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ageitgey

Who's going to be the hero that builds a modern update of C&C Generals/Zero Hour with 4k rendering, raytracing, etc?

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There's a mod for RA3 that re-implements Generals: https://www.moddb.com/mods/command-and-conquer-generals-evol...

Whoa awesome. I spent hours playing Generals in the mid 2000s.

I'd settle for a native Linux build.

Would be nice. But they all work just fine with wine and/or proton.

I haven't tried wine in ~15 years, but it was pretty useless for gaming back then. Has it much improved?

Basically the entire premise of the Steam Deck is built on WINE (via a Valve-developed fork, Proton).

Noting that Proton is regularly rebased on upstream, and Valve is contracting CodeWeavers, the same company which employs many core Wine contributors.

Fork is certainly technically the correct word, but "distribution" might give more the right impression.

When someone releases a game in a Windows version and a Linux version, the current Wine-based compatibility layers mean that the Windows one is more likely to run without issue than the native binary is.

I built a Linux gaming desktop 5 years ago. The only thing that regularly causes more than minor issues is that many online games use incompatible anticheat technology. I pretty much play exclusively single-player games on PC, so it hasn't been a practical issue for me.

It's pretty awesome. Some of the compatibility layers built on Wine (Valve's Proton/Codeweavers Crossover/Whisky) are almost plug and play. With Steam on Linux, a lot of games work seamlessly. I've only ran into trouble with very new games and multiplayer games with invasive anti-cheat that freaks out when they're running in an environment that doesn't look like a normal windows install

The performance hit is surprisingly low. It's not rare for the windows binary to run better on linux than the native one (when it's an option)

Just yesterday I got the Linux version of an indie game made with Unity and it doesn't even launch. Fetched the Windows build, ran "wine game.exe" and it just ran. Couple other things (C# projects iirc) also worked well

This is not a Unity game, but especially with ancient stuff like Red Alert? I would certainly try it and expect good results. Some years ago, Wine always used to give me trouble and never worked unless you used some special blend of options (like Proton and PlayOnLinux help with). Maybe those times have passed

These days Wine works better than Windows for some kinds of games.

Wine was far from useless for gaming ing 2010.

Man wine works on Android now, with stuff like winlator. I saw a video of someone playing fallout 4.

Did they eventually fix the game desync bug that would happen when you have a multi-core CPU?

We used to play Generals at LAN parties all the time - but once multicore CPUs hit the market, it was difficult to just get to the end of a game, because peers would desync and you'd suddenly find yourself playing singleplayer. Its clearly some race condition in the game engine which makes the game non-deterministic in a multicore situation. Does anyone know - is that still a problem?

I'm going to be nice to the net code and say that it has issues because of its age, but multicore CPUs don't cause any issues as far as I know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS0UL9QC2c4

Generals has a really annoying issue where it just desynchronizes and drops you out of a multiplayer game after a random amount of time.

There was a reverse engineering one, and openRA.

https://github.com/TheAssemblyArmada/Vanilla-Conquer

You might check out https://www.openra.net/

That's RA. Generals was a different game engine.

Converting the assets to use the Spring engine (or BeyondAllReason's active fork of it) is probably easier than writing a new engine from scratch for the existing assets. And then it'll feel like BAR but with C&C's assets. The UI is what gives the game most of its feel.

C&C Generals plays completely different compared to Total Annihilation like games with streaming economy that Spring was built for. I like both subgenres of RTS, but they are very different.

With the game engine opensourced, I doubt thats true. Its probably going to be much easier to just get this code building (patching out any proprietary bits and pieces) and going from there.

Modding the game to work properly at a high framerate doesn't sound very hard when you have the original assets & source code to work from.

Even more importantly, running at 60+fps while not breaking gameplay, physics, shaders, cutscenes...

This is less of a problem for multiplayer games usually because they will already need need to deal with these issues for syncing between clients.

Don't forget fix all the bugs...

What is a modern equivalent of this genre of game? I loved C&C

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