The game is well balanced, it's easy to set up, the number of games found in the game lobby are increasing and my trust in humanity turned up a notch.
The time spent the past few years on trying to establish a flawless red alert multiplayer experience with friends is mind boggling. I'm a below amateur 'anything computer related' type of guy and I appreciate so much that some people somewhere has taken the time and effort to fix a remake of this historical gem for humanity. A program that for some reason seemed like is an impossible undertaking by the original creators or EA (with it's garbage 'last decade' edition). No more trying to mold the original program with customized patches, sub-programs and whatnot, at least for people like me and I imagine countless of others with love for the original game. Fuck, it's even better than the original, FAR better - at least when it comes to the game balance in the multiplayer game.
Still there are things that can be done better (and probably will improve, mind you the so far great game updates) but what of it? It works great, I'm actually playing this game online more than Starcraft 2 now. That's what you have done.
So thank you thank you thank you for all that you have done with this, and for whatever you will do with it in the future. Except screwing it up:) Thank you!
Thank you so much!!!!
Story time!
(X-posted from Cncnet.org forums for display to others than flamers
)
All right, adressing my love affair with the original Red Alert and my path to OpenRA, because why not:
When I was around 13, my dad took me to the states to visit my family (his side) in New Orleans for the winter holidays and was my first trip to the states. I'm a Norwegian and visiting the USA is a big thing for any Wegan kid. We were staying for about 2 weeks and I was given an allowence of $100 (a Ben!) for casual shopping when going out. As a video game geek I quickly found my way to a video game store at a mall and located the PC compartment and on the game shelves was this gigantic game box displaying Red Alert, Red Alert: Counter Strike and Red Alert: Aftermath. Back home I had a demo version installed on my computer but I also got to see the game played briefly on multiplayer at a friend of a firend's house with multiple PC's connected up in a big room by his dad who was working with something related to computers. I never got to play there myself because this kid, who was around 8 or 9) was a complete jerk and didn't allow me or my friend try it out but we got to stand behind the chair watching him play Soviet in Skirmish mode, spamming tesla coils. Anyways, back to the store, this big ass box that was almost as long as a kid's arm's lenght had a price tag of $99 dollars on it. I picked up the box to read the back cover of it but obviously by then my mind was already made up. My Dad was fine with it knowing how crazy I was about video games but my family thought I was nuts spending all my money for my stay on 1 game. Back home to the family house, I delved into the content like a pirate finding treasure. I still had over a week before travelling back home so I had plenty of time studying the contents, the manuals, the game guide telling you how to start the first Allied base on one of the first missions by basically securing your ore income and "go crazy building pillboxes". The music CD by Frank Klepacki was my first experience intro to the music genre and I listened to it fanatically on my portable CD player.
Back home in Norway I got to install it the moment I had access to the PC. To my big disappointment the resolution was different than I had previously seen it in my friend's friend's house before, it was all zoomed in and didn't look as pretty as how I remembered it. I still played it non-stop but after a week or 2 I somehow figured out how to change the resolution back to the proper scale which made me extremely satisfied. I played the shit out of the game, playing the campaigns over and over (didn't care too much about the expansion missions) and in school my friends and I took turns listening to the soundtrack in between sessions.
I should mention, my previous RTS experience involved watching my friend (same as above) playing the Dune 2 campaigns, and I got myself a private copy of WarCraft 2 installed on my computer by the big brother of a school mate back when I was around 11 which I had to pay 50kr (ca $6) for, obviously without my parent's knowledge. WarCraft 2 was my first real experience with an RTS game.
After Red Alert my love of RTS brought me over to StarCraft but I quickly went back to C&C with Red Alert 2 when it got released. Red Alert 2 was the first game I got to play online and after playing the campaigns I got completely hooked on online Quick Matches which was at the time a very functional match making service getting you to play against other equal skilled players in your region. After playing a ton of quick matches and reading strategy guides online I eventually found myself playing in the top 200 on the European server using cheap Soviet rush tactics getting Rhino Tanks and collecting tears of Ragequitters all day long. By this time Red Alert 1 had taken a back seat as I moved on to other games (big fan of the Settlers and Civ series) but it wasn't before High School (Videregående) before I took up RA1 again when I befriended other RTS fans and being very competetive we frequently LANed up playing then "old school" games against eachother for years including series as AoE, Settlers, Civ, StarCraft and Red Alert. At a point we played Red Alert against each other excessively for a couiple of years, going 1v1 for hours on particular maps that were huge and asymmetrical, maps such as River Basin, Death Valley and Tournament Hills (courtesy of this site for putting all RA1 skirmish maps on display) that allowed for big arenas in which tank blobs would pose around each other and look for a position to move in, eventually getting into a fight doing the stop-and-move dance to deliver as many tank shots as possible while keeping on the move to reduce damage taken yourself. This went on for quite some time and we had a ton of fun with it but one day we accidentally came across this relatively small open-source project OpenRA (around 2011). Despite it being very unpolished and ridden with bugs we found it fascinating how the system of unit production was tweaked as so as you had a strong incentive moving up the tech tree and engage the opponents with more options and made available the gameplay that we were looking for in Red Alert.
For anyone who's wondering, the biggest and most important difference between the RA95 and OpenRA's Red Alert is the way production works. The additional production fascilities built in RA95 cuts the procuction time by a huge margin per fascility all up until a single tank are built in a few seconds. In OpenRA's Red Alert the added production fascility cuts the production by a small margin and caps the production speed reduction at 50% with 7 fascilities. The 2nd production fascility rewards the player with a -15% in production time, 3rd with -10% etc. This setup made it applicable for the player to look for additional means of production besides mainly the War Factory, with added infantry, air units and possibly naval in addition to take advantage of the tech for each faction. In turn this initially exposed a great deal of game imbalances since in RA95's multiplayer, for obvious reasons, most of the units, structures and tech aren't used in the meta and thus initially never had a need for balance tweaking. Units such as Tanya, Mechanics, Medics, Shock Troopers, Tesla Tanks, Artillery, YAKs, MiG's and tech structures such as the Chronosphere and the Iron Curtain are and always has been utterly void in high level RA95 competetive multiplayer and therefore have had no attention payed to them other than with plots in the Red Alert campaign missions. All these assets are a part of my fascination and nostalgia trip with C&C Red Alert and having these available as part of an arsenal when playing against an opponent are immensly satisfying.
So that's my story I guess! Needless to say we never looked back on RA95's multiplayer but that isn't to say RA95 is bad or with a lesser value. RA95's multiplayer experience is unique and has a great sense of fun with it as it is. The story is that Westwood Studios, as great as they were, never invested much time in to making the original Red Alert (same as with Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun) as a venue for online competetive multiplayer. Naturally because of the limited household internet at the time but within the current modern era of internet, hardware and programming the possibilites are endless in making Red Alert more accessible, be it with a re-invention such as OpenRA or new emerging projects such as Red Alert++. I, for one, prefer OpenRA but that's my personal preference and I have legitimate reasons as to why I consider it to be a superior platform to access the very core of what Red Alert means to me. I just want to see more people discovering it for themselves so that I can have more players to pwn on a daily basis
gg
(X-posted from Cncnet.org forums for display to others than flamers
)All right, adressing my love affair with the original Red Alert and my path to OpenRA, because why not:
When I was around 13, my dad took me to the states to visit my family (his side) in New Orleans for the winter holidays and was my first trip to the states. I'm a Norwegian and visiting the USA is a big thing for any Wegan kid. We were staying for about 2 weeks and I was given an allowence of $100 (a Ben!) for casual shopping when going out. As a video game geek I quickly found my way to a video game store at a mall and located the PC compartment and on the game shelves was this gigantic game box displaying Red Alert, Red Alert: Counter Strike and Red Alert: Aftermath. Back home I had a demo version installed on my computer but I also got to see the game played briefly on multiplayer at a friend of a firend's house with multiple PC's connected up in a big room by his dad who was working with something related to computers. I never got to play there myself because this kid, who was around 8 or 9) was a complete jerk and didn't allow me or my friend try it out but we got to stand behind the chair watching him play Soviet in Skirmish mode, spamming tesla coils. Anyways, back to the store, this big ass box that was almost as long as a kid's arm's lenght had a price tag of $99 dollars on it. I picked up the box to read the back cover of it but obviously by then my mind was already made up. My Dad was fine with it knowing how crazy I was about video games but my family thought I was nuts spending all my money for my stay on 1 game. Back home to the family house, I delved into the content like a pirate finding treasure. I still had over a week before travelling back home so I had plenty of time studying the contents, the manuals, the game guide telling you how to start the first Allied base on one of the first missions by basically securing your ore income and "go crazy building pillboxes". The music CD by Frank Klepacki was my first experience intro to the music genre and I listened to it fanatically on my portable CD player.
Back home in Norway I got to install it the moment I had access to the PC. To my big disappointment the resolution was different than I had previously seen it in my friend's friend's house before, it was all zoomed in and didn't look as pretty as how I remembered it. I still played it non-stop but after a week or 2 I somehow figured out how to change the resolution back to the proper scale which made me extremely satisfied. I played the shit out of the game, playing the campaigns over and over (didn't care too much about the expansion missions) and in school my friends and I took turns listening to the soundtrack in between sessions.
I should mention, my previous RTS experience involved watching my friend (same as above) playing the Dune 2 campaigns, and I got myself a private copy of WarCraft 2 installed on my computer by the big brother of a school mate back when I was around 11 which I had to pay 50kr (ca $6) for, obviously without my parent's knowledge. WarCraft 2 was my first real experience with an RTS game.
After Red Alert my love of RTS brought me over to StarCraft but I quickly went back to C&C with Red Alert 2 when it got released. Red Alert 2 was the first game I got to play online and after playing the campaigns I got completely hooked on online Quick Matches which was at the time a very functional match making service getting you to play against other equal skilled players in your region. After playing a ton of quick matches and reading strategy guides online I eventually found myself playing in the top 200 on the European server using cheap Soviet rush tactics getting Rhino Tanks and collecting tears of Ragequitters all day long. By this time Red Alert 1 had taken a back seat as I moved on to other games (big fan of the Settlers and Civ series) but it wasn't before High School (Videregående) before I took up RA1 again when I befriended other RTS fans and being very competetive we frequently LANed up playing then "old school" games against eachother for years including series as AoE, Settlers, Civ, StarCraft and Red Alert. At a point we played Red Alert against each other excessively for a couiple of years, going 1v1 for hours on particular maps that were huge and asymmetrical, maps such as River Basin, Death Valley and Tournament Hills (courtesy of this site for putting all RA1 skirmish maps on display) that allowed for big arenas in which tank blobs would pose around each other and look for a position to move in, eventually getting into a fight doing the stop-and-move dance to deliver as many tank shots as possible while keeping on the move to reduce damage taken yourself. This went on for quite some time and we had a ton of fun with it but one day we accidentally came across this relatively small open-source project OpenRA (around 2011). Despite it being very unpolished and ridden with bugs we found it fascinating how the system of unit production was tweaked as so as you had a strong incentive moving up the tech tree and engage the opponents with more options and made available the gameplay that we were looking for in Red Alert.
For anyone who's wondering, the biggest and most important difference between the RA95 and OpenRA's Red Alert is the way production works. The additional production fascilities built in RA95 cuts the procuction time by a huge margin per fascility all up until a single tank are built in a few seconds. In OpenRA's Red Alert the added production fascility cuts the production by a small margin and caps the production speed reduction at 50% with 7 fascilities. The 2nd production fascility rewards the player with a -15% in production time, 3rd with -10% etc. This setup made it applicable for the player to look for additional means of production besides mainly the War Factory, with added infantry, air units and possibly naval in addition to take advantage of the tech for each faction. In turn this initially exposed a great deal of game imbalances since in RA95's multiplayer, for obvious reasons, most of the units, structures and tech aren't used in the meta and thus initially never had a need for balance tweaking. Units such as Tanya, Mechanics, Medics, Shock Troopers, Tesla Tanks, Artillery, YAKs, MiG's and tech structures such as the Chronosphere and the Iron Curtain are and always has been utterly void in high level RA95 competetive multiplayer and therefore have had no attention payed to them other than with plots in the Red Alert campaign missions. All these assets are a part of my fascination and nostalgia trip with C&C Red Alert and having these available as part of an arsenal when playing against an opponent are immensly satisfying.
So that's my story I guess! Needless to say we never looked back on RA95's multiplayer but that isn't to say RA95 is bad or with a lesser value. RA95's multiplayer experience is unique and has a great sense of fun with it as it is. The story is that Westwood Studios, as great as they were, never invested much time in to making the original Red Alert (same as with Tiberian Dawn and Tiberian Sun) as a venue for online competetive multiplayer. Naturally because of the limited household internet at the time but within the current modern era of internet, hardware and programming the possibilites are endless in making Red Alert more accessible, be it with a re-invention such as OpenRA or new emerging projects such as Red Alert++. I, for one, prefer OpenRA but that's my personal preference and I have legitimate reasons as to why I consider it to be a superior platform to access the very core of what Red Alert means to me. I just want to see more people discovering it for themselves so that I can have more players to pwn on a daily basis
gg
