OpenRA

Why the original Redalert was so popular Small details matter. They make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.



Unit Costs Scale
Price range from $100 to $2500 , just like monopoly the money maths is easy when the numbers are in this range.
Many RTS game complicate things by using $$$ costs that are hard to grasp off the top of your head. Eg $175250 , $33201...not good !




Bookmarks
The function keys allowed you to jump to anywhere on the map. You could book mark a bridge, the enemy base etc. This greatly aided dynamic play. Airforce and navy in particular..... BRING BACK BOOK MARKS !...WHERE DID THEY GO ???




Iconic designs for most units and buildings
Tank, Jeep, Radar Dome, power station, Teslacoil etc...less things to learn. Strarcraft is just blobs n squibs. The same is true of many other RTS games.



Simple Colour Selector
Where did that go ? doh! ]bring it back openRA !!!



Big Icons on the right hand side toolbar
Pretty pictures of the units in action that were easy to click. Most people are right handed, DONT make them play the cross hands mouse game!




Field rather than point resources.
Ore patches that take up dozens of map tiles give you something to fight over. Much better than a single tile point resource ringed by endless turrrets & walls. The classic redalert refinery and ore truck system has yet to be bettered stylistically or playwise. A timeless gem.




Last chance crates The game throws you a life line in your hour of needed. 50% chance of an MCV crate




Mess with time & it messes with you bring back the chrono vortex ! perhaps with a little nerf




No fog of war
FOW might be a default these days but its absence in the original made learning and playing the game that much easier. Doubly so when complex computer games where still new to the general public. RTS? even the abreviation was new.




Pixel Love Tanya puffing her hair, tesla'd dogs yelping in skeleton form. The love per pixel strong in this one !



Classic selection of units
Jeep, APC, light tank, scud,heli, chinook, ships, subs etc, its all there!....only the original artillery sucked looks & statwise

and much more besides


The sad news is that the PC games industry (and open source projects ) never seem to understand what factors make for great games. If they did who would bother playing 20 year old classics ? Great design is obvious, what is less obvious are the reasons for it being ignored by those tasked with creating.

dzine wrote: ↑Simple Colour Selector where did that go ? doh! ....bring it back openRA !!!

As I played countless of lan games on RA95 I have a nostalgia for the original color palette. Not sure if there's enough of them for huge team games tho.

agreed, but nice, easy to click on colour boxes is the CORRECT way to go..x,y colour picker = bad design for RTS games

A 10x10 grid would give a 100 colours. Think well defined and well seperated shades of colour & brightness...OPTIMISED FOR CLARITY !

The colours carefully selected so you cant 'bugsploit' the colours to your gaming advantage. Colour wheels have been in use for centuries!!!! ...lets not make selecting team colours any harder than it needs be.


eg Black, White 4 shades of red,green,blue, yellow etc

Almost every RTS game made has a drop list of pre filtered colours....except openRA , doh! keep it simple


Ive lost count of the number of times/arguments and hassle the current colour selector thang has caused players. Q when did common sense leave the code room !


Never confuse player choice with overchoice

A fixed dropdown color palette is a pain in the ass to be set up - it has to consider all options of the game in a single run. This person took months with setting up 16 distinct colors in his Yuri's Revenge mod - and still had to reiterate twice.

Black is out of the question, due to timers - they become really hard to see/read. Grey and/or white best to be used at civs.

You can't go with calculations because the human eye does not perceive the colors as fine as most colorwheels can pretend. The maximum shades you can have a single color would be around 3-4 (but that's really pushing it, because if say, the base color is red, then one would be really bright red, one would be dark red, but if you want 4 reds, then one pair must be really orangish red while the other is close to crimson to make them distinct - and then the players will complain that you have no real red.)

And the above example does not even start with ruling out colors which are used at terrain (white, green, orange-brown).

The gain of the current color selector is that both players can have the color they really want and developers don't have to waste months to tweak the shades to prevent overlapping with each other.

ref A fixed dropdown color palette is a pain in the ass to be set up

Its not that difficult at all, in fact its standard practice in 90% of computer games !

Im not the worlds greatest coder but i could knock one up in a day !


Microsoft paint has a simple grid box. Something like that would work well.
We allready have a box and the code that detects mouse x,y and mouse click, not so hard to overlay a grid to quantize/ filter the colours so that the only colours available are 'good colours'

http://s8.postimg.org/i0s8yz8lx/colour_picker.png




The original game had a simple colour picker. It made setting team colours much easier and quicker....thats why its become established 'best practice' We are not playing photo shop, we are playing a computer game.


I dont mind helping out picking the right colours.

20 is the minimum we need. Approx 40 colours would do the job. There are only so many distinctive colours in the rainbow.





ref Black is out of the question, due to timers - they become really hard to see/read. Grey and/or white best to be used at civs.

Which is why on screen text needs a seperate fixed highlight so its readable regardless of base colour.

dzine wrote: ↑ Im not the worlds greatest coder but i could knock one up in a day !

Please do. I'm genuinely interested in seeing how you make a color picker with 40 (hell, let's start with 20) hardcoded colors that all work for any mod that is on, or will come to OpenRA.