After 1 week of play...

[Dasha]

Hi,

Here's a topic just to share my impressions after one week of play.

I've started to play Red Alert around 97/98 on PS1 with Red Alert but mainly Red Alert Retaliation.

I've also played on Win 98 and XP several years later and more recently on RA Réalisation via the PSN and also aa little bit on RA3 on PS3.

Recently I moved to Linux (ubuntu) and just wanted to see whether or not it's possible to run RA on it and came accross OpenRA.

I'm more and more sensitive to Open Source, ... And thus this project seemed to me very appealing.

I've to admit I expected a clone of RA when I tried it and quickly discovered that it was not the case. Any I enjoy it and here're my impressions :

Pros :
- Open source
- Compatibility on Win, Mac and Linux natively
- Quite big community : there's always someone to play with online
- Althought I like retro-gaming, I think that this project is really positive for the original game.
- Now it's worth to play with allied. Balance is quite good. Sometimes I even feel that now Allied are > Soviets. Their artillery is so good at destroying Tesla coils ! :-)
- Possibility to enabled / ddisable new features like war fog.
- Special unit principle
- Special power principle like advanced chronoshift or parabombs
- Tanya : only one at the same time and soviets cannot train her
- Improved AI : now they build naval units, they build nuke silo, ... In original game they can only build basic things and they just send you all they have in the early moments. If you can resist the first rush, you're pretty much done.
- The spy concept
- The new UI and building menu + queue system


What (IMHO) can be improved :
- Lack of vortex (damn, it was so cool - maybe add an option to enabled/disable it ?)
- Full install did not work with French CDs. I had to do it manually. If you are interested, I can upload all content in FR language (incl. videos)
- Add the missing missions for Single Player Game
- Add a "classic" mode where original unit stats and allied/soviet trees can be used. I know if we want this we can play CnCNet but it might be cool to have the fog of war, ... with original units.
- Add all Westwood maps in official pack.
- Map editor crashes (back to desktop) wheb I start it from Extras menu on Ubuntu. It crashes when I chooses a map name and confirm it. I don't even entre the editor.
- Chrono tank cannot travel in the entire map. Only in surrounding cells. It makes it useless then.
- Given several different unit or building are in queue for building, when one is on hold, then the other does not start automatically. The on hold one has to be cancelled.


Overall I think it's an amazing project, giving the original sensations + a lot of extras.

I already make discover this game to 6 new players incl. some having played the original game and we're all addicted... Again.

Many thanks to the dev team.

Dasha.

[pulse]

- Lack of vortex (damn, it was so cool - maybe add an option to enabled/disable it ?)

Oh wow I completely forgot about that. That would be an interesting addition indeed.

[Sleipnir]

- Map editor crashes (back to desktop) wheb I start it from Extras menu on Ubuntu. It crashes when I chooses a map name and confirm it. I don't even entre the editor.

This one is a known problem. You can work around it for now by changing the "Directory" field from "./mods/<mod>/maps" to "^maps/<mod>".

[Dasha]

- Lack of vortex (damn, it was so cool - maybe add an option to enabled/disable it ?)

Oh wow I completely forgot about that. That would be an interesting addition indeed.

I've created a ticket on GitHub for this :
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues

We'll see what comes out of it.