OWA

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.

In a letter to the community, Jim Vessella has announced today some key details of the previously announced Command & Conquer Remasters! Here is a copy of the letter in full: This is incredibly exciting news for the C&C community as a whole and exactly what the we all needed to pull us out of our dormant state, big kudos to EA and Petroglyph for making this happen! A larger statement with a message from Joe Bostic and a bonus video can be viewed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/9x1zcz/cc_remastered_announcement_from_ea/ In light of news, W3D Hub will be organising some special events in order to celebrate! More info on that will be posted soon, so stay tuned! [blurb]Get ready for the return of Command and Conquer on PC![/blurb][thumb]custom_thumb_ea.png[/thumb]

Just going to throw in my wall of text: Sacred Things Cut-Scenes Joe Kucan, Nicolas Worth, Kari Wuhrer, Udo Kier and Michael Biehn. These are only a handful of actors that formed the roster of memorable characters that have featured in C&C over the years. Even though the cost of re-recording such performances with new actors would deem it unlikely, it doesn't need to be done. An up-scaling of the original footage or re-mastering from the original video reels (if EA or Brett Sperry/Joe Bostic/Louis Castle still has them) would be incredibly welcome. A lot of C&C's memorable moments and quotes come from the cut-scenes, so shipping a remaster without or with new cut scenes would be a great loss indeed. EVA and Unit V/O Part of the character of C&C is definitely the V/O. To this day, I can quote C&C units to my friends and they know exactly what I'm referencing. From the Workers complaining about not having shoes in Generals to the Desolator's heavy breathing, to the Nod Harvester in C&C3's Tiberium obsession; the V/O is one of the most memorable and iconic things about C&C and it really helps to define the character of each unit to the point where the combined characters shape the overall character of the game.. Re-recording it just wouldn't be the same. Frank's Music One thing that has definitely been synonymous with the earlier C&C games is Frank Klepacki's music (and to a lesser extent the jukebox function). The ability to play Hell March on repeat whenever you like during Red Alert 1 skirmishes always brings with it a rush of pure nostalgia. Bringing in Frank to score some new tracks for the remaster would be one of the best things to win the hearts of the fans, as there is a lot of love for Frank and his work within the community. The games that he scored over the years have a certain atmosphere because of the music and it wouldn't be right to bring the remaster out without it. Mod Support Modding has always been the backbone of the C&C community, whether it be maps or fully blown total conversion mods. C&C mods consistently make ModDB's top 100 every year and bring more aspiring developers into the industry over time. Modding has taken a bit of a hit recently due to less developers supporting it, along with the rise of proprietary game engines like Unreal and Unity, but despite that, modders still continue to work diligently on mods for older titles and do get recognition for it. The Mental Omega and Twisted Insurrection mods for Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun respectively have garnered coverage in PC Gamer this year and continue to provide replay-ability to their parent games long after they came out. If the remasters are to begin their own legacy, modding is a great thing to plan for in order to keep the community coming back for more. Gameplay, Balance & UI Classic Mode vs Modern Re-balance When undertaking a remaster, especially for an older title, players will have certain expectations of how it will ultimately play. C&C was always good in offering a number of different ways to play by a number of toggleable skirmish options. It would be great to see a classic balance option as one of these game options, because it will allow players to play the game exactly as it was when it was released. Playing without this option enabled, would be a more balanced experience overall than, Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge for example. To this day, players name their online games with titles like "1v1 No Rush No Yuri", as Yuri is perceived to be the best faction in the game. With Yuri's Revenge only seeing a single patch after release, there were simply not enough balance iterations to fix this problem. This also allows more agency to the development team to inject more modern RTS features (such as concurrent construction from multiple factories for example) into the game in order to provide a vision that brings the gameplay up to modern standards. A modular ruleset would allow players the highest degrees of flexibility, with the aforementioned factory changes being one, along with an option to use a more modern sidebar, turn units/structures on and off rather than through un-descriptive tech levels, a no-rush timer that limits their unit movement to their section of the map only until the timer expires, multi-engineer (RA, TS) option, fog of war settings (on, off, revealed), diplomacy (mid-match team changing like in RA2), MCV re-packs and the ability to toggle any new features added into the game so that they can be turned off to provide the 100% vanilla experience. A faction banning system that allows the host to ban the selection of certain factions in the lobby would be useful as well (especially in the "No Yuri" example). Art of Defence The addition of "Art of Defence" as an official mode in multiplayer and skirmish would be a welcome addition to any C&C remaster. Art of Defence is a wave based defence mode where players have to protect an objective or simply survive until they clear all of the waves of enemy units being thrown at their base. These types of maps are popular with the community and have been produced by modders en-mass. With wave-based survival RTS "They Are Billions" proving to be a popular and refreshing approach to RTS gametypes, I feel an official C&C interpretation of the survival/AoD gametype would prove popular with the fans. Queuing Buildings Something that has always seemed like it would be a great quality of life improvement to the classic C&C formula is the ability to queue buildings. OpenRA made this a reality and it does help to take a bit of pressure off the macro-management of base construction when the player needs to be present elsewhere on the map. Control Groups, Factory Groups and Factory Stances The ability to bind units into multiple control groups is something that I find really useful in newer RTS titles. The level of control and micro you can potentially setup on the keyboard's number-line is incredibly powerful if used well. The ability to bind buildings to a control group is also incredibly useful in other RTS titles and I think it would be a welcome addition to C&C. There is an understandable wrinkle in the fact that classic C&C games don't allow for more than one factory of a given type to be used, but games which use that system (like 8-Bit Armies for example) seem to have solved it to a point by auto-switching to the appropriate UI tab when the corresponding factory is selected. An extra function which would make control groups even more powerful would be if you could assign a factory to build units into a particular control group, so that there's no need to keep adding new units into a given control group. C&C3 had a similar feature where the player could set the stance of a factory (Aggressive, Normal, Hold Ground, Hold Fire) which was incredibly useful, for example, if you wanted to build an army that would attack everything straight out of the box (I usually used it in conjunction with Black Hand Flame Tanks with the Purifying Flame upgrade in Kane's Wrath which was incredibly satisfying). Waypoint Mode & Planning Mode Waypoint Mode & Planning Mode were both great features in C&C3 that enabled players to have absolute control over their units by making them patrol areas, or execute plans whilst the player focused on other matters. This helped players to plan their micromanagement ahead of time, which could be beneficial in the right circumstances. The differences between the two were subtle, but enough to warrant evaluating them both for inclusion in the remaster. RMB Scroll Coasting RMB Scroll coasting (when the player holds the right mouse button and can then quickly move around the map by moving the cursor to the edges of the screen) was an excellent feature in Red Alert 2 and C&C3 that really aided the accessibility of the game. Whilst most contemporary RTS titles compromise the layout of the keyboard to offer WASD movement, or used the frankly quite clunky pull-and-grab camera control method, C&C has always been miles ahead of the camera control game just because scroll coasting is so intuitive. Sidebar Tabs To echo what others have said previously about the C&C3 sidebar, I'd definitely add my +1 into the ring of supporters. C&C3's sidebar was probably the best iteration of the sidebar to feature in the franchise because of it's unobtrusive design and easy-to-understand tab system. The fact that it reacted to what building the player had selected at the time is just the icing on the cake. Whilst other RTS games seem to clamour for the bottom-bar, the sidebar will forever be a C&C characteristic, though that's not to say that some degree of placement customisation wouldn't be welcome. Formation Move Lining up your units into fromation and having them move across the battlefield at the speed of the slowest unit was great for ensuring that your faster scout units didn't run ahead of the player's main force and get themselves destroyed. Also being able to control a unit's facing was really important for deployable units like the GDI Rig, which was stronger from certain sides based upon which was it was facing. Bringing back formations and formation move would really help in the 3D titles, but I'm not sure how much use it would be in the 2D titles, given that units operate on a grid to begin with. Graphics There's not really that much to say here. Up-scaling the artwork in the older pre-Generals titles would be absolutely amazing. Microsoft have done this with Age of Empires: Definitive Edition along with adding more rotation directions for every unit (up to 32 from 8 if I remember correctly), which would be awesome to see in a remaster. That being said, I don't think it would be appropriate to take one of the older games and put it into 3D. It would seem less like a remaster and more like a remake at that point. Controls Fully Customisable Control Scheme One of the learnings that I've made over the years is that RTS gamers enjoy customising their controls and hotkeys, but only if the menu to do so is functional. The ability to easily see a list of mapped controls, rebind keys and save/load control configurations would probably appeal a lot to the hardcore RTS scene and empower them to find a control scheme that works for them. Fans of the later titles and other RTS games entirely could reproduce the control schemes that they use into the older titles and share them across the community, which would help to appease players from all walks of RTS life. Left Click vs Right Click When C&C3 patched in left click mouse controls, it was incredibly welcomed by the community. I understand this a bit better now by taking a look at my own experiences designing RTS games and watching newcomers to the genre play for the first time at several high-profile gaming events; observing that players that are new to RTS will instinctively attempt to use Left Click for all affirmative actions (selecting units, moving units) until they are explicitly told how the "classic RTS" Left-to-Select/Right-to-Move system works. In our day to day lives using Windows as an operating system, Left Click is used for all affirmative actions such as selecting, dragging, choosing menu items etc. whereas Right Click is more contextual. Windows trains it's users to expect mouse based interfaces to be this way, so when it comes to RTS that control expectation doesn't necessarily carry over, unless you are playing a classic C&C game where every affirmative action is on Left Click. With this in mind, I'd highly recommend keeping Left Click orders as the default mouse control method simply because it is a lot more accessible for new players to grasp. An option for right click orders is definitely needed to appease the RTS crowd who expect that, but if C&C is to be brought to a new generation through remasters, I feel strongly that this is one of the small things that could be kept as-is in order to retain the accessibility of the game and keep it easier to play for gamers that are new to the RTS genre. Just because all of the other RTS's have Right Click as default, it doesn't make it the right choice for C&C. Double Click to Select All Units of a Type Introduced in Generals, this feature made it really easy to pick out units of a specific type from a group. whilst it's kind of obvious looking at other RTS titles these days (because they all do it), it's worth mentioning regardless. Shift Click to Queue 5 One of the best control/UI features from Tiberium Wars was the ability to Shift+Click to queue 5 units. This would be greatly appreciated as a quality of life feature when remastering the older titles. I think that's about it for now!

GAMEBREAKERS!

Yup, serious.