Show HN: OpenRA – RTS project that recreates Command and Conquer games | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: OpenRA – RTS project that recreates Command and Conquer games

openra.res0l.net

131 pointsZakWheaton40 comments

The codebase is in C# if anyone wants to jump in.

Also: https://www.bountysource.com/trackers/36085-openra - yes, that's $1600 in bounties.

Speaking as somebody who contributed a pathfinding fast-failing optimization, the development team is really helpful and the codebase is quite nice to jump into!

If you want to get a feel for RTS design, OpenRA is great stuff. Plus, it's really fun, so there's that too.

It's so great to see the RTS genre getting love from the free software community. It's really been abandoned by commercial game development studios, much like point-and-click adventurers.

I can't wait to have some cross-platform Command and Conquer style games with my friends.

...thankfully, not totally abandoned: http://www.uberent.com/pa/

I am a backer but it is pretty much just a multiplayer game and what I loved about RTS games was the single player campaign experience

And it's an indie game.

> It's really been abandoned by commercial game development studios

Not really. Starcraft 2 comes to mind. And not too long ago Supreme Commander. Wargame: European Escalation... and so on.

Not to mention the Total War series, though they are significantly different in some respects. I think the problem with traditional RTSes is that they are just too damn hard to play effectively for most people. As a former follower of StarCraft II, I remember vividly the discussions about ladder anxiety and even experienced it myself when playing. It's such an incredibly high-pressure game, I'm really not surprised people avoid playing it.

Total war is real time tactical plus turn based strategy,not really RTS.

Yeah, I'm aware of the difference. Personally, I think it's splitting hairs in an already extremely small genre (by number of titles, not players).

Just because the RTS genre is small doesn't mean that it makes sense to consider things that are very different part of the genre -- having construction/replenishment, strategic movement, etc., outside of the realtime game and part of the turn-based game makes Total War very different structurally from an RTS, and very different in its appeal.

Who gets to decide which structural features are allowed and which aren't allowed in the genre? I'm sorry but I've had this sort of argument with tons of other people regarding other genres. Personally, I don't think you can define strict rules for what should/shouldn't be in a game for it to be classified into a genre. Otherwise a genre would be nothing more than a list of games that never changes.

There are plenty of browser based RTS games in they don't have turns. However, total war is much closer to starcraft etc than any of these: http://www.mmobomb.com/browsergames/strategy

Planetary Annihilation did some amazing numbers on Kickstarter.

I miss Tiberian Sun. That and Goldeneye were what got me stoked about gaming in the first place.

Interesting- for me, Tiberian Sun was a huge disappointment. Maybe I was alone in this.

My favourite C&C game was Tiberian Sun, so I'm really interested in seeing an official mod from OpenRA. However, It's not clear to me if it uses the proprietary Freeware game content (terrain, units, structures) of the original game. Can anyone please explain if that's covered by the GPLv3 as well? Thanks.

No, the original assets are definitely not covered by any open content or free software license. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/FAQ#is-that-legal

Probably not, I didn't like it too much. At least compared to Red Alert 1, which is my all time favourite.

And on that topic maybe I should plug redalert1.com, a still active community for the game, and others too.

One more good example is NetStorm 2 [0] that is a Unity3D-based remake of little-known, but still good classic RTS game NetStorm [1].

[0] http://netstorm2hq.com/page.php?7

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetStorm:_Islands_At_War

Wow! I used to love the original.. Nice balance of strategy, puzzle and sweaty palmed action

These are the only kind of computer games that entertain me for some reason(except card games). First person shooter games bore the heck out of me and I don't play them.

There is one in particular called "Cossacks" that is hands down the best game ever IMHOP. I have been playing it for over 12 years and keep an XP machine (last windows machine in the house for a long time now) specifically to play Cossacks. I play it regularly too... at least a couple of hours a week usually.

And I really really wish someone would do a project like this with Cossacks. It is so much richer and more complex than the Command and Conquer series (although those were good as well... not complaining and this is a neat project). I think it actually takes years to get the nuances of Cossacks down. Best game EVER!

(I realize this is not normal. I don't know if I should seek counseling or if I'm just a game monogamist.)

Another similar project is ORTS, which has been around for a decade: https://skatgame.net/mburo/orts/orts.html

The most polished I'm aware of off the top of my head is Spring (http://springrts.com/), which started off as a Total Annihilation clone, but grew into a pretty solid engine in its own right.

Anything that helps people relive these amazing PC classics has my support. Same thing with OpenTTD!

There is also 0 A.D.[0], which is inspired by Age of Empires.

[0]: http://play0ad.com/

Glest/MegaGlest[0] is also another FOSS RTS project. When I last played it it felt a bit like Warcraft 3, but definitely not a clone (no heroes as far as I remember).

[0]: http://megaglest.org/

They should probably post some more news so that the 1st of April jokes isn't the first thing you see...

Awesome! Just awesome. My late father was a huge C&C fan but his fondness for the series ended around the time of C&C Generals. I remember with Red Alert 2, they introduced killer dolphins and Giant Squids. The RA series just became more and more comical over time. The first RA and its expansion packs remain my absolute favorite.

I host this and have been involved off and on for the last few years. If you want to contribute the dev team is very approachable (often a problem) and willing to help out where needed. The codebase is rather pleasant as well.

Surprised no one mentioned: http://zero-k.info/

This is an extremely polished open source game (spiritually based on Total Annihilation). Everyone should check it out.

Spring was mentioned, which is a superset of Zero-K

I remember trying this out a few years ago, and was amazed that it ran at 0.5fps on my modernish PC, when the original game from 1996 ran fine on a 66MHz PC with 16MB of RAM.

Wasn't there a version of C&C running completely in WebGL or JS/Canvas in some way?

http://www.adityaravishankar.com/projects/games/command-and-...

def fun and an easy game to play with your friends quickly. Plays really differently than the real RA, but doesn't mean it's bad.

Love the project. Crashes on my mac though :(

Have you reported the problem? Found a way to replicate it consistently?

I'm asking because a lot of people forget about the participation part of F/OSS. You don't have to be a killer dev to make a piece of software better. Sometimes you only need to donate a few minutes/an hour of your time.

On the off chance that it was a beach ball instead of a outright crash, apparently there's some cache generation that happens on first run on OSX 10.9+. It started working after ~5 minutes of beachball on my 2011 MBA.

This has been fixed in https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/5244 and will be shipped in the next version.

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