Comments - pchote

Yes! This comment has some details: Github.com

Are you okay there buddy? These are stressful times for us all, and it is great that you are excited for the remaster, but nasty comments like that are uncalled for. Remember that other people exist on the other side of the comment Save button.

Try changing to the "Joystick" scroll mode - its not what you're asking for, but does let you move long distances in a single gesture.

I'm not sure why you're seeing problems with left-click orders. The game is supposed to have a 24px dead zone that the mouse can move before it switches to the selection mode - that is a full cell on the map!

It sounds like you have enabled both right-click orders AND right-click scrolling. This was a configuration that we didn't expect people to use, and which indeed doesn't work properly.

If you're using right-click orders you should disable right-mouse scrolling and enable middle-mouse scrolling instead.

We are expecting to remove the ability to set right-mouse orders+scrolling in the next release (see Github.com).

What does the exception log say. Are you running a 32 bit edition of Windows?

The "Many fixes for queued unit orders, aircraft, and harvesters" point mentioned in the news post understates what has been a significant rewrite of the code controlling the way units behave. These changes fix some of the big technical issues that needed to be solved before a public TS release, in particular involving aircraft and the various deploying units (tick tank, artillery, sensor arrays, etc). This is a significant step forward for TS, but there are still many other big technical issues that need to be solved and don't yet have a clear timeline.

There are lobby options to disable some features like the construction yard radius, but in general you might find Github.com more to your liking.

What kind of development do you expect? The campaign missions are still trickling in, but aside from that neither mod has an active playerbase discussing things that need to improve.

Disq.us

Dark Reign: Github.com
Earth 2140: IceReaper will release the prototype project at the end of his video series.

Congratulations on the release!

There *is* an option for that! Uncheck the "Limit Build Area" checkbox in the options tab before you start the game.

We don't have the manpower to maintain these as official projects, but there is a RA Classic mod that aims to provide this for Red Alert: Github.com

I am not aware of any similar projects for Tiberian Dawn, but we provide all the tools you or someone else would need to start one using the Mod SDK.

As mentioned in the news post above mods for this release must use the Mod SDK. If they create an installer you can then run them the same way as the main OpenRA games, otherwise you can use the launch-game command in the mod directory.

I'm sorry to say that this is not likely to happen. We are critically short of experienced developer manpower now, and reviewing pull requests and dealing with bugs in the shipping mods needs to take priority. Development on TS hasn't stopped completely, but it is not progressing fast enough to be able to predict a public release date. You can track the remaining TODOs or help out at Github.com

We gave a TS update in the previous playtest news post last month. There have been no notable changes since then - there are only two of us working on it, and we have been busy with other things!

The color selector in the December release was bugged in a way that made it about 10x as strict as it should have been. That's been fixed in this playtest.

That is a difficult feature to add. Some of the low-level engine changes in this playtest are working towards it, but it is not yet complete.

Yup. There are parameters for setting the average light intensity / color (LightAmbientColor), the contrast (LightDiffuseColor), and the direction (LightPitch/LightYaw). Our TS is still a WIP, so there are a lot of polish issues such as improving these default values that haven't been looked at yet.

You can see all the tweakable parameters for voxel rendering at Github.com

Could you clarify what you mean about voxel lighting? It is completely configurable in the mod rules, and all the feedback we've heard about it before this comment has been positive.

This has been planned for a while, but is not a priority (so don't expect to see it anytime soon). The idea is that they are equivalent to what a map-mod can do, but can be applied to any vanilla (no modified rules) map. They could be automatically downloaded from the resource site in the same way that custom maps are now. The main goal is to cut down on the number of maps that just take an existing map and then overlay custom rules, which really annoys some of our hard-working map authors.

OpenRA doesn't use Rules.ini, but instead has its own (much more powerful) syntax. Take a look at the yaml files in <openra dir>/mods/ra/rules.

I'm not really sure what your point is here. You are correct that OpenRA is not an open-source drop-in engine replacement for the original game (which one? OpenRA targets more than just Red Alert), but we have never claimed that we were. If you want a drop-in engine replacement, then you are welcome to resurrect the dead FreeRA/CnC projects and rework their logic to properly match the original games.

The OpenRA engine is a toolkit that can natively load the original asset files (art/sound/video, but not rules) plus a flexible framework for writing RTS game logic. Our default mods build on this to provide games that recreate the character and gameplay of the originals, with modern conveniences and other changes that have been driven by our community.

You might insist on making up your own version of our project goals and history, but you look like a lunatic when you go around the community / news posts (note to others: this isn't the first time) ranting about your offense over them.

********. I (not Matt) axed the classic mods because it was wasting a developer time towards an unachievable goal ('exact' values are impossible without knowing the full details of the engine internals), and because the original motivation of the classic mods (extending an olive branch towards people like yourself) was based on a flawed premise - you're going to complain no matter what we do, so there's no point wasting our time trying to pander to you.

I normally try to be more diplomatic in my responses, but your comment is so wrong and hostile that I don't see the point in spending the time on careful phrasing.

The best time of day to find a game is 18:00 - 22:00 UTC. There are usually 40-50 players in-game during this period. You'll want to be running the latest release build, as unfortunately our main player base tend not to use the playtests.

The third suggestion (threat evaluation for support powers) was actually one of the improvements included in this playtest :)

The other suggestions about baking ai hints into maps have been discussed on and off for quite some time, and may happen eventually if somebody wants to put in the effort to build this.

Installing the videos and soundtrack from CD has been supported for several years, and the news post above explains the music download support that was added in the last release :)

I get the impression from that forum thread that you've misunderstood something fundamental about how OpenRA works behind the scenes. You're more than welcome to come and chat with us in #openra on freenode if you want to know more about the whats and whys of our engine.

There is a bunch of literature on the internet about inheritance vs entity composition, and I don't see the point in repeating those.
What it really comes down to is that an inheritance system pidgen-holes unit behavior into pre-defined bins, which can severely restrict what different unit types can do.

Want a VehicleType to be able to deploy into something that isn't a BuildingType? you'd better hope that the original developer explicitly allowed for that.
How about allowing a vehicle to act as a unit factory? or garrison a structure?

None of these things should depend on whether a specific actor is an infantry or vehicle or building.

An entity based system (like our traits) breaks the gameplay logic into logically separate chunks, and allows the mod authors to compose them in arbitrary ways.
Want an aircraft that that acts as a gap generator? Just add the trait.
Want a vehicle that has 17 turrets, each with 3 weapons? I don't know why you'd want to do this, but there is nothing stopping you from adding 17 Turret and 51 Armament traits.
Want to define new unit behavior without patching the exe? You can package your new traits into a dll that you ship with your mod.

What do you mean about coding style? OpenRA doesn't integrate with the original code in any way.