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Are normal players permitted to !TAG other players in game or is the command only available to certain moderators? If a normal player may tag other players with a nickname or perhaps some other reasonable comment what is the command to do so? And what are the protocols/rules associated with it?

I hope this question is in the correct forum... I can not get logged into the launcher. The user id and password is the same as the website? Is this correct? Email or W3dhub handle? or either? Either way, I always keep a text file with my login info and that's the one thing that I always do without fail. Somehow when I try to login I get the message: Your username or password are incorrect. Have I blown it out from trying too many or some other ridiculous procedural error? I apologize for bringing such a noobist problem to you but could you help to resolve? Thanks in advance. Solarsails

Endless loading when trying to connect to the Rencorner marathon server, and then the error "Connection to the server is interrupted", for example, does not appear on other servers!The game includes Exodus co-op. I do not use any third-party software or modifications. In short: A modern Windows 10 gaming computer has plenty of disk space, and I don't use antivirus software. It is always disabled. I had a similar problem before, it was the missing ttfs folder, but I solved this problem and played normally for a while, then abandoned Ren for 1-2 months and came back again, but I couldn't play because of this error.

Thanks for the updates, though darn costs of REN weaps going up. Just like the real world costs of everything. :D

For what it's worth I can confirm that the following steps get all the other mods working after setting up a fresh wine prefix: 1. install winetricks dotnet48 2. install winetricks d3dcompiler_47 *To run vanilla Renegade from the launcher (after installing SCRIPTS 4.8 to the game's install directory) : 3. install windowsdesktop-runtime-8.0.23-win-x86.exe This allows me to get everything except Apocalypse Rising running. Is it possible there is a newer component AR needs since it is a newer mod? trying to install anything newer than what I mentioned above breaks all the other mods, so it might mean AR would need its own dedicated prefix.

[blurb]The PLECOSTOMUS have grown fat on people's internetz for far too long, it’s time for them to go on a diet.[/blurb]This release contains massive stability improvements (for the server), some rework to the crime system and treasure chests, and tons of bug fixes.New Stuff Treasure chest system has been reworked: There are now only 3 treasure chests at the bottom of the ocean instead of 20. Treasure chests are now generated once every 1-3 days after a chest was found. Treasure chest locations are now saved between games, so even if the server restarts/crashes the chests will be in their same spot on the next load. There is now a treasure map that gives hints where the treasure chests are located. Treasure chests are now worth $25,000,000 to $50,000,000. Players will now see security cameras scattered around the map, while in line of site of these cameras any crime committed will go toward the players bounty (previously only 10% of the crime was counted when out of line of site of cops, now 0% is counted but obviously with cameras the chances of being spotted is much higher). There is also now a high score for killing these cameras. The crime system now has indicators below the radar on the HUD: Green (Pathfind Icon) means you’re in a pathfindable zone, you must be in pathfind in order to gain bounty. Yellow (Camera/Eye) means you are in line of sight of a security camera (newly added all over the map) or a police officer/vehicle, this is required to gain crime stats. Red (Hand Cuffs) means you can be arrested/killed to get the bounty, for the most part this requires you being in a path findable areas, and having been in game for a few minutes. Mars Rover can now over heat, running the laser too long will cook the driver (there may or may not be a perk that will extend the time the laser can be run without cooking the driver). There have been some new high scores added related to this as well. I'm shipping the original release with a slimmed down version of scripts, that seems to decrease blackscreen issues (this is just a trial run) in order to host locally you'll need to rename scriptsFull.dll to scripts.dll. Beyond that there has been no new content as previously mentioned. Improvements/Tweaks TONS of pathfinding changes, for the most part the pathfind area is much smaller than it used to be; however, this also will improve stability (basically the issue was if a VEHICLE tried to pathfind out of certain spots, the pathfind network would overflow and choke itself if it couldn’t figure out how to get to the target location). I’m not promising 100% no crashes, but this is a MASSIVE improvement. Notes: Roofs and building interiors are no longer pathfindable. If you wedge yourself into a spot a cop car can't get, chances are it is out of pathfind, and if its not there is a chance that that spot can cause a crash. See Images bleow to get a better idea of how much smaller the pathfind area is now. Increased the resolution of the HUD_Main and made radar markers besides the star smaller (goal here is to make objective markers easier to see when lots of markers are on the radar). The Crime system now has different jail sentence times based on the crime committed, previously it was just randomly generated and the same for all crimes. Bail costs now cost roughly 10x as much as they used to. Special thanks to Seifmagdi, he reverse engineered “Is_In_Pathfind_Sector” previously I was detecting pathfind by testing if a bot moved toward a player which required a ton of extra checks and a lot more time to scan if the bot made the attempt, now the code can check it live. Added 21 more message in a bottle hints and updated several of the old ones. More train blockers now only exist when the train is near by (specifically the ones on the main land). Volorus Cervous now weighs more (this will make it slightly more sluggish to change directions). Being pathfind has been reduced certain events (Ants/Abominations) have to have been repositioned so they spawn in pathfind still. Several spots on the map have had their terrain smoothed out to make pathfinding easier (the ledge by the little park near the housing, the step drop off by the road and fountains, and the super steep hill by the bridge). Removed 309 draw calls from the main map, probably won’t make any difference but you never know, could help lower end machines. Server crash dumps now report players in game as well as their locations, which will help me pin down other pathfind related crashes in the future. Cops will now go to the location of the criminal at higher wanted levels instead of just parking at the end of the block. Cat unlock code is now tied to a different thing (possibly something Mutant Assault related). Pole dancer payout has been reduced from 25 to 10. Renegade weapons now cost 10x what they used to, they were the stock Ren prices which made them horribly disbalanced once favorited. Nerfed the professional racer perk, it only does 2.5% instead of 10%. 911 should now list all players that have a bounty over 50k. General code cleanup of several systems. Reduced how long players are counted for “being seen” (cops used to count a player as being in the line of sight for up to 15 seconds after last being seen, now this has been reduced to 5 seconds). Bug Fixes Fixed a crash with the original release that could cause the game to crash if there were too many human characters on the map at once. Fixed the LOD for the industrial train station and tunnels in A69’s underground popping out too soon. Cops should no longer just forget about people that attacked them if those people don’t have a wanted level currently. Fixed a bug that would cause cops to hate you forever even after you’d died and lost your wanted level. Fixed a bug that would cause damaging cops/vehicles to count for multiple crimes instead of a single offense. Selected perks code will no longer overflow the text buffer if the player has a lot of perks with long names. Possible crash fixes with the high score system, although I don’t think they could ever be hit, so its more of a fix for Visual Studio so its not throwing warnings anymore. Player cat and several other player characters no longer get armor and health they shouldn’t. Phone no longer works while in the sewers, just too far under ground to get a signal. Tutorial house no longer sells for NaN. Fixed some bugs in how ECW’s date calculations worked, in theory they could bug and cause undesired issues. Credit cards can now be charged vastly more, preventing players from being stuck in jail forever if they have large bounties. Fixed a script that was repositioning objects client side… or suppose to at least… to actually do so. Motel shades should now be in their correct positions instead of floating off the walls. Fixed some high scores not showing up on the in game reader boards. Ogel cat now has a high score for being killed. Fixed a bug that would cause multiple treasure chests to spawn in the same spot. Fueling technician perk now unlocks correctly. Fixed a bug with the Gmax Job that would give you tips for the Hazmat job instead. Fixed a script that wasn’t sending the message from the player, which resulted in several high scores not being tracked correctly. Train job now tracks player squishes correctly. Players will no longer be able to pick up their own debt cards after dying. Fixed a bug that would cause cops to be unable to see players driving vehicles. Cops should no longer continue to unload their weapons if a friendly drives into their line of sight. Fixed several weapons being able to be refilled off the PT terminals that say "unavailable."

Hi guys, I am trying to migrate over to Linux and wanted to test setting up W3Dhub games on Linux. 'Cyberarm's Linux Friendly W3D Hub Launcher' seems to be working pretty good and I was able to get all the available games to work except for Apocalypse Rising. For whatever reason, every time I try to launch it I immediately get 'W3D has encountered an internal error and is unable to continue normally'. It's pretty weird since all the games are using the same WINE configuration, and all the other games work. Anyone have any ideas I should look into? Can anyone help me analyze the crash log to get any ideas? When does the game crash? Immediately at launch What game crashes? (because we have quite a few here) Apocalypse Rising Can you reproduce the crash by repeating a certain action? (If so, please describe the steps in detail) Yes, launching the game via Cyberarm's Linux Friendly W3D Hub Launcher causes the game to immediately crash Brand of PC (and model numbers are great too if you can locate them) I built it What Operating System do you run? (Windows 7, Windows 10, or whatever) CachyOS (Linux) What Processor do you have? 9700K What GPU (video card) do you have? 2060 RTX Super How much RAM do you have? 32 GB How large is your hard drive(s)? Is there enough free space available? 4tb What Antivirus application (if any) are you running? none Anything else you feel we should know about your system. Are you running any "add-ons" like Fraps or other recording software, modification to the game of ANY kind, etc. No. How long has the problem been occurring? Did a certain game update cause it? It's always happened since I installed it. Have you modified your game in any way? Mods are cool, but be honest with us if the problem could possibly be rooted in your own experimentation. We have all broken a game while fooling with it at some point, so no shame. We just need to know about it in order to help fix it. No. crashdump.20260123-194132-r13554-n1.dmp

Jon, I respect you and your many years of experience with Renegade and its engine. As such I will not push this matter further and simply drop it. Despite my feelings on it (and there are many), I'll defer to you. That all aside, I really need to edit the main post with the updated information (as it will be useful to someone out there) and delete another post elsewhere that no longer is needed. I've been tardy on this too long.

You can get the latest version of AR on the W3D Hub Launcher here:

There is no such thing as a "modified version of Direct3D 8", the renderer stuff is just a wrapper on top of Direct3D 8 functions. Generals and Zero Hour most definitely use the Direct3D 8 header files just as Renegade does (see files like wbview3d.cpp, w3dwebbrowser.cpp, sortingrenderer.cpp and dx8fvf.h). As for that video, I see nothing whatsoever that suggests that DX9 or HLSL was involved in making that, you could absolutely re-create it in DirectX8 with fixed function stuff or some shader assembler (and in fact at one point we did re-create something similar in pure fixed function for the w3dhub Renegade engine upgrades). Its a nice effect though (it probably didn't work so good on lower-spec GPUs, hence the decision not to use it in the final game) I have been programming Direct3D and DirectX for more than 2 decades at this point (and messing with these engines for almost as long) and I know how it all works.

SuperHackers is the equivalent SAGE project based on the open source Generals/Zero Hour code.

Thanks ChAoS! I'll make sure to join in and contribute there if I can (I had a feeling there was a project somewhere out there). In the mean time, I'd better study what the team has already done to see if I could be of use. Shame that the OpenSAGE project isn't like the OpenW3D one.

https://discord.gg/fGUxFEQt The OpenW3D project is mostly contained to our discord in the OpenW3D project https://github.com/w3dhub/openw3d I'd post either there or on the github page. The closed source engine we work with already replaced miles years ago, but Omniblade has been working on audio stuff for OpenW3D.

Hey ChAoS, Jon, I need the following to stay within the community. Anyone who asks for it, grant them (as it is not ours to deny). I might add this to the main post, but it will have to be spoilered just like here and with the added legal reminders.

That's good to know! That makes its coverage very good (hopefully it also has WebM, or else that will have to be added as well, no big). I'm going to have to read the source code on that to see how it handles Bink functions to see how to replace the ones in the existing code. I'll have to update the list again. No. The Dynamic Linked Library (DLL) is not indicative of what's actually going on in the engine. It's much weirder than that. SAGE reuses Renegade's version of DX8, yes... but it's a MODIFIED version of DirectX8! Westwood overwritten key functions to get more out of the API (via the DX8renderer.h and associated overwrites). It's really cool! The change between the engines is the fact that SAGE no longer has the DX8 header libraries included, it now relies on the DX8.1.dll (and the installer installing DX8) to run the API. That said, SAGE has DirectX 9's libraries included because Westwood and EALA were working with them. I'll explain that next. Wrong, but in the best way: You see, while only the World Builder editor uses any kind of shading (simple texture blending) in the final release, the in-development C&C Generals was being tested on DirectX 9 all the way back in 2001. Had the game just been delayed for a 2004 release like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 did, things would have been very different, but EA was never going to allow that. Regardless, thanks to EA releasing the development footage of Renegade, Renegade 2, and Generals, we now have some pretty stunning evidence of this (I can't believe I didn't know about the video for months): Command and Conquer Archive Footage from Renegade and Generals (Generals 2001 tech demo timestamp) Look familiar? Yeah, that's Generals in DX9, looking very much like C&C3 and BFME2 would look like later on. Consumer computers in 2003 were not yet ready for that, hence why they scaled back to Westwood's DX8 (but held on to the DX9 library for the next game). But man is it cool to see that skybox reflection on the water layer! The NVASM code was probably intended to be used in tandem with the WW3D DX8 for older hardware since Windows older than XP doesn't have native HLSL, but that's a guess without being able to ask the dev team directly. W3D sure is impressively flexible. And you're right about the Maya files. I must have been tired not to notice that they were Maya Assembly (ma) files (a transfer format) and not Maya Binary (mb) files (an export format). Just another thing to fix in the main post. Oh it will be very easy, barely an inconvenience, to add new 3D formats. Model format loader source code can be integrated into the engine if you know where the W3D format is being called for loading. It's also useful, not only to make use of existing models in the engine, but also some formats are better geared to somethings than others. Like the old ASE format used to be pretty great for terrain due to its ability to retain smoothing groups and keep the file size decent. I'm not going to lie, the W3D format is so flexible that it might end up using it as intended. Though I assume it's lacking the ability to retain smoothing groups and custom normals (same limitation with id Software's MD5 format). So unless there is a version out there that does, or a way to modify the format to do so, I might have to look into formats that can. A compressed, binary version of the format, much like Doom3 BFG's binary version of the MD5 format that it automatically compresses the format to, or Panda3D's BAM format and Panda Zip (pz) formats, would be nice additions as well for W3D. Interesting. I'll keep that in mind. Though when it comes to zip files, I'm considering also using them to zip up resource files (textures, models, and others) and load them during run time like the id Tech engines to help keep file sizes down. Thanks once again for the insight.

FFMPEG is good for Renegade/Generals because it can support both Bink (to play the existing videos) and open formats (best option IMO is VP9). For DirectX, I can 100% tell you that Renegade, Generals, Zero Hour and Earth & Beyond all use Direct3D 8 ONLY. BFME, BFME 2, TW, KW, RA3, Uprising and TT ALL use Direct3D 9 ONLY. I can tell by looking at the main game exe files, the main game exe files for the earlier games link to D3D8.dll only and not D3D9.dll and the main game exe files for the later games link to D3D9.dll only and not D3D10.dll or anything later. There is nothing in the source code for Generals or Zero Hour that points to Direct3D 9. I know what HLSL is and I can tell you now 100% that nothing in Generals or Zero Hour uses HLSL, its all done using fixed function stuff or shader assembly.The later games starting with TW make extensive use of HLSL though and any modernized engine running on newer Direct3D versions should absolutely do so as well. As for 3D formats, w3d does a lot of things. It can do meshes, it can do skeletons, it can do animations, it can do lights, it can do particle emitters, it can do dazzles, it can do sound render objects and more. And it is equally suited to doing all of those. If something doesn't need animations, it has no W3D_CHUNK_ANIMATION. If something doesn't need particle emitters, it has no W3D_CHUNK_EMITTER. And so on. The .ma files in the Renegade 2 model pack are just indications that the artists used Maya at some point during the process of making those objects before loading them into 3DS Max and exporting them to .w3d files. If you want to support a different format beyond .w3d in your "modern" version of these engines, go ahead (but it wont be easy) Best thing to do for the installer is to replace the whole thing with something like NSIS or if you really want to write something yourself, use LZMA (which is what 7Zip uses internally and is the best choice for compression if you don't need super-fast decompression) Go ahead and take any of what I wrote and put it in your post if you want.

[blurb] On January 3rd at 8 PM GMT [/blurb]

Hello! The moderator in question says you've been pushing these types of boundaries for a some time now. Whether it's a movie quote or not, can we work away from that behavior and be kind toward all players ingame?

ummm, where do find the download for the latest version of Apocalypse Rising