I like to think I caused this
EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
251–260 of 339 posts
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#252Found this gem in Recorder.cpp of generals:
//Kris: Patch 1.01 November 10, 2003 (integrated changes from Matt Campbell)
// Since we don't seem to have any *visible* desyncs when replaying games, but get this warning
// virtually every replay, the assumption is our CRC checking is faulty. Since we're at the
// tail end of patch season, let's just disable the message, and hope the users believe the
// problem is fixed. -MDC 3/20/2003
//TheInGameUI->message("GUI:CRCMismatch");Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#253// Homework for today. Write 2000 words reconciling "Your code must never crash" with "Intentionally putting crashes in the code". Fucktard. // DEBUG_CRASH(( "xferScienceVec - vector is not empty, but should be\n" )); // https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour/blo...
This one made me laugh, mostly because the variable names are so dumb // our RNG is basically shit -- horribly nonrandom at the start of the sequence. // get a few values at random to get rid of the dreck. // there's no mathematical basis for this, but empirically, it helps a lot. UnsignedInt silly = GetGameLogicRandomSeed() % 7; for (Int poo = 0; poo { GameLogicRandomValue(0, 1); // ignore result }
This is similar to "burn-in" for markov-chain montecarlo. When the chain is initialized to some bad value, it requires a number of iterations to get into a "good chain". But for a uniform RNG, any value should be good.
So the RNG doesn't seem great.
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#254Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 9…
All you have said is that it's easy to write something that takes you 90% there and ignores the last 10% of requirements. I worked in webdev some 15 years ago and if I could have dropped IE support sooner my code would have been so much simpler as well :)
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#256great in code documentation.
but how to C++ folks cope. every C++ codebase looks like its own different language with so many dialects.
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#257Found this gem in Recorder.cpp of generals: //Kris: Patch 1.01 November 10, 2003 (integrated changes from Matt Campbell) // Since we don't seem to have any *visible* desyncs when replaying games, but get this warning // virtually every replay, the assumption is our CRC checking is faulty. Since we're at the // tail end of patch season, let's just disable the message, and hope the users believe the // problem is fixed…
Hahaha. We used to get desyncs on networked games of Generals pretty regularly. I remember if a game took more than 30-40 mins I'd start to get a spidey sense things were about to go wrong
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like the Tiberian Dawn code is Windows too (so C&C Gold / W95) I was kind of wishing it was the 1995 DOS version source code! (also, no Dune 2000)
Emporer: Battle for Dune was their first 3D RTS and I personally loved the gameplay, story, and soundtrack. I very much hope it will eventually be open-sourced.
I play this game once a year... every year :)
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emporer: Battle for Dune was their first 3D RTS and I personally loved the gameplay, story, and soundtrack. I very much hope it will eventually be open-sourced.
Yeah, I wonder why Emperor: Battle for Dune is not part of the open source since it's basically an earlier version of the General Engine. Would be weird to have the source code for that but not for Emperor.
Licensing perhaps
Re: EA Open Sources Command and Conquer: Red Alert, along with other games
#260> If you wish to rebuild the source code and tools successfully you will need to find or write new replacements (or remove the code using them entirely) for the following libraries; Take the hint, Valve. And Epic (UT99). Having third-party code is not an excuse.
I thought about this recently - probably Valve is reluctant to because people are still licensing both the GoldSource and Source engines (I think the last GoldSource engine license was in 2020 but the game hasn't even been announced; I think four Source engine games are due this year). If EA released the Nightfire engine code (very advanced GoldSource engine fork) that would be great though! But it's sad that John Ca…
I completely forgot about Nightfire! What an amazing game it was.