A day I've been waiting for! OpenRA, the game engine reimplementation of Command & Conquer, Red Alert and Dune 2000 has a huge new release out for 2021 and a flashy new website.
While it's not yet ready, a lot of work in this release went towards getting their support for Tiberian Sun into a working state. Progress is slow going on it but it is advancing and eventually it will be playable which is extremely exciting. OpenRA is still the best way to play Command & Conquer, Red Alert and Dune 2000 on any platform and eventually will be for Tiberian Sun too.
Some of the highlights of this 20210321 release include:
- Support for Discord integration and community-run ladders
- New lobby features for player handicaps and disabling spawn points
- Community balance updates and a refreshed map selection for Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn
- Further adjustments to make Dune 2000 more faithful to the original game
- More fluid infantry combat after fixing several long-standing combat bugs
- Nine more campaign missions have been ported for Red Alert
- Improved AI behaviour and performance
As the game engine expands, they've needed to bump up the minimum requirements from legacy OpenGL 2.1 up to OpenGL 3.2, DirectX 11, or OpenGL ES 3. Why? Supporting the likes of Tiberian Sun and the upcoming support for the data from the C&C Remastered Collection, along with eventually Vulkan rendering support means dropping seriously old systems. Thankfully, the new requirements are still pretty darn low and cards as far back as 10 years old should support it. Full release notes can be seen here.
You can download and play for free from the official site.
We prefer to play the OpenRA:Tiberium Dawn option, rather than the Red Alert option, as we think the computer then plays a better game. This new release plays a slightly better game as the AI is more intelligent.
We use discord to talk to each before and during the games, and put a password on the game so it is just us.
My son's are on Windows 10 and I play using Linux Mint. The AI is so much better than the original Westwood code making it the best collaborative RTS game we have found.
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