Command and Conquer is going open source

[ReaperAA]

23 minutes ago, lazygecko said:

For Tiberian Sun they spent many years developing new technologies that were groundbreaking for RTS, but many of those were not necessarily things the average player would appreciate or care about, making it kind of a wasted effort in many ways.

 

Hence TS being underappreciated. I loved these things about the game. The environment played a role in the game (more than in any other C&C game). And lets not forget breakable ice, weed and tunnels ;)

 

23 minutes ago, lazygecko said:

But by far the worst has to be the Hunter Killer. I don't know how it was initially envisioned to work, but what you ended up with in the final game was a simple one click superweapon which automatically seeks out a random enemy unit in the map based on some convoluted, nonsensical threat assessment system and oneshots it. The only thing it really amounted to was having one of your units unexpectedly killed every now and then with no chance to predict or do anything about it which is extremely frustrating.

 

This I agree with. From what I read a long time ago, it was going to be more advanced that what the game ended with (being able to choose whether it would attack power plants, defence, units etc or something like that). It would've still probably sucked, but less that how it did in the final game.

 

Thus, it was first thing I threw away when I made my mod for the game.

[MrFlibble]

So there's already stuff going on with the port(s):

 

[Gokuma]

Personally I like Tiberian Sun way more than RA2.

 

I totally played through the regular campaigns of C&C1:TD, RA1, TS, the TS expansion Firestorm, and C&C Renegade.   RA being a prequal was great.   RA2 just threw that away and got more ridiculous.

 

I only played a little into RA2 and C&C3's campaigns.   I'll guess C&C3 is better and more balanced and serious of those two, but it annoys me how they wussed out and made destroyed buildings and units just fade and shrink away.   Then in C&C3, there's a mission with the hugest battleship ever.  It's stationary but you can direct it to attack.   Unfortunately its attack is about the most underwhelming disappointing crap I've seen.  I played even less of RA3, a.k.a. C&C Carnival though it seems interesting.   If you're curious about C&C4, just read the Amazon reviews.

 

I can't wait to see TD and RA1 codebases merged and what becomes of those.   A remaster of TS+RA2 (being somewhat similar but more varied codebases of their same engine) would be cool to see in the future.   I hope this current TD+RA1 remaster is very successful.  Of course there's a bunch of perpetually malcontent steamtards screaming refund right away without giving it a chance.

[MrFlibble]

Am I the only one unhappy with the quality of upscaled FMVs? They were made from PSX videos which are in MPEG format, and feature rather noticeable JPEG artifacts.

 

I wonder what the FMVs could look like if they were upscaled with Topaz Gigapixel. After all, they were aiming at photorealism when making the FMVs.

[Taw Tu'lki]

Never played C&C. 

But it must be a good idea. 

[FractalBeast]

On 6/8/2020 at 5:37 PM, MrFlibble said:

The differences are mostly cosmetic and amount to debris flying off from explosions. In every other aspects, Dune 2000 is even less original than  the first two C&C titles combined.

Ah, that explains why Dune 2000 is unique in being EXCEPTIONALLY harsh on infantry blowing up buildings. It's just impossible to reliably blow up a building with only a few guys because the shrapnel coming off a building will just outright kill anyone who doesn't have (almost) full health.

 

On 6/8/2020 at 8:25 PM, ReaperAA said:

 

Hence TS being underappreciated. I loved these things about the game. The environment played a role in the game (more than in any other C&C game). And lets not forget breakable ice, weed and tunnels ;)

You forgot that Tiberian Sun had destructable cliffsides, that could be shot to create new pathways.

It also had an unused banking, hospital and armoury system that ended up being used for Red Alert 2.

 

Also, the Tiberium mutation system to Visceroids. Well, the original C&C had that, but it'd be nice if it got un-hardcoded, so we could have multiple kinds of mutation processes.

 

 

 

[MrFlibble]

BTW, with TS I always felt that Firestorm ended up being the polished version embodying what was intended from the start. Too bad the campaigns are short and no more mission selection. But they used the scripting potential to the full extent (no more of those in-mission dialogues with like only half the lines having voice-overs), the missions are arguably more interesting, and no more super-accurate Nod artillery that was such a game breaker it felt like a cheat.

[ReaperAA]

2 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

BTW, with TS I always felt that Firestorm ended up being the polished version embodying what was intended from the start.

 

In some ways yes, in other ways no. Firestorm added some things that were meant to be in the base game (like the Drop Pod superweapon) but it really screwed the faction vs faction balance because of...

2 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

no more super-accurate Nod artillery

 

Which was overpowered as hell, but it was Nod's only reliable defence against GDI's infantry+titan rush in multiplayer. It is one of the reasons why only few folks played Firestorm multiplayer and most played standard TS multiplayer because everyone played as GDI in Firestorm (well even in standard TS, the majority played as GDI but there were a few Nod players too).

[Hypnotik]

 

[MrFlibble]

3 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Which was overpowered as hell, but it was Nod's only reliable defence against GDI's infantry+titan rush in multiplayer. It is one of the reasons why only few folks played Firestorm multiplayer and most played standard TS multiplayer because everyone played as GDI in Firestorm (well even in standard TS, the majority played as GDI but there were a few Nod players too).

Well, it shows then that I never played any multiplayer :) In the original Nod campaign, artillery made everything easy peasy. I think I replayed both TS campaigns at least once if not more times, and would always get the feeling that the features were not used to their full potential. In some aspects, the visuals are more advanced than in StarCraft (my main RTS infatuation for a long time) the dynamic lights alone are miles ahead. But at the same time there are oddities like the infantry "electrocution" animation that is taken straight from Red Alert even though infantry sprites are about twice as tall, and odd missions that aim for depth and complexity but the execution falls short.

 

The Nod mission where you need to retrieve the Tacitus, one of my least favourite ones, there's the orange Nod AI that is supposed to represent Vega's forces, and actually there is no need for the player to touch them at all, but once I managed to capture some of their buildings but it still got me nowhere because the mission is timed and you lose if GDI remove the Tacitus from the crash site. So the entire action just boils down to walking your units past GDI patrols to the downed alien craft. I even suspected there was a bug in that mission and something did not work as the devs expected but now I think it's just that the design turned out to be more interesting than its execution.

[Gokuma]

I thought they made the Nod Artillery's too inaccurate and just ruined the unit in Firestorm.  However much balancing it needed, they shouldn't have went to that extent.

[FractalBeast]

IIRC, the main issue with Nod Artillery in vanilla TS was the terrain deformation. Nod Artillery wasn't meant to kill units, it was meant to "starve" the enemy of buildable land, by turning everything in a crater.

[Gokuma]

Oh yeah, they really wrecked the playing field.

[ReaperAA]

10 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

The Nod mission where you need to retrieve the Tacitus, one of my least favourite ones

 

Yeah that mission sucks.

 

10 hours ago, MrFlibble said:

but once I managed to capture some of their buildings but it still got me nowhere because the mission is timed and you lose if GDI remove the Tacitus from the crash site.

 

Actually, it is Vega's forces who capture the Tacitus. When we put the engineer in the crash site, we realize that the Tacitus is no longer there and that Vega has the Tacitus inside the train. The train would escape if we are not fast enough.

 

Basically we don't even need to capture the crash site. We only need to destroy the train in Vega's base and retrieve the cargo before the bridge in the Vega's base is repaired.

[Gez]

I found this video very interesting.

 

 

It's mostly about Dune II of course, and a bit about other Dune games, but it does talk about the history of Command & Conquer too, including how C&C was originally meant to be a medieval-fantasy game, kind of like an RTS version of Master of Magic I suppose. Working title: "Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone". And then they were inspired by The Monolith Monsters to make a near-future sci-fi wargame instead.

[MrFlibble]

4 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

Actually, it is Vega's forces who capture the Tacitus. When we put the engineer in the crash site, we realize that the Tacitus is no longer there and that Vega has the Tacitus inside the train. The train would escape if we are not fast enough.

 

Basically we don't even need to capture the crash site. We only need to destroy the train in Vega's base and retrieve the cargo before the bridge in the Vega's base is repaired.

I didn't know that :) I remember playing through it several times, and IIRC I always won by reaching the crash site and picking the crate.

 

But at any rate, that mission always made an impression on me of being a very confusing, trial-and-error and borderline frustrating experience, something I never had when playing StarCraft missions for example (or Firestorm missions for that matter). In the context of the Gamasutra article I write this off as the result of constraints due to rushed development.

On 6/15/2020 at 11:21 PM, MrFlibble said:

I wonder what the FMVs could look like if they were upscaled with Topaz Gigapixel. After all, they were aiming at photorealism when making the FMVs.

Well, someone apparently asked and answered the same question already:

 

[FractalBeast]

8 hours ago, Gez said:

And then they were inspired by The Monolith Monsters to make a near-future sci-fi wargame instead.

 

I've always thought that was where they got the idea of Tiberium from.

 

That reminds me... I wonder if there are still sites hosting old Westworld concept art for C&C1?

The concept art showed that it was originally planned as a far-more scifi-esque game. Actual combat cyborgs for Nod, instead of those weird hacker-cyborgs stationed in the Temple of Nod (that eventually hack into GDI's Ion Cannon in the Nod campaign), jumpjet troops planned for C&C1 instead of TibSun, and aliens have pretty much always been part of C&C's narrative. WW designed the Scrin during C&C1, even though they later on reworked the design (think the CABAL Walker from FS).

[MrFlibble]

On 6/17/2020 at 9:11 PM, FractalBeast said:

That reminds me... I wonder if there are still sites hosting old Westworld concept art for C&C1?

The concept art showed that it was originally planned as a far-more scifi-esque game. Actual combat cyborgs for Nod, instead of those weird hacker-cyborgs stationed in the Temple of Nod (that eventually hack into GDI's Ion Cannon in the Nod campaign), jumpjet troops planned for C&C1 instead of TibSun, and aliens have pretty much always been part of C&C's narrative. WW designed the Scrin during C&C1, even though they later on reworked the design (think the CABAL Walker from FS).

I remember that stuff. I wanted to point you to the image gallery at Nyerguds' site but he does not have the concept art you're talking about. But I found those images here just now, I'm not sure if they are in the original quality though. I don't even know where they originally come from, the First Decade bonus content perhaps?

 

On another note, here's something funny I just discovered. One of the artists who worked on the Remastered graphics, Benjamin Tay, is making a series of comical animated shorts about C&C units:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSt7dofQxC-pIL9hUT6uX0A/videos

[FractalBeast]

Might be wrong, but I think that's the best quality we're gonna get, unless someone at Petroglyph decides to open the archives and jam the old art in a scanner.