OpenRA

Hi, I'm (evidently) new to this forum, and would like some help on a couple of things.

Firstly, how can you use an editor on mac? It seems to be an EXE file, and that simply doesn't work on mac. Wine doesn't agree with it either. I'm not an idiot with macs, but I'm not a superuser either. Also, I don't have access to a PC, to use said editor. Barring editing the files (which i'm not too keen on, with my bad rep), I'm slightly clueless on what can be done. (I have checked the "package contents, and the only unix friendly file is the main executable)

Secondly, what is the situation on mods? I am aware that the RA and TD are themselves mods, but are there others that people have slaved over?

Now. I have suggestions ~ Ants? that'd be funky! Harvest ant, infant (infantry) ant, and of course warrior ant (heavy tank) and fire (alt. tank) ant. Very basic concept. After all, It came from Red Alert! (Not that funny.)

Another- Volkov & Chitzkoi ( I think mentioned elsewhere)

How about porting some RA1 mods to this thing? Or would that not be kosher? I know there's licencing rants that states you can't distribute freeware without the consent of the creator.

Opinions ~ You guys done a great job on this. Finally I can play C&C on a mac! I like what you done, with balancing. Its very much identical to the original. Good implementing of rankings, but do they have an effect on performance? I think so, but it could have been a placebo effect. I love the plane crashing concept, and the burning tanks concept.

Constructive criticism ~ Right click? This is incredibly difficult on a macbook pro. Whatever way you do it, theres not a strict 100% chance of success of a right click. (barring ctrl click) a feature to change this would be very nice. Even if this nae happens, it needs to be consistent. Using superpowers should be activated with right click.

Artillery is too long ranged, IMO. But, artillery in RA was too underpowered. Either way, bump the price, or dock the length.

Future features ~ Groups. I have groups of 20 MIGs that I allocate to group 1, a few Tanya's to group 2, mammoths to group 3 and so on. This feature is not (yet, i hope) in OpenRA.

Next, Lunar Battlefield! The crazy map where anything goes! That'd be a nice new feature!

Problems ~ I have noticed, occasionally, when i use the lettering to build stuff, it sticks, and makes me build 50 bazillion power plants. Solution ~ press said button again. THEN right click to undo the amount of times it had done.

Also, there seems to be a bit of latency when building, holding, and using superpowers. I can right click several times on a "building" process

I know this is kinda early to poke holes, but I mean this to aid, not to burn. I am highly appreciative of the effort being put into this project.

Thats all for now, I'll contribute more later.
By the way, I'm not technically minded enough to create maps or units, so the chances I make maps are slim. why about the editor? There's no harm in trying!!

Mono (the runtime that OpenRA and the editor runs on) has very poor support for Winforms on osx, which is the windowing toolkit that the editor uses. This causes the editor to be full of graphical glitches and be horribly slow. The latest version of mono (2.8.2) simply crashes when trying to open or create a new map using the editor.
Because it is so crap, it simply isn't worth supporting under osx so we don't distribute it. If you want to try it anyway, you can run it from a terminal by cding into the OpenRA.app Resources dir (after copying the editor exe there), and running `mono --debug OpenRA.Editor.exe`.


The modding community hasn't taken off yet - the most complete mod to date was `OpenRG' by Gecko, but that no longer works with current versions of the game.

The next public release includes support for a hostile creeps faction on all maps (added to support viceroids in cnc) - this can be used for ants too, someone just needs to hook them up. This could be done with a very simple mod.

I'm also on a macbook pro, and find the trackpad usage equally frustrating. In the meantime, I'd recommend simply using a mouse. Better support (including 2 finger scroll to move the map) is on my list of todos, but it won't happen any time soon.

Unit groups are in, mapped to ctrl+numkeys. If you have spaces bound to the same combination, then they will take priority (this is an os restriction - the only way to prevent it is to programatically disable spaces when the game starts, which i'd rather not do).

The order delay is intentional, and required to soak up latency in online games. Because the game runs lock-step on every machine in a game, enough time must pass between issuing and resolving an order for it to be sent around the world to other players. It is silly that we enforce this delay on singleplayer games, and this will be fixed at some point.

Fair enough, to most of those responses; I realise that this is very early in production.

There are unit groups? I did try plenty of combos, but you said about the number pad, so maybe thats it.

Solution to spaces ~ disable with F8 (then re-enable it on end), or change it to (apple) + (number).

I keep forgetting this is online only, essentially. That explains the latency perfectly.

I hope I can help in any ways further on, but as mentioned, I'm neither an Ûber-nerd, or an idiot. I am a musician though! (hint hint) Speaking of which, is the music on here (hell march only, IIRC) in MID format, WAV, MP3 or OGG? Or some other foreign file?

Couple of other things I've noticed:

Crates land everywhere. I mean everywhere. I've had it and in trees, and inside a building, which i sold, to have my base blow up with a nuke.

On the other side, i love the fact that crates are dropped by plane, as opposed to spawning in camo.

2ndly, another problem, many planes can use the repair depot at once.

Capturing opposing team's base yields no spoils. I'd like to capture their war factory and start churning out traitorous tanks!

A little known feature in RA, was if you press H, it zoomed straight to a construction yard. Its a nice feature that i use, pre-radar dome moments. Which leads to guard and AI. No guard (yet) and AI both opposing myself, and of my troops en route to a destination, is really bad. they have a very delayed reaction before realising "oh, wait guys, that doesn't seem to be the same colour of our uniform, but lets finish this sentence of epic proportions before we make any attempt to return fire. Return fire? they're shooting at us! Now lets carefully take out our guns, we don't want an accident. Now, fire!"



Thats all for now. I'll test more features later.

Captured tech (mostly) works in cnc, but is more difficult to implement in ra because of the different production method. I have no interest in fixing this, but one of the other devs may eventually get around to it.

Scrolling to construction yard is mapped to backspace/delete.

Unit-level AI is high on my todo list, as it is the last thing stopping us from implementing campaign missions. It should see significant improvements within the next couple of months.
The default move command will make the unit ignore enemy units, unless it is attacked. If you want your units to actively attack units they see while moving you must use Attack-Move (press a, then issue a move order).


The ingame music is encoded in a custom westwood aud codec. We support all the ingame tracks if the scores.mix is present, but only ship Hell March with (some) of the downloaded packages. A future release will include support for installing them from disk.

Now; units are awful against tanks. 40 infantry barely stand against a tank. Grenadiers don't seem to be any better, even though they are packing explosives. Rocketeers, obviously are better. Flamers were effective, but again, in large numbers. Shock troopers are good, but their range is appalling. Tanya is absolutely fine.

Units coming out of barracks- they come out in their normal 5, but then all go into the same spot afterwards, on top of each other. This is Tanya prey, but great for testing.

Multi-barracks/ War factory- not implemented as of yet. in the TD mod, you had a tab for each, no such thing for RA. I'd like the same for super weapons. If I have 3 missile silos, I want to launch 3 missiles, or speed up missile production by threefold.

Planes- HUGE bug. I had 6 yaks, and they all seemed to be shot down by a flak cannon. but, they didn't go down. They continued their flightpath with no health to the airport, and sat there. foreber. They could be selected, but could not be moved in any way. they regenerated ammo, but nothing else. I continued to sell the airports, and they just sat prettily on the ground. I could even build under them! Units and tanks could walk over it too.

Any unit can get promotions. I got a MCV to star rank, built it, unbuilt it, and it was gone. Countless of my ore trucks accidentally got promotions too.

The nuke-in-a-box is a bit cruel. I opened one at the start with my MCV. :sad:

Missile subs are far too overpowered. they are like cruisers, but underwater. that perk is unfair.

Engineers come out of every building. This is bad, but very realistic.

All units freeze in their shooting positions, if you press S. Turrets do not respond to pressing S.

Technicians do no damage whatsoever.

Thats all for now. I'll do tanks later.

Thanks rb10c, I was noticing that the tank turrets stay where they are until they have something else to shoot at. As this is an Open project, I would assume that many of the fixes and additions that you and I have been mentioning will be put in eventually. It's pretty fun as it is though, even with all the querks and oddities. I still can't get over the fact that I can play skirmish on original cnc!

I'm just letting the creators know what's not working, or is flawed. I think I did mention how great this game is, and the redux of it is absolutely smashing. I did say this is not to burn or be abusive or ungrateful, but I feel that i cannot create maps, so pointing out bugs it the minimum I can do.