Red Alert 2 in web browser
chronodivide.com
chronodivide.com
2. The Mental Omega mod project[1] is going strong, so RA2 is still worth playing today. Hopefully it will work in this browser-based version.
[0] https://forums.revora.net/topic/107344-red-alert-2-engine-so...
So if they had it they'd would have almost certainly included RA2 in that as well.
To this day I haven’t found a game that replicates the magic of 1999 era of RTS..
Not arguing with you, just saying if that's true, it's insane.
Prior to ~2010 we were simply deleting source code and assets for finished projects; either because they weren't owned by the developer due to a publishing deal, or because the developers didn't want to reuse their garbage code. Same follows for assets, often they were owned by the publisher and not the developer, but if the developer did happen to own them they'd rarely see reuse in future projects. And publishers didn't catch on to the value of data retention until remakes started to make serious money.
I still have backed up copies of the full source code of personal projects that I wrote 25 years ago. These will probably never be deleted until I'm dead.
1: One company I worked for didn't have a clue about managing their source code, and didn't even use source control. They were a hardware manufacturer that just didn't understand or care about software at all. Not what I'd think of when I think a professional game developer.
That was fairly typical at the time. It wasn't uncommon for a game publisher to patch their games, it was uncommon for that patching happen too far from the initial release. After all, they wanted their game devs working on something other than the old release. The patches were strictly just a goodwill thing to make sure the game kept selling.
"recovered" the source code this was the mob's code to begin with britboys
The industry's treatment of its works was pretty horrible back in the day. Not even 25 years earlier, developers had to fight to be credited in games. Lessons take a while to learn, apparently.
[1] https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silen...
You can play a minimal web version at: - https://throwingbones.com/ben/s30/
Source: - https://github.com/benprew/s30 (patches welcome!) Written in Go using ebitengine
I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then.
Gone.
Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone.
I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes.
The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything.
Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends?
It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.
Our company retained the right to use the source code. We pushed it, but some circumstances and some assholes stood in the way. The business started to struggle, we considered open sourcing it but the contract was complex and it would have been difficult to prepare the code to be open sourced. We didn't have the time and money to open source it and said distro company didn't want to pay us to do that.
Eventually the company was bought by some Russian company, the team laid off, the code was forgotten about and likely just illegitimately sits in a handful of ex-staff drives.
I feel it was a loss for the world that a huge effort never saw the light of day.
Other part of it is most studios didn't imagine a use for old games in the future. So they weren't archived properly. World of Warcraft original source code was mostly lost and that game sold incredibly well and the company stayed in business. More modern studios are thinking more about remasters, remakes and archiving their work now so it's mostly a problem with older titles.
Everything afterwards felt lame and was geared too much towards multiplayer balance, which does not interest me the least.
I love that they don't take themselves too seriously in this series. RA3 had some hilarious cutscenes with characters barely holding it together (the Soviet Premier was an underrated Tim Curry role IMO).
barely holds laughter back and takes a break
SPACE!"
It's the opposite of C&C3, which had a good campaign but the theme was a step back from the scifi of Tiberian Sun. Especially the GDI/NOD units were way less futuristic, and the alien ones were a bit too similar to each other in style. The cutscenes were also mostly boring compared to earlier games.
If I recall correctly, the expansion pack for C&C3 was much more interesting in these aspects, but the gameplay suffered.
A more innocent time tbh
If I watch YT videos a la "New RTS games 2025/2026" there are very interesting projects which give me hope that SC2 is not the end of RTS games.
Starcraft and Starcraft II, and Warcraft I,II,III had great campaigns. So it is kind of ironic that a lot of the games copying them cut the campaigns for the esports focus.
It was particularly visible in how, if you edited the map so that every pile of resources was 50k, so essentially endless, you'd arrive at a stalemate.
Given (effectively) unlimited resources within base distance, Zerg undoubtedly have a fairly substantial advantage and will probably win. Assuming comparable player skills, of course.
Their remax time is 1/3-1/4 that of Protoss/Terran, they can tech-switch near instantaneously, and they have some of the most powerful endgame meta. This was true for SC1 and Brood War, and it's even more true for current SC2.
Tempest Rising is a newer RTS (this year) that's also in the C&C style, its highlight is the campaign. (Multiplayer I think is basically in the go-to-discord phase already.) The real problem is that RTS is just an unpopular genre, whether it's taking design inspiration from the C&C branch or the SC branch.
And Aoe2 is consistently getting official updates, there's 3 Indian and 4 Chinese civs now.
For example, getting to the 3rd age in AoE 2 ASAP is basically mandatory, but in AoM you can potentially start attacking from the 2nd age. On top of that, getting to the 3rd age in AoE 2 takes much longer than AoM. So there's basically a whole lot of wasted time at the start of an AoE 2 match.
It was sad to see the slow and steady enshittification with 2 and 3. The online community is pretty toxic too.
We’d start the game up in one computer, then pop the CD out and start it up in the next one, and so on.
I do remember having to install IPX to play over LAN.
Keygen was also easily available.
They're technically challenging to make and creatively hard to balance.
The public doesn't want to pay $60 upfront for a campaign when fun freemium games exist.
The UX does not work well on controller so a huge amount of console players will be out of reach.
Games tend to be quite long and because it's not team play matchmaking matters a lot. This push multiplayer into being highly competitive and not pushes out the casual players.
Seems like Clash Royale likes are the best we've come up with to modernize the genre but of course its very different.
I'd probably lose another week if I had easy access to RA2 modding. Or let's say "experimenting and watching the AI burn" not to disrespect the real modders.
The "we made units this way because it's fun" philosophy is sorely missed. Every game feels like it goes through a tuning phase just for esports. Even if the game isn't out yet.
I think its something about the perspective warping of the 3D camera that makes 3D RTS games look weird to me
but on a tangent, just wanted to add how impressed in was at super Mario 3D world on the Nintendo switch. Perfect balance between good looking and pragmatic 3D graphics adding up to real platformer feel.
And, unfortunately, Chronodivide does not work with Yuri's Revenge expansion; apparently that game is build differently.
That wasn't the case when I checked the site a few hours ago, the autopopulated link is new.
Sorry, didn't know. That's very strange, I've never had that in all my times playing Chronodivide. Just in case the URL field is empty for someone: https://archive.org/download/red-alert-2-multiplayer/Red-Ale...
Instead of working on finishing it though they just add more tedious features to RA1 (an in-game encyclopaedia, really?)
I think it's fine for OpenRA to focus on what they enjoy most, and others to cover other games.
Oh well.
Then again, the demo is only usable for those with existing assets.
Can't, for privacy reasons.
I would guess because the GPU world is messy and full of broken drivers full of hacks and workarounds, so it is rather a miracle that FF works so good, with the few engineers they have left.
(If you are on a chrome based browser, open chrome://gpu to get a glimpse into the work they have been doing just for your GPU and plattform)
While on native games the engine can workaround the driver issues, Web 3D APIs are at the mercy of the browser sandbox, where studios don't have access to possible workarounds due to lack of feedback on API performance.
Minimum specs: Memory: 4GB (8GB recommended)
The original ran on 128 MB or even less.
Oops, it's a browser based game, you still need the assets on the client side, i.e. in your local memory... never mind
If they could distribute them, they would.
They have a whole section of their website where they list the features. https://chronodivide.com/#features
Edit: Oh maybe you do have to have the assets now? I swear last time I used it, it was all online :/
Again, just idle curiosity. No actual intentions here, so just wondering if anyone has some deeper knowledge on the subject.
Not sure it's ever been proven definitively in court, though. And if you "made" custom assets that were exactly like the original ones only with a 1px color difference or something I'm sure you'd fall foul of it. What counts as different "enough" is always debatable.
Once you've seen the originals, you're contaminated and no longer suitable for the role of doing the replacement work.
However, the exact definitions of "significantly different" and "assets" is where things start to get fuzzy. While you could definitely make a very similar RTS game, exactly how similar can you get? EA doesn't own "military-themed RTS", but they probably do own "Soviets vs Allies with about 5 different unit types, air transports, and tesla coils." Getting even more fuzzy, are unit abilities considered assets, or game mechanics? It'd have to be worked out in court.
My gut feeling is these clone engines would probably lose in court. I think the specific expression of the general game mechanics being cloned here probably would constitute infringement. But there isn't much upside to the IP owners to pursue enthusiastic hobbyists cloning a 20+ year old game in a non-commercial way, so they let it slide.
[1] "Although Amusement World admitted that they appropriated Atari's idea, the court determined that this was not prohibited, because copyright only protects the specific expression of an idea, not the idea itself." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_Inc._v._Amusement_World...
OpenRA simply downloads a copy that it loads for the purpose of assets, but the engine is completely new, and it is very different from the orignal Red Alert. At this point, I don't think a single unit acts exactly the way it did in the original game. It's endlessly being rebalanced.
I even visited their studios in LA during a cross-country Amtrak trip. They were very kind, especially the community manager (whose name escapes me). I was given a tour and allowed to play Yuri's Revenge before its release. They gave me a Dune 2 box and C&C poster which I still have somewhere.
If looking for gameplay like this, OpenRA does play a few games without original game assets. I don't think RA2 though.
When you have a large ship, like the Aircraft Carrier or Dreadnaught, you'll notice that its rotation is much smoother than in the original game.
Yuri's Revenge when?
Also, if that's a non-profit fan project, why is the source code not available?
The whole bundle for £6 or £1.60 for RA2/YR.
AK-47’s for EVERYONE!
Love it, can’t wait to poke at it from home later.