OpenRA • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenRA

#121

Post by wahnfrieden » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 2:24 AM UTC

egeozcan wrote: post #28

wahnfrieden wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you familiar with my modding site RA2Factory?

Yes! I downloaded a lot of shps voxels and map packs from your site! I think it was the beginning of 2000s? Anyway, a very delayed thank you!

Amazing! You're welcome. Yes it must've been around 2000, I was around 13-14 when I built Tiberian Sun Factory and then RA2 Factory.

To be honest I didn't play with mods much myself because I was consumed enough with the joy of building tools (such as for INI editing and voxels) and the websites, and connecting with the community and other site/tool builders. I did play the vanilla games a lot though.

I contacted the community manager at Westwood Studios and was granted the chance to visit once during a trip through Vegas. I remember him and others being very friendly, giving me a tour through the office, seeing the reality of the life of game testers, having some time with the Yuri's Revenge expansion before release, and being given some merch - a Dune II box, a C&C poster, which I still have in storage. Just to share some more of what I can recall from those days.

Re: OpenRA

#122

Post by skhr0680 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 2:48 AM UTC

benoau wrote: post #56

liendolucas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison was against the original game. I haven't played on the computer since ages, but that was my impression the times I played it. I'm not deep into all the nuances of the game just that it was considerably better that the 1995 release.

1995 was the original "Command and Conquer" not "Red Alert". In the original C&C the computer wouldn't attack sandbox walls which was basically godmode since you could just fence them off heh.

The computer player would always target your nothern-most structure for airstrikes or nuclear weapons. This persisted to at least Generals Zero Hour (I never played the campaign of C&C3 or 4 so can't comment on them).

Re: OpenRA

#123

Post by kodefreeze » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 2:48 AM UTC

We are building a command & conquer style RTS. If you're interested in taking a look at our very early demo of the game play, please check out: https://warpact-rts-9221.web.app/

And join our discord to follow along!

Re: OpenRA

#124

Post by hypercube33 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 2:52 AM UTC

opengears wrote: post #64

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link to your GitHub? I'd love to play the version with your improvements!

https://github.com/hypercube33/OpenRA/

ReCNC I think is published - this is the new fork

Re: OpenRA

#125

Post by hypercube33 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 3:12 AM UTC

hypercube33 wrote: post #124

opengears wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/hypercube33/OpenRA/

ReCNC I think is published - this is the new fork

https://github.com/hypercube33/ReCNC

Re: OpenRA

#126

Post by shmoe » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 3:29 AM UTC

minitoar wrote: post #77

apitman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it worked, IPX LAN was maybe the peak UX in multiplayer gaming. Moving everything to TCP/IP came with a lot of improvements, but we also lost important things. Reminds me of the move from Flash to HTML5.

I was using ipx over hamachi for multiplayer c&c as recently as 15 years ago!

Hamachi is what I always bring up when explaining tailscale :P

Re: OpenRA

#127

Post by kodefreeze » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 3:31 AM UTC

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #118

Played OpenRA a few years back, and as an 80s/90s kid played the original. OpenRA is great in my books. I've linked this before, but I suggest watching some.of the competition replays of OpenRA from the "five aces" YouTube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmywk-96Irk ).

[dead]

Re: OpenRA

#128

Post by teruakohatu » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

b112 wrote: post #42

hypercube33 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. I find the balance for player vs AI to be actually pretty horrible. AI can outrange artillery sight so you have no choice but to push forward always or micro manage units. I have a fork of OpenRA on my GitHub where I try to address this, along with pathfinding bugs, enabling Tiberian Sun and fixing bugs with that. I also updated it to cross platform .NET 10 and bumped the performance up about 6-10x fixing mino…

The load/save is what kills me. It's a great project, but having to wait 2 hours for a game to load, fans blaring on my laptop, makes it less playable. For context, I love huge, massive maps with loads of players. OpenRA replays the entire game to restore, it doesn't have a save-current-state routine. So 20 hours of massive map + 8 players means 2 hours of pegged CPU to reload the save. Heartbreaking.

Does that apply even for single player saves?

Re: OpenRA

#129

Post by mmooss » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 5:52 AM UTC

b112 wrote: post #42

hypercube33 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird. I find the balance for player vs AI to be actually pretty horrible. AI can outrange artillery sight so you have no choice but to push forward always or micro manage units. I have a fork of OpenRA on my GitHub where I try to address this, along with pathfinding bugs, enabling Tiberian Sun and fixing bugs with that. I also updated it to cross platform .NET 10 and bumped the performance up about 6-10x fixing mino…

The load/save is what kills me. It's a great project, but having to wait 2 hours for a game to load, fans blaring on my laptop, makes it less playable. For context, I love huge, massive maps with loads of players. OpenRA replays the entire game to restore, it doesn't have a save-current-state routine. So 20 hours of massive map + 8 players means 2 hours of pegged CPU to reload the save. Heartbreaking.

Why is saving the state hard for them? So many games and other software save their state .... Imagine Excel 'replaying' the spreadsheet to return to the latest state.

Re: OpenRA

#130

Post by mmooss » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #103

b112 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. You know, I wonder. The API provided to AI scripts must have enough info for limited strategies, but I've never seen what's what. You have. What are the possibilities for just giving Claude that each turn. Yes, insane over kill, but in a couple of years Claude level AI will run locally on laptops...

Even if it worked, it most likely wouldn't be fun. Game devs have talked about the fine line one walks with AI in strategy games: your goal is to challenge the player, not to beat him. It's not impossible to make AI which can beat the player, but that wouldn't actually be fun to play against. So the challenge becomes trying to create something which will hit the sweet spot of challenging but beatable for most people.

I think the issue is less winning and losing, and more feeling and seeming real. Game AI opponents do absurd things that break the immersion; suddenly, you realize you're just playing a dumb game on a machine.

I suspect LLMs might be able to do that better. Even their hallucinations are less frequent and more convincing, very generally speaking, than game AIs IME.