcome between Abcdefg30 and Kazu who will play their last round match against eachother. Kazu will have to win both maches against Abc in order to claim 1st position, beating me on the guest point count. Abc needs to win only one match against Kazu, but, should that be a home point win and guest point loss, Abc and I would be tied in points, guest points and with a 1-1 in the match between us earlier this season, would force us to play a contested position match (best-of-3) after the last round to determine the division winner. The 4th and 5th place in the Minions' now grants direct promotion into the next seasons' Masters' Division, given the latter divisions' forfeitted players. Hamb has secured his promotion given that Testosterone Rex is the only player that can pull him down one place (given Hamb's guest points). NoobMapMaker has played his matches of the season and will be dependent on Testosterone Rex or Henry The Slav not picking him off his position, in order to advance to the Masters' Division. The bottom players of the Minions' Division are not in danger of relegation given the 4 of the above division's players forfeitting the league instead of making their way down to the Minions' Division. The Recruit Division is a bit of a stir but the story has revolved much around OzzyOuzo for stomping players and collecting points almost uninterrupted throughout the season. His claim for the honorable 1st place is close but has the runner-up contender, player T, as his last opponent for the season. Both T and OzzyOuzo has a delay match in addition to ther match against eachother. Should T somehow be able to pull a double on OzzyOuzo in their match then it would be up to the performance in the delay matches (in which both are big favouritesd) to determine the winner. The top positions in the Recruit Division are mostly honorary given the fact that there is in total 6 league forfeitters in the above divisions, meaning the top 6 place finishers in the Recruit Division are rewarded a promotion in to the Minions' Division for the next season. Currently. 2 out of the 6 positions looks to be contested between GoldenHippo, DazUltra, Fenix and Udderz! The last couple of rounds has seemingly been tainted with a bit of players' fatigue, as multiple strikes has been given players mosly for blunders such as forgetting delays, uploading replays within a reasonable time etc. Looking at the table there can be no doubt this is mostly a league problem, not a player problem as the league has been continuously non-stop over the corse of almost 3 months! This is an issue which will have to be adressed in a discussion after the end of the season (dedicated thread). The previous point makes the performance of player General in the Recruit Division that much more admirable. Regardless of not winning matches, General has played all of his weekly matches, without issue, and has been exemplary to what makes such a league thrive. I'm hoping I'm not betraying any trust by telling people this but there was expressed player fatigue in before the last few rounds of the season but he went through the last remaining matches regardless. This meant 2 more reliable matches (that counts) for every other player in the division, and helped the 3-divisioned Global League survive it's infacy. For that I'm especially thankful for! To the last mile!

I could've submitted the post on to 'newer games' but I erroneously thought the post would belong to the 'Red Alert' subforum since 'newer games' listed RA2, RA3 as examples of subjects. The subject got moved, I achnowledged and didn't think twice about it. I was content with the post being in the 'General Discussion' forum. But it didn't end there beacuse someone took serious issue with my personal interpretation of what OpenRA and the Red Alert Global League is all about. I appreciate the discussions on what differentiates RA95 to OpenRA's Red Alert mod but that's about it. Lashing out generalized accusations and tribalism (us vs them) is what got this thread to this place. For my part these "discussions" are now totally moot. If someone wants to continue this bickering I'd hope it could be exported to another thread. Another solution would be to set up a separate OpenRA subforum as with Red Alert++ to which I'd be more than happy to contribute to. I'll be posting a summary on Season 1 of the Global League once its concluded and I'd like start up a new thread once Season 2 approaches. Cheers

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?

The OpenRA team doesn't use the original logo for their mods. You've confused the competition (my project) with the game. So hurr durr right back at ya

Here's the original full 1080p RAGL poster: Notice the small OpenRA tag in the top left corner as well as the subtle star behind the center title. To extend the olive branch, I could simply pull the 'OpenRA' tag in closer with the cropped versions.

Wow, like setting fire to a hornets nest. All right, adressing my love affair with the original Red Alert and my path to OpenRA, because why not: When I was around 13, my dad took me to the states to visit my family (his side) in New Orleans for the winter holidays and was my first trip to the states. I'm a Norwegian and visiting the USA is a big thing for any Wegan kid. We were staying for about 2 weeks and I was given an allowence of $100 (a Ben!) for casual shopping when going out. As a video game geek I quickly found my way to a video game store at a mall and located the PC compartment and on the game shelves was this gigantic game box displaying Red Alert, Red Alert: Counter Strike and Red Alert: Aftermath. Back home I had a demo version installed on my computer but I also got to see the game played briefly on multiplayer at a friend of a firend's house with multiple PC's connected up in a big room by his dad who was working with something related to computers. I never got to play there myself because this kid, who was around 8 or 9) was a complete jerk and didn't allow me or my friend try it out but we got to stand behind the chair watching him play Soviet in Skirmish mode, spamming tesla coils. Anyways, back to the store, this big ass box that was almost as long as a kid's arm's lenght had a price tag of $99 dollars on it. I picked up the box to read the back cover of it but obviously by then my mind was already made up. My Dad was fine with it knowing how crazy I was about video games but my family thought I was nuts spending all my money for my stay on 1 game. Back home to the family house, I delved into the content like a pirate finding treasure. I still had over a week before travelling back home so I had plenty of time studying the contents, the manuals, the game guide telling you how to start the first Allied base on one of the first missions by basically securing your ore income and "go crazy building pillboxes". The music CD by Frank Klepacki was my first experience intro to the music genre and I listened to it fanatically on my portable CD player. Back home in Norway I got to install it the moment I had access to the PC. To my big disappointment the resolution was different than I had previously seen it in my friend's friend's house before, it was all zoomed in and didn't look as pretty as how I remembered it. I still played it non-stop but after a week or 2 I somehow figured out how to change the resolution back to the proper scale which made me extremely satisfied. I played the shit out of the game, playing the campaigns over and over (didn't care too much about the expansion missions) and in school my friends and I took turns listening to the soundtrack in between sessions. I should mention, my previous RTS experience involved watching my friend (same as above) playing the Dune 2 campaigns, and I got myself a private copy of WarCraft 2 installed on my computer by the big brother of a school mate back when I was around 11 which I had to pay 50kr (ca $6) for, obviously without my parent's knowledge. WarCraft 2 was my first real experience with an RTS game. After Red Alert my love of RTS brought me over to StarCraft but I quickly went back to C&C with Red Alert 2 when it got released. Red Alert 2 was the first game I got to play online and after playing the campaigns I got completely hooked on online Quick Matches which was at the time a very functional match making service getting you to play against other equal skilled players in your region. After playing a ton of quick matches and reading strategy guides online I eventually found myself playing in the top 200 on the European server using cheap Soviet rush tactics getting Rhino Tanks and collecting tears of Ragequitters all day long. By this time Red Alert 1 had taken a back seat as I moved on to other games (big fan of the Settlers and Civ series) but it wasn't before High School (Videregående) before I took up RA1 again when I befriended other RTS fans and being very competetive we frequently LANed up playing then "old school" games against eachother for years including series as AoE, Settlers, Civ, StarCraft and Red Alert. At a point we played Red Alert against each other excessively for a couple of years, going 1v1 for hours on particular maps that were huge and asymmetrical, maps such as River Basin, Death Valley and Tournament Hills (courtesy of this site for putting all RA1 skirmish maps on display) that allowed for big arenas in which tank blobs would pose around each other and look for a position to move in, eventually getting into a fight doing the stop-and-move dance to deliver as many tank shots as possible while keeping on the move to reduce damage taken yourself. This went on for quite some time and we had a ton of fun with it but one day we accidentally came across this relatively small open-source project OpenRA (around 2011). Despite it being very unpolished and ridden with bugs we found it fascinating how the system of unit production was tweaked as so as you had a strong incentive moving up the tech tree and engage the opponents with more options and made available the gameplay that we were looking for in Red Alert. For anyone who's wondering, the biggest and most important difference between the RA95 and OpenRA's Red Alert is the way production works. The additional production fascilities built in RA95 cuts the procuction time by a huge margin per fascility all up until a single tank are built in a few seconds. In OpenRA's Red Alert the added production fascility cuts the production by a small margin and caps the production speed reduction at 50% with 7 fascilities. The 2nd production fascility rewards the player with a -15% in production time, 3rd with -10% etc. This setup made it applicable for the player to look for additional means of production besides mainly the War Factory, with added infantry, air units and possibly naval in addition to take advantage of the tech for each faction. In turn this initially exposed a great deal of game imbalances since in RA95's multiplayer, for obvious reasons, most of the units, structures and tech aren't used in the meta and thus initially never had a need for balance tweaking. Units such as Tanya, Mechanics, Medics, Shock Troopers, Tesla Tanks, Artillery, YAKs, MiG's and tech structures such as the Chronosphere and the Iron Curtain are and always has been utterly void in high level RA95 competetive multiplayer and therefore have had no attention payed to them other than with plots in the Red Alert campaign missions. All these assets are a part of my fascination and nostalgia trip with C&C Red Alert and having these available as part of an arsenal when playing against an opponent are immensly satisfying. So that's my story I guess! Needless to say we never looked back on RA95's multiplayer but that isn't to say RA95 is bad or with a lesser value. RA95's multiplayer experience is unique and has a great sense of fun with it as it is. The story is that Westwood Studios, as great as they were, never invested much time in to making the original Red Alert (same as with Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun) as a venue for online competetive multiplayer. Naturally because of the limited household internet at the time but within the current modern era of internet, hardware and programming the possibilites are endless in making Red Alert more accessible, be it with a re-invention such as OpenRA or new emerging projects such as Red Alert++. I, for one, prefer OpenRA but that's my personal preference and I have legitimate reasons as to why I consider it to be a superior platform to access the very core of what Red Alert means to me. I just want to see more people discovering it for themselves so that I can have more players to pwn on a daily basis gg edit: words

Some of the developers are directly participating in the Global League (Minion's Division), so if you wish, go and ask them if they feel insulted by anything related to the competition. As of now you're pretty much handling this as a debate rather than a discussion. I've already admitted to being biased towards OpenRA so you can take it for what it is but your "rational" arguments for what constitutes legacy and a conservative development seems to me to be personal. As already stated the Red Alert mod for OpenRA is and always has been aimed towards availing the Red Alert universe on to a competetive multiplayer platform. And let me tell ya, it's good. You will learn you develop core strategies, like utilizing heavy tanks and infantry to dominate the field and gain early map control as a Soviet player. You can take a risk by teching early Radar Dome in order to gain air superiority or get access to V2's and Artillery, banking on doing damage vs a lesser aware player or play it safe with a Service Depot, aiming for mid-tier tanks and looking towards an expansion to get ahead in economy, while holding off the opponent from picking you off in the process - perhaps with an early grenadier rush or a potentially devestating flamethrower rush dropped from multiple APC's. In the late game you have in wait for you Russia with it's infamous tesla tech, Shock Troopers and Tesla tanks, able to punch though any weak spot and melt any units or structures in mere seconds of it's arrival - likely with the aid of a fully charged Iron Curtain. Ukraine, able to deliever crippling damage to strategic targets with it's parabombs or if neccessary, going high risk-high reward style by getting a nuke truck in an attempt to clean out a vast field chock full of units or find a sneaky way towards the enemy base to take out some crucial tech or production fascility. Tanya. In a phase transpot. Scouting behind enemy lines and look for an opportunity to do devestating structural damage or delivered right on to the battlefield to lay waste to platoons. Chronoshifting your MCV behind your opponent's base. Micro Submarines and Destroyers to fight for sea control in order to reach additional routes towards the opponents base, perhaps with a follow-up of Cruisers or Missile Subs to force players away from the shoreline. I beg to differ.

Had to stop for a laugh I'm not gonna stand here and claim my reply wasn't thouroughly fleshed out and selling the game is in my nature (although it's COMPLETELY FREE, come get!). That said, it was an opportunity to adress OpenRA's legitimacy as a legacy and tie-in to RA95 given the above discussion, including the use of the original C&C Red Alert logo in the Global League banner. Obviously this is all my personal interpretation and I'm not looking push anything down people's throat. Although if more people were to come over to try it out, liking it or not, is just a good thing. Btw that's the longest 'So what you're saying...' argument I've seen in my life But no I don't think my reply could honestly be interpreted as an insult to the OpenRA developers.

duplicate of reply below