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A little backstory; I told told a friend of mine, I tested games for fun as a hobby. He told me he knew a guy involved in accounting for a game developer. It sounded cool, and I inquired to get a small meet up. I had a few questions, and spoiler I left feeling depressed. I started off with how I gave feedback into how the experience could be enjoyable, and often checked for bugs or glitches things like that. He told me that the big money maker in games were open world games because they generated live services. I asked what are live services he said you know RCS? I shrugged, he said you know PRI? I asked what PRI was. PRI stand for Player Recurring Investment. I said micro-transactions? He laughed. He told me games are measured in Sell-through, Engagement Time, and Yes in-game store transactions. I asked why open world was so lucrative? He painted a picture... A game is a virtual world, a box, and a while ago was asked the question, "what if the box was a disguised store?" Like what if world of warcraft allowed purchases at any time? You'd never have to go to the store, you'd be in it all the time. Like Disneyland where every 200m is a shop. The more customers in the door aka game sales and the longer browsing time aka Engagement through quests, maximizes the potential for in-game purchases. I was stunned. So the quests are there for Engagement time? He said yes. The quests keep you playing and logged-in, that why we measure potential play-time in hours. We are measuring a metric of potential store transactions. You know cosmetics, DLCs, currency packs, exclusive perks, etc. Exclusive perks? He said, well the enemy of play-time is when the player feel discouraged, so we offer perks to maker their shopping or playing experience better. Is that what people call play to win I asked. He told me no it makes accomplishing time fillers are tasks easier. (I call it grinding but whatever.) He told me difficult and repetitive tasks often drive the sales for these perks. It's a feature, like icons on a map. I asked what he meant by map icons. He told me game metrics requires a certain amount of icon density to give players time consuming tasks to keep him busy. Like Disneyland's rides. So success is measured by square km, icon density, and potential hours of engagement. He told me optimizing these three lead to potential additional transactions. Then he got real excited. AI is making it so we can generate thousands of km, icons/quests, and thousands of hours of potential live service sales. He told me players want more to do, more see, and more hours of game-play. He couldn't share any of his company's formulas (for obvious reasons). I said, that's a lot of AI work how do you quality test it? He said, the elements individually tested, then simply randomized. Like testing the cookie shapes, not the cookies. He told me not all assets need interaction, some are just ascetic. It's expensive to detail buildings and interiors, while it's easier to generate square exteriors, but change color or positioning. He let me know they are saving money by limiting total designers and focusing on modulating unit for projects. The idea is reusable assets with minimal bugs or errors. I asked about how that might effect aesthetic. And he told me that's what the graphic design departement solves. You know lighting, shading, and etc. So game design is making stores with the interior as theme parks with facade castles and quest distractions all for the purpose of the gift shop? He said, games are expensive and don't pop out of thin air. There are shareholders to please and quarterly earnings to account for. He told me if the model wasn't profitable it's wouldn't be used. After about an hour or two I thanked him for his time, and did my best not to feel depressed. So I did what any angry millennial does and write an angry blog. Thank you for your time.

Changelog For 3.8.0.2 ReleaseGeneral Fixed a crash. Fixed an issue with bots purchasing vehicles on non-forest maps. Increased LowPowerDamageScale, rounding from 16.67% extra to 20% extra, matching what the encyclopedia states. Added information about this damage scale to the "low power, defenses inoperable" message to players. This is the feature that makes buildings take more damage when a base's power is low. Updated and clarified the ingame encyclopedia (F1 screen). Upscaled TT logo for splash screen. Nerfed Tesla Coil jolt damage Chain damage: 30 to 20 Chain fragment damage: 20 to 10 Explosion damage: 180 to 90. Fragment explosion damage: 100 to 80. Radio Commands Lowered sound volume from 2.0 to 1.0. Adjusted "building needs repairs" Soviet string. Thief Increased Crowbar Damage Penalty Cooldown from 0.35 > 1 Decreased Crowbar Damage Penalty Fraction from 0.15 > 0.08 Maps Removed visible boundary stripes on a few maps. This is planned for the remaining maps soon. Fixed missing tree stumps on a few maps. Replaced the copied assets with instances on a few maps. This affects the backend work more than anything. RA_GuardDuty Brightened overhead map. RA_KeepOffTheGrass Increased mine limit from 40 to 50. Fixed collision on a tree by the civilian rar house. RA_LunarParadox Fixed mine bomber being too shiny. Fixed weapon scopes. Sorted air units into the air tab. Kovtillery projectiles are visible again. Yaktillery uses the urban texture instead of forest. Set correct rotation on Angry Tank's emitter. RA_Metro Set Floating as the primary Jukebox track. RA_PacificThreat Fixed bigcrate nullgons. This would cause camera jittering in third person view. RA_RidgeWar Fixed a vehicle wedge spot behind the Allied WF, Added Hedgehogs to mark vehicle boundary at the infantry path north of the Allied base. RA_ShallowGrave Made an adjustment to the terrain that should fix an issue with stealth shaders appearing where they shouldn't. Fixed some floating rocks and grass. RA_StormyValley The environment is now brighter. Front Soviet Service Depot is now more flush with the ground. RA_TheWoodsToday Made an adjustment to the terrain that should fix an issue with stealth shaders appearing where they shouldn't. Removed Soviet Guard Shack near Allied base. RA_ToTheCore Unfloated a tree by the church. RA_Volcano Blocked off southwest naval route completely. Moved the Sub Pen and Naval Yard to face the single naval route better. Fixed/cleaned up lava heat damage zone. Slightly narrowed so more of the outer walkway is safe. Covers middle walkway now too.

Hi everyone, it's been a while! We've been on a nice long break, but has returned with a small patch to add some QoL and improve the balance a little bit. Take a read below to check out what we've been up to! Update 0.9.0.13 The changelog for update 0.9.0.13 is below: That's all folks! Head over to the discord for all of out latest updates. Please leave your feedback on Discord and we'll look at a larger balance patch for next time! Stay tuned for that! - @ OWA, @ moonsense715 and the AR Dev Team

[blurb]On July 12th at 7 PM GMT[/blurb]

[blurb]On June 27th at 7 PM GMT[/blurb]

[blurb]On June 20th at 7 PM GMT[/blurb]

Long time no see! Ok so... Reborn was a pkgmod in 2005 after it was a total conversion in 2003? I believe you, I just had no idea. But the project also went through a "reset" of sorts too right? It changed leadership, most of the team, etc? What can you tell us about that time? Also, there is only one test level "weapons" inside that pkgmod file, no other level files unfortunately. Got anything else cool in your collection that you'd be willing to share? Thanks, -Einstein the community history nerd

I remember people kept saying she looked like the borg queen, lol. I also remember the chaingunner firing from the hip and boy bullets hit hands before heads, lol. Good memories, good times.

[blurb]On June 6th at 7 PM GMT[/blurb]

The only reliable fix for that is to decouple rendering from physics and computations in general, and that's a tedious task given the state and nature of the engine.

altmat expects the exact same meshes & configuration in both W3D files. It doesn't play well if you try to add new passes or change things too much. To be on the safe side, separate buildings from terrain. In other words, make two max/gmax files, one for buildings only and one for everything else. Then, make a clone of building-only max/gmax and change the material as you wish. Change it incrementally and make backups so you can figure out/recover what exact change breaks it. These were the steps I followed making C&C_Frostbite.

It is false positive.

This is an issue you need to solve with RenCorner. We cannot do anything about it, sorry.

Blast from the past. The first version of Reborn back in 2005 Back when it was a PKG mod for Renegade Download Reborn.pkg Reborn.mp4

Not that anyone here asked, but I two more items of interest to add to the modernization list. First is an explanation of Granny3D, the fifth and last of the Rad Game Tools as well as the first of them to be discontinued by Epic Games soon after the 2021 buyout. This is specifically for SAGE users, as only SAGE games used Granny3D (the "granny" folder in the file hierarchy) as a middleware for animating models. Granny was a popular and easy to use middleware that allowed you to hook up the animations on a model to actions, blend them, and (most importantly) see the output in real time in the various renderers in use within the industry (being able to switch between PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo consoles on the fly). Granny outputted to its proprietary file type (gr, and later gr2) but could also handle transfer formats. Westwood and EALA attempted to implement a conversion function that turned granny files into W3D format, but the disabling of the function along with the comments suggest that they could not get it working in time (it is unknown if they ever succeeded). Regardless, Granny3D is still an amazing middleware that I daresay programs like Blender never truly replaced. If the community could create an offshoot version of it using the source code floating about on the net, that would become an amazing pipeline tool for creating W3D models with professional feeling animation work. Next, I have a replacement for the BIG file format used in SAGE. Videogames often use real-time decoding of compressed assets to drastically reduce the file size of the game. This optimization is a must have. However, although the Generals source code contains the BIG file decoder, it lacks the inclusion of EA's proprietary BIG file encoder. That's a big deal, pun intended, because if you do not have that program, you have to do the encoding by hand. That's a lot of slow work, even if you are a modder who's used to it by now. Not to mention the fact that there are better and faster real-time compression solutions out there than BIG files. As such, I would like to introduce ZStandard [ZSTD]. Now, while 7Zip may have the better compression in comparison, it was never intended to be used in real time over and over again. ZStandard is, and it's so reliable at it that Valve is planning to use it for Steam's installation and update system, replacing the older LZMA method. And if it's good enough for Valve, it's great enough for you! Thus, in short, 7Zip for installation files and ZSTD for real time assist deflation and loading. Just ignore the fact that the repository is currently owned by Facebook, it's under a GPL license, so open source and ready to roll. I'll see if I can update the main list with these details when I have time. I also need to fix information about the Asset Importer (ASSIMP) and clean up other information before starting any new topic (like discussing the shadow systems in WW3D and SAGE, or dissecting the WW3D camera to determine the type of rendering method: forward or deferred).

Man I miss the forum games

Making an SDK for Reborn has been on our to-do list for a while.

Hm, you are right I cannot find a public TSR SDK on gitlab either.

Ah that's it, Rockymountains! I'll check out TS_Zama, thanks for uploading it.

I believe it was a recreation of Zama. The other one is called Rockymountains. Forest fires was a different map if i remember correctly Oh yes i agree. The direction Reborn went doesn't really suit chokepoint maps. TS_Zama.mix