OWA

Hi all! 2018 was a good year for us, as we grow from strength to strength! We were going to do our usual yearly roadmap post, but then realised that we had practically achieved everything that we were announcing, so consider this one big W3D Hub update I guess! We aim to make 2019 an even better year than 2018, with more updates, more patches and more content than ever before, so without further ado, let's get into some of the key things we're bringing to the table right now! New Logo & Intro Video2019 is a fresh and exciting year, so what better time than now to debut our new logo and intro video! The new logo is slightly different to our previous logo (though we've had the new logo in place for quite a while now), but the major difference comes from the fact that we've now got a fantastic new intro video to put in all of our games! Big thanks to @Kicken for making this happen but also to @Coolrock for being instrumental in bringing oldbies, like Kicken, back into the community! You'll notice that the oldbies group on Discord is pretty full these days, which is great to see! Anyway, here's the video that Kicken's made for us; paying a homage to the little known company from Las Vegas that inspired us to make all of this happen. 2018 Feature RetrospectiveLast year, we posted this thread outlining what we wanted to achieve within the year. Here's a quick rundown of what we did out of that list! We announced and released Mammoth! A brand new game editor that fully replaces the old Level Edit tool for Scripts 5.0 projects such as APB and Reborn! We announced that we were working on a new plugin for 3DS Max, which we have now completed! Renegade support was announced last year, which we have some exciting info on below! Work has begun on Single Client Packages so that we can distribute the launcher with a game already pre-installed! This will likely be completed later this year. Our Stats System is in fully working order, tracking players stats across Red Alert: A Path Beyond. It will support Tiberian Sun: Reborn when it releases as well. The APB Forum Skin was completed and continues to be maintained. More skins will come but it's currently a low priority amongst our other projects. Confluence support has been attained. Read more below! The Downloads section is back up and running, giving players the ability to upload their own mods! The Modders Group was launched! It currently doesn't have anyone in it because everyone in it got staff permissions, but we hope to get more modders on-board soon! We had our first Event with Prizes last December! The turnout wasn't quite what we expected, but we're glad that the people who took part enjoyed it! We hired new programmers, such as @Dghelneshi, @Yah-Nosh and @CMDBob, who have been instrumental in pushing our codebase forwards with new and exciting features and optimisations! Cheers guys! Big Announcements Recently, in an excellent video from [NE]Fobby[GEN] and Havoc89 of the Renegade X team, Fobby mentioned that the Renegade community is "stubborn" and "tenacious". What we are about to reveal in this update proves just how stubborn and tenacious we really are in continuing to provide support for a game that should have died out years ago if not for its uniqueness, its easiness to mod and the people like us who continue to love what Westwood gave us back in 2002. The Renegade and W3D community is the best community in the Command and Conquer franchise's umbrella and today we aim to prove why with these game-changing updates. Hold onto your butts, it's gonna be a wild ride! W3D Hub Launcher - Now Supporting Renegade! We are proud to announce that W3D Hub will now be fully supporting Renegade and its community with our services. But what does this mean exactly? Well, as of now the W3D Hub Launcher supports Renegade! It's been tested internally for the past couple of weeks, but once we switch on the support publically, players will be able to browse for a Renegade installation and have the launcher manage it. Upon clicking "C&C Renegade" on the launcher, you might find that the launcher has already detected your installation of Renegade (using known registry keys) which means that you will be able to play Renegade from the launcher with no further actions needed! If the launcher doesn't find your install of Renegade, you will see a new button that reads "Import Game". Click it and you will be taken to this screen: You will be prompted to browse for your Renegade executable from the installation directory. Browse for it, select Game.exe and then click "Import Application". If all goes well, you should be done! Please note that the launcher doesn't currently install the latest version of scripts 4, so if you wish to install that, it must be done so separately (for now). Once Renegade has been imported to the launcher, you will be able to join servers using the Server Browser tab! The launcher will also feature all currently online Renegade servers that have plugged into our infrastructure. We pull our sever listings from two GSA (Gamespy Arcade) servers currently: renlist.n00b.hk renlist.w3dhub.com If you are a Renegade server owner, we encourage you to add both master server addresses to your configuration file in order to ensure zero downtime. We invite all Renegade community server owners to join us as we aim to formalise the union of the Renegade and W3D modding communities with the inception of the Renegade Council on our own Discord server. With this we wish to create strong bridges across the Renegade community, so that we can help and support each other in ways that we cannot do alone. W3D Hub's infrastructure has grown large over the past few years, so we'd like to share the knowledge we've gained across the community and share our tech, such as the launcher, with the Renegade community so that more people can benefit from it. We hope that we can begin a road to a brighter future for Renegade by working together, so we encourage any Renegade server owners who are interested to come forward and talk to us about more cross-community collaboration. Stay tuned for an announcement when we switch it on! A W3D Engine for Modders Everywhere - W3D Kit Following on from the news that we will be supporting stock Renegade, we'd like to announce a new development toolkit that we're currently calling the W3D Kit, which is designed to provide a solid base for amateur modders wishing to make new total conversion mods. The W3D Kit is essentially a stripped down version of the W3D engine with all non-essential content removed which will enable developers to freely mod and experiment with it, as well as make full-blown mods without needing to use a pre-existing game like Renegade or APB as a base. Here's what the W3D Kit will contain: Game folder which includes the latest release build of Scripts 5.0 and a specially stripped down Always.dat (W3D's main content archive) Latest release build of Mammoth Editor The latest 3DS Max content plugins (Importer and Exporter) A whole suite of additional tools for building and editing W3D-related files (Artillery, W3DViewer, TDBEdit, SimpleGraph, etc.) A link to our documentation resource, Tacitus. Content examples for modders to refer to (e.g. rigged vehicle/character/building sample files). This step forward will hopefully encourage more people to step up and try their hand at developing mods on the W3D engine. If you are looking at starting a new hobby making small games or wanting to get into the games industry professionally, W3D is great to start on! It is a pre-built engine for first-person shooters and vehicle combat is a lot less bare-bones than more contemporary general-purpose game engines such as Unreal or Unity are. Obviously the Renegade/W3D engine is still EA's tech, so strictly no money can be made from games made on it. What we aim to do is make an accessible engine for hobbyists to use non-commercially, which we feel could be beneficial to those looking to learn how to get into game development. More info on this will be released when we launch the W3D Kit later this year. In order to support it, we've been working on some new content tools and a strong documentation resource, which is what we'd like to talk about next. New Content Pipeline - 3DS Max 2017 Tools We announced last year that we would be making a new plugin for 3DS Max that would allow W3D developers and modders to use the much more modern and feature-rich 2017 edition of the popular modelling software to make and export 3D models for Renegade, Generals, Zero Hour and the Battle for Middle Earth games. To clarify, this means no more GMax and no more 3DS Max 8. We are happy to announce that with the combined efforts of @cfehunter, @jonwil, @Sir Kane and the talented bunch over at The Assembly Armada, we have been able to produce the first working version of this plugin which we are now testing thoroughly before we release it. This new plugin should enable our content creation pipeline to be much smoother, giving us many more tools and options at our disposal when creating everything from maps, to vehicles to characters! Also bundled in with the plugin are new versions of W3D Viewer and W3D Dump! You can get hold of the plugin and additional tools right now from here! This has been one of our long term goals ever since we started W3D Hub, so seeing it complete has been a major achievement for us as a team! W3D Engine Development Documentation Network - Tacitus Last year, we announced that we were going to get a confluence community licence in order to power our new wiki. This goal has changed, so without further ado, we're proud to announce the central point of documentation and reference for all things W3D and Renegade related; Tacitus. Tacitus is driven by Atlassian's Confluence software, which is a powerful industry-standard tool for creating and managing documentation. With Tacitus we hope to host everything W3D and Renegade-related, including W3D engine documentation, game information, tutorials and even the old Renegade community wiki in its un-vandalised entirety. We hope that with Tacitus, we can create a resource that inspires players and developers alike; standing the test of time as the years continue to march on. Although it's quite bare right now, keep your eyes on it as it grows further and further. As of now, our database is looking quite bare, so if you are interested in helping with the transfer of content onto Tacitus, please get in touch with us via PM! We are looking for documentation writers and are eager to push this project forwards! For now this is more of a soft launch, but more visible links everywhere will come once we have enough content to fully launch it. More to come!As we move forward, there will be more updates for the games coming through the pipes! We're currently undertaking a pretty major overhaul of our codebase, so not much feature development can be done; but once this has been completed we should be in a good position to get the wheels turning again! Stay tuned for more information on the games in the weeks to come and thanks for all of your support. Without everyone supporting us, we wouldn't be where we are today! As ever, if you have any questions or feedback, feel free to post below! Cheers! [blurb]We've got big news for Renegade players, W3D Modders and fans in our big update for 2019! Come and read more right here![/blurb][thumb]thumb_w3d.0.png[/thumb]

I actually love this new avatar.

Awww yisss!

TeamSpeak is still pretty good even after all these years, but in terms of growing a community, Discord is leads and bounds ahead. What Discord is essentially a replacement for is IRC; it's fancy IRC with VoIP tacked onto it and it also copied Slack's UI and somehow made it worse. We started on IRC years ago, but as VoIP became a thing, it was great to hang out and chat to each other on TeamSpeak, because it was easy and it was better than IRC. People who were generally not comfortable with VoIP tended to stick to the forums or IRC (maybe on rare occasions idle in TS). Then Discord gained traction. You can cram 100's of users into Discord concurrently, just like you could with IRC, so it's great for housing a big community with lots of members that you can then engage with. The difference with Discord (compared to IRC) is that it's easily accessible and features emotes, gifs and HTML embedding that allows it to be a machine for keyboard discussion and re-posting memes that VoIP-exclusive applications like TeamSpeak never were. I personally use Discord to play games with friends since a lot of them turn their noses up at the thought of TS these days, but since nobody idles in the VoIP channels in W3D Hub, we've lost that casual chat spirit that TeamSpeak had, which is kind of sad. TeamSpeak are working on their next version, which I hope will bring the fight to Discord a bit, but we'll see.

Nice work man! Tagging @Synaesthesia just in case he's lurking around somewhere.

Hey guys. Please make sure that you state who you want to pose your questions to if you wish to ask a specific person. We'll have a list of people on the first post by the end of the day.

The screenshot competition has been over for about a month now, so it's about time that we announce the winners! 1st Place! In first place we have @SilverShark with his epic screenshot of MiGs on Hostile Waters! 2nd Place!2nd place is @Testament with his Stryker joining a GDI rush in IA! 3rd Place! 3rd place is @URKA with this close call as he tries to defend the Soviet War Factory! Congrats!Congratulations to all of the winners! You all win a poster (that will be in the post soon!) and a copy of the C&C Ultimate Collection on Origin! It was pretty tough to choose 3; as although we didn't get many screenshots submitted, they were all quite good! Thanks for participating everyone! See you next time! [blurb]The screenshot competition has been over for about a month now, so it's about time that we announce the winners![/blurb][thumb]thumb_w3d.0.png[/thumb]

Hi guys. I have a question for you. I'm trying to understand the way that the original Red Alert works and I want to know something. "On the medium speed setting of the game, how long does it take for a Mammoth Tank to kill another a Mammoth Tank in seconds?" I'm currently working on visualising the balance data from RA1 and am using the Mammoth Tank as my control group. I would like to know how long (in seconds) Mammoth Tank A takes to kill Mammoth Tank B if Mammoth Tank A force fires on Mammoth Tank B from this position: I'm want to know this because I want to know whether my own control is accurate, or whether the Medium speed setting varies from player to player. To do this, just load a skirmish game of Red Alert as Soviets with lots of starting units and get your Mammoth Tank to fire on another using the force-fire command (Ctrl+LMB). You can get Red Alert from https://cncnet.org/red-alert Cheers!

Please stay on topic.

Do you still have a link to the trailer somewhere?

Winners to be announced this weekend!

I have no idea what that song is really called because it has no metadata, but here is the MP3. m_Speeder.mp3

Needs moar Glacier_HT.

I agree. It's important that if we implement any of the following logic into the engine, they should be toggle-able, so that projects can choose to retain the feel of Renegade's gunplay if the devs want that. Ultimately what these proposals aim to do is vary the gunplay across the projects, giving each one more of a unique feel. Recoil patterns are definitely a good thing, as they should stop us from leaning on the rng cone spray mechanics so heavily, which makes weapons such as the AK47 in APB a bit more controllable. Damage drop-off is an interesting one, as it allows players to engage each other at longer ranges, something that hasn't really been tried all that much in the engine. It could also potentially fix the age of issue of "I have a rocket launcher that only damages aircraft" by setting the damage drop-off to be quite steep for anything that isn't an air unit. This allows weapons such as the RedEye to be a lot more usable outside of their niche at closer ranges, without the problems they have experienced in the past (i.e. submarine sniping). ADS is an interesting feature, but as you say, it would require quite a lot of rigging/animation overhead to implement. Also it makes things tricky with secondary fires, which was also mentioned previously. I think it's good to talk about such features though; getting them out on the discussion table is definitely worth it.

We've been talking about it internally for a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd bring this discussion to you guys to see what you think. @LiamGriever also mentioned it in his recent thread, so I figured it would be a good time to start the discussion. The original post: Also, if anyone isn't familiar with concepts being talked about in this thread, I recommend that you go and read this article about how weapons are setup in Planetside 2. Whilst there are a lot more elements to Planetside's weapon implementation, the core concepts are nearly identical to Renegade's. Take a read here: http://iridar.net/planetside2/weapons/weapon-mechanics/ I'm looking forward to the discussion and ideas!

That's a very vague request. What does equal footing mean to you? Like what do we have to do in order to achieve equal footing? Please be specific, at this stage I can only guess what you mean. Do you want Renegade and all of the servers on the launcher? If so, we are working on it. If not, please tell me in simple terms what you mean and what you would like us to do. Also the questions, for the third time, are: I would really appreciate it if you took the time to answer these, as it would save us all from a lot of trouble.

We can't fix anything if you don't tell us what you would like fixing. We're working on getting Renegade on our launcher but it will take time. Is that enough for you or can we help in some other way? I ask again: Also, it wasn't my intention to call you guys out at all. I was merely explaining the IA stuff in response to Griever's post. The fact that you latched onto that in order to soapbox your issues with W3D Hub makes me want to think that you don't have any interest in fixing the relationships between the communities at all, but are just here to cause drama. I don't want to believe that though. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. I want to help you guys out, but you've got to tell me what you want, otherwise nothing will get fixed.

Hi Shaitan. We've been working on getting Renegade support for the launcher, but progress has been slow because danpaul88 (our launcher guy) has been very busy getting married amongst other things. Our intentions are to get Renegade (with all of the servers) up onto the launcher so that people who enjoy W3D Hub Games can also enjoy Renegade. In October I sent you guys a PM asking what you thought the solution to our problem should be. This left the ball squarely in your court for you to make some demands so that we could form a plan together and move forward. The problem is that those demands never came through, so as far as we're concerned we've had nothing but radio silence from RC and MPF on the matter since October. As for the block, part of IA's inherent design is that it can be joined from the IA client on the W3D Hub Launcher or the Renegade client, allowing for a wider potential player base. Here are my notes from the PM I sent you on the matter: So, with that in mind, we will be trying our best to add Renegade to our launcher, but you've got to understand that this does take time. As for covering our asses legally, this is incredibly hard to do when there is a third-party tool out there (mixcheck) that is able to convert heavily modded Renegade builds into full Renegade builds by re-downloading the base mix files and repairing them. Did you know that you can get a fully working copy of Renegade from the freely available Renegade multiplayer demo if you install Scripts 4.6 on top of it and run mixcheck? Food for thought. dblaney asked us how to get his game on the launcher and we helped him. That was about it. There were no talks about any other platforms (RenList) that Apex would be hosted on, because that was really dblaney and Kaskin's decision to make. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, our long-term goal is to include Renegade on the launcher in a way that is legal. I'd like to know what we can do to satisfy you and the others in the meantime whilst we work on this solution. No offence, but I see a lot of soapboxing and shouting about how we've done a bad thing, but not a lot of ideas or solutions coming from you guys to help us all fix the problem and get us past this. Tell us clearly what you want and we can discuss it. As it turns out I was wrong. EA does give a shit about old games. I sent them a tip last year about a website called Abandonia that was hosting full isos of RA2, Renegade and Generals. When I went to check back late last year, I had seen that they had been removed, which suggests to me that they got a C&D sent to them. I wouldn't underestimate EA legal, since all it takes is one tip-off for the lawyers to come running. I'm not really concerned who blocked the server really. I just want to work towards a solution to this problem instead of bickering about it. I'm not sure what you're talking about with the scripts there. Scripts 5.0 doesn't support Windows XP at all. If you meant to say 4.x the thread wasn't due to a lack of caring, but more of a curiosity surrounding what portion of the player base still made use of Windows XP. If you read the posts in that thread it's never once suggested that XP was to be dropped because of a lack of caring. You do what you like, but just know that my offer of a solution still stands. Here's another quote from that PM with my request for ideas. There's no need to threaten drastic measures if we can find something that suits all of us. I just want to also take this opportunity to ask that you please refrain from venting these issues in public. We're all reasonable people here, so there's no need to call us out when what we all want can be achieved through PM. Let's find solutions, not more problems.

Have a read of the other points I mentioned and try not to focus on just one. Moving to a new engine is not a good idea collectively because of all of those things. It's like telling the Mental Omega team that they should move to the C&C3 SAGE engine or the OpenRA guys that they should be using UE4. It's just not gonna happen.

In some ways you're right. RenForums is a ghost town and there are only a handful of server communities left hosting servers which have definitely seen better days. Renegade as it stands is pretty dead. That's why we got some retaliation when we launched Interim Apex; the owners of those stock servers didn't appreciate the competition that we brought into their space and our server was subsequently blacklisted by the owners of the RenList server. That being said, we aren't a traditional Renegade community. We put our focus into improving the engine rather than hosting stock Renegade content; our latest version of the scripts project (version 5.0) doesn't event support base Renegade anymore. This year though, we do plan to support Renegade a bit better, in order to try and unify the communities a bit more. As it stands, I feel we are distrusted by communities such as MPF and Rencorner, which works against us, but I hope we can change our image for the better in the coming year. As for recoil, we've actually been talking about whether we should implement it or not. We have quite an amazing level of flexibility for new features these days and it's definitely something that hasn't gone unnoticed. The community makes the game, but the game also makes the community. There's a lot of charm in Renegade, but something that it does incredibly well in particular is vehicular combat. There were still games being released 10+ years afterwards that has worse vehicle implementation than Renegade. What we should definitely look to do is expand outwards, but also try and heal these wounds as you say, so that we may move forward as a community that is a fair bit more united than it is currently. I honestly don't feel that we are a laughing stock. Who's laughing at us right now? It's certainly not the rest of the C&C community or EA. I disagree about the 2000s being less PC than today though. I'm not sure if you were around in the APB/BHP community during the 2000's, but it was a really wonderful place to be (despite Aircrafkiller banning anyone who looked at him in a funny way). We had a large community who regularly played (and modded) our games, but also respected each other thanks to a moderation team that kept shitposting to a minimum and thoroughly enforced the community guidelines. Anyone who said the N word in-game or on IRC was instantly banned. You can imagine the cry of "CENSORSHIP + MUH FREE SPEECH THO" from the Grillers if that were to happen today though. I remember that time too and you're right, it was great! Unfortunately MP-Gaming has been dead of nearly a decade now and we're the only community hosting APB. MPF did a approach us about hosting an APB server, however we refused because the population in APB was so small that it didn't warrant an extra server and we also had doubts about MPF leaving the APB gameplay experience in-tact, given their track record with previous servers and questionable mods. I'd say this, AR has always been my passion project, but it has most certainly also been a source of portfolio material for me. These projects got me into the games industry and have introduced me to so many wonderful new friends from around the world. Your comment about Game Dev College rejects is rather shortsighted seeing as a large majority of our dev team are now working professionals, with a significant amount of our new code team hires being skilled professional programmers. To your last point though, it does make me realise something; we aren't as transparent with our team structure and "who's working on what" than we used to be, which may be a contributing factor to your comments. Granted, it does take us a long time to get our arses into gear and make content, but the split across the teams is a bit more polarising than you might think. The new Ground Zero project, for example, is being entirely developed by @Killing_You and @Ice (so far), who have never really held any sole allegiance to any particular projects before. KY has previously worked on audio a lot, but this is the first project that he will be doing the unit and structure work for, making this a new learning experience for him; as well as a cool game for you guys. ICE is a military specialist with 3D skills, which he will largely be carrying over to GZ. This thread will definitely be a talking point in the upcoming meeting, so thanks for posting. We do have some fairly lofty plans brewing for wider C&C community integration, but I'm not really at liberty to talk about those yet. Rest assured though, we've heard you and we will be discussing our next moves carefully. Also, AR will never end as long as I live. Come at me! The thing is, we quite like developing for the Renegade W3D Engine. This is the main reason amongst these other ones: UDK is now essentially a dead game engine because of UE4. Renegade X is on UDK, but barely has more players than stock Renegade. The draw to change engines just isn't worth it. Moving to UE4/UDK would leave us with a very high dependency on creating current/last generation art assets that require specific pipelines; e.g. PBR (Physically Based Rendering) or Normal/Specular. We don't have a team who knows how to create such assets, as we develop solely using diffuse maps. Moving engine would require to either buy or create animations for infantry, We currently have no animators on the team. Moving engine would throw away the years of work we have put into the codebase; essentially putting our code team into a position where they have to code the most basic Renegade gameplay elements (i.e Harvesting, Buildings, Purchase System) back into the new engine, which would take a lot of time and effort. Little-to-nobody on our staff roster knows how to use engines like UDK or UE4. We would have to re-learn a lot of things to become competent again. We do this in our spare time. It's not like we're being paid to make these games. Part of the reason we make these games is because we enjoy working with the engine and improving it as a hobby. Other than better graphics (which we can't have due to lack of artists), I don't exactly know why the suggestions to switch engine game time and time again. It's just not realistic. Please take discussion surrounding the BBQ Grille to a different thread instead of derailing this one. Cheers!

Not gonna happen. Microtransactions will not be included.

I gave Father Christmas a glass of port on xmas eve once. There was soot on the plate the next morning. He's real guys.