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EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

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Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#231

Post by qingcharles »

lucb1e wrote: post #193
qingcharles wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a game dev in the mid 90s. It was unserious. There was all sorts of crazy shit in the graphics assets. One wall I remember says "CUNT" on it o_O I'm sad if developers can no longer name their variables poo and fuck . Also teenage me would probably be horrified finding out 30 years later his source code was public.

> Also teenage me would probably be horrified finding out 30 years later his source code was public. I guess that's why moral rights are unalienable in many countries: if you are horrified what they do with it, you still retain that and this right did not go to your employer Not that I think there is anything here the devs need to be ashamed of, to be clear, just what came to mind as I read this remark

I'd just be horrified by the quality of some code. It included some of my best code, and some of my worst code. Some of it was written after three days straight with no sleep for those times when Eidos wanted to come for a personal demo.

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#232

Post by slavik81 »

MisterTea wrote: post #38
HelloUsername wrote: post #2

Red Alert: https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert Tiberian Dawn: https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Tiberian_Dawn Renegade: https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Renegade Generals Zero Hour: https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour EA post: https://www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-con... Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/commandandconquer/comments/1izmpmb (Deleted Reddi…

Holy shit, Renegade. I had struck that from memory. God, I remember trying to play Renegade with my brother and all I can remember was a buggy nightmare. Also having flashbacks of extreme vitriol for gamespy.

I loved Renegade. The multiplayer demo was great. It had such excellent map design. The trade-offs in buying upgrades felt very strategic, as well.

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#233

Post by josephg »

tete wrote: post #40
theandrewbailey wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd settle for a native Linux build.

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

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?

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#234

Post by dagelf »

For real, CnC Generals was the game that has taught me the most about the frivolity of war: there are no winners, both sides lose, it's just a grand burning of resources... for nothing.

You build a wonderful base and war machine, only to watch it burn.

If this was "required playing" to all kids, I would be greatly surprised if war would still be a thing... it basically mocks war. In the most fun way possible!

Look up Jeffrey Sachs' address to EU Parliament, if you are unsure about the real geopolitics of this century... you won't find it in US media.

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#235

Post by josephg »

harshreality wrote: post #36
ageitgey wrote: post #13

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

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.

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.

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#236

Post by josephg »

jimnotgym wrote: post #111
theandrewbailey wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft devs also claimed that making cmd faster would require years of research, but someone did that in a weekend by making it run on a GPU. I'm sure there's someone out there that would solve every problem Space Cadet has within a week, just for fun.

I'm sure there are lots of large groups of devs who are undone by an upstart kid with a fresh perspective and no fear

Can confirm. I've been on both sides of that fence.

I worked on a product about a decade ago which had an unnecessarily complicated custom layout system written in javascript. CSS was missing a lot of features at the time, so we figured we'd roll our own. It was crazy complicated - and it had all these weird easy to reproduce bugs.

For fun, some pesky kid on twitter took our insanely layout system and reimplemented 95% of it in a couple hundred lines of (almost) pure CSS. At a glance, it looked identical to our product - but the code was small, clean and fast. The link got passed around the office. It was amazing how many reasons people had to dismiss it. "Ah, see - it doesn't even do this weird custom behaviour we have!" or "Well and good in chrome - but it doesn't work properly on IE8!" and so on. I've never seen a better example of motivated reasoning, before or since.

What we should have done is reach out and offer that kid a job.

The smartest programmer on your team isn't as smart as the smartest programmer on the internet.

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#237

Post by mock-possum »

slavik81 wrote: post #172
iamacyborg wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, Tiberian Sun was my favourite in that series

Tiberian Sun was the first PC game I ever owned. I picked my current username for Westwood Online and have been using it ever since. I had played Red Alert at a friend's house and when I went to buy my own copy, the guy at the shop recommend I get Tiberian Sun instead, as it had just released. I must admit that I was a bit disappointed in the gameplay as compared to Red Alert, but the world building was amazing. I sp…

Blizzard’s commitment to providing editors for the RTS games was a big part of my early loyalty - all the way up through Star Craft 2, you could just pop the editor open and start making your own maps and scenarios.

It’s what gave us DotA, and Tower Defense, and maybe some others I’m not remembering - maybe even vampire survivors ish for horde survival?

Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games

#239

Post by tomw1808 »

sho_hn wrote: post #71
tomw1808 wrote: post #39

I am speechless. The most vile gaming company I know. The most beloved game I ever played. Now, Open source ... from them? How? Why? Marketing gag or a step in the right direction? But then, OpenRA has existed for a while - does that mean its getting even better? Where is this going?

EA and Open Source isn't completely alien. Their C++ standard library EASTL was open sourced long ago and is a historically quite important and influential codebase in the history of C++'s evolution. They've also open sourced and patent-pledged a bunch of gaming-relatee accessibility tech over the years. And of course Micropolis/SimCity. My advice is to celebrate the successes of large corporates in this regard very…

> My advice is to celebrate the successes of large corporates in this regard very hard and often - this provides backup to the champions on the inside.

I am wondering what the metrics / KPIs are they are tracking to see if open sourcing something is a success or not. Can't be just "sales went up for retro games when we open sourced" - there must be something like community reception and retention, general acceptance or whatever...

But yes, I agree. Let's celebrate this and hope for more.

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