362 replies to this topic

[AlexB]

Hello all,

I've been working on a small Red Alert project I started last February. It is a DLL like Ares for Yuri's Revenge that was meant to support The Lost Files movies without the need for a customized executable file. So it is not merely patch, though it tries to fix many bugs I encountered. Besides the fixes, it contains some new features aimed at players, some new features might be interesting for modders also.

The project will support the Red Alert 3.03 beta patch (English only), The Lost Files and hifi's CnC-DDraw DLL.

I'll reveal more information about the project in the next week. It is still a beta version and it has not been tested throughoutly yet, but it should be usable already.

I'd be glad if there is anybody interested in testing it. If you have questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Greetings,
Alex

 
A version for testing has been released already. Please note that this is not the final version and bugs and crashes can still occur.
You can find the latest version here.

Edited by AlexB, Thursday, 1 March 2012 - 06:28 PM.

[Inferno]

I'm available if you need me ;o

[AlexB]

Thanks! I'll post a little more info as i finish this thing and also upload a test version the next few days.

Here's is a list of included bugfixes.

• Instruction Error when destroying fences on upper map border fixed.
• Automatic Sonar Pulse will not be applied in single player missions any more.
• The Mobile Radar Jammer will have its Tesla weapon disarmed properly.
• Disk space check functions updated to today's standards.
• Music track Arazoid restored.
• The First Decade Soviet movie loading bug fixed.
• Fixed a crash related to tags.
• Made certain frag explosions visible on buildings.
• The unit formation feature now uses the slowest unit's speed.
• Enemy shipyards will no longer repair a player's ships.
• Prevent ships from being repaired when not docked to the shipyard.
• If projectiles leave the map, the game will not crash anymore.

It's pretty standard stuff. Nothing fancy. Just some eliminated crashes and fixes for sloppy coding errors. The Sonar Pulse is fixed completely, not just for certain missions. Most of these should be pretty straight-forward to test. The disk space checks are updated to support "extremely large disks" by 1996 standards. If you don't see a message box when starting or saving and the game doesn't crash, it worked .

Now comes the rather uninteresting part of this post:

• Debug logging and error reporting capabilities added.
• Real object names shown in tool tips for enemy units and buildings.
• Suppy Truck casts a shadow now.
• Automatic evacuation of civilian infantry will not happen in multiplayer modes.
• The nuke plays a sound on impact.

Even if this project tries to fix bugs, the game will most likely still crash on various occasions. When it happens, the DLL will generate a file that might assist in locating them, which hopefully will accelerate development of a patch.

I'm not quite sure about always displaying enemy unit's types, but they aren't exactly secret either. Several special unit names won't be shown because the enemy owns them. The nuke kabooms even if it doesn't hit anything and civilians won't trigger evacuation in multiplayer, so modders could safely reuse Einstein, General and friends.

I've seen the Red Alert Bugs thread in the Command & Patch section, but couldn't fix all the issues yet.
Does anybody know of more bugs in 3.03 that need to be fixed?

[Bullet]

If this bug fixes do all work without effecting High Resolutions like 1280x720 to be set or NoCD or Mods or the Addons, then you are the Godfather of Command & Conquer Red Alert 1 xD
You made bug fixes where even Hyper failed to fix them and you will make his life and his patch much easier now. Much thanks to you AlexB, noone has done this so far, i have waited so a long time for this bugs being fixed, especially the game crashes in Multiplayer!

But of course i have more bugs for you which you can fix

• Fixing the Rangebug: When you have good timing you can order Soldiers to fire across the whole map when you first command them to attack anywhere near them and then at the right moment command them to fire anywhere on the map (it applies to all Infantry units with any weapon and might also apply to vehicles)

• Also all cloaked units and buildings should be revealed to the enenmy player when you have nothing more left than subs and cloaked things. (Especially for mods where you can get cloaked units and buildings even from crates)

• When cloaked units except submarines cloak themselves then the Shadows get shown wrong. It's because the stealth effect in RA was made for subs, RA does not interpret shadows correctly, since the subs do not have any shadows. The cloak effect should be like in C&C1 (newest Version is 1.06c revision 2 from Nyerguds)

• The General [GNRL] doesn't have his extra made voice if you choose the Russians, then he have the standard voice like the other Soldiers. He only has his right voice if you choose the Ukraine!!!

• If flamethrowers or flame towers shoot on unnormal terrain like beaches or bridges, the terrain will turn into temperate or snow terrain. This Problem is well solved in Playstation Version Retaliation.

• When ore is completely harvested around an Oremine and when it grows again, then it not grows around the Oremine, it will grow one field below it!

• Interior maps have not the graphics for electro deaths. You can fix this by extracting electro.tem, renaming it to electro.int and putting it into interior.mix

• Another Problem is that SC*.mix Mod archive files have not the highest priority but they should have the highest priority because modding happens after patching and after installing the Addons!!

Edited by Bullet, Thursday, 19 January 2012 - 12:54 AM.

[AlexB]

Hi Bullet,
thanks for the list. I think not all I did until now can be converted to an exe patch easily. Thus this project might not just be included in Hyper's patch to be made obsolete by it afterwards. On the other hand, I've only spoken to him a handful of times, about a year or so ago. I don't know much about his patch that isn't here in the forums.

It looks like the DLL will be Hi-Res-compatible.

The GNRL's voices aren't exactly a bug. A spy on the russian side won't do it "for king and country", either.

And the submarine ping feature is hardcoded to do exactly that, not looking left or right; they even did extra work to ensure only SS and MSUB are revealed. This was on my list of things to do already.

I won't change the SC*.MIX and SS*.MIX file loading in particular.

Would it work if the smudges from flame throwers would only appear on clear terrain?

At least the range bug, drawing shadows and the ore mine spread most likely won't be fixed in this version, otherwise it would take years to finish.
 Time for player related fixes! Some more changes made by the project, this time language specific:

• Missile Silo cameo typo corrected.
• Medium Tank and Heavy Tank cameo texts corrected in the French version.
• German language glitches corrected.
• Counterstrike addon theme names added.
• Don't Drink The Water tutorial text corrected.

Counterstrike's theme names were indeed a little off. Under3, VR2 and Shut_It aren't real names, are they?
And the Don't Drink The Water ingame tutorial texts tried to convince you to destroy the reseach facility even though your objective is to capture it.
Today's feature list additon is a little dull. But there's more to it...

[Bullet]

Why are you talking of converting the fixes to an exe patch?
I think your bug fixes fully work with your Syringe launcher or?
If this is the case, then it is not that worse that it cant be converted into to a exe patch.
But nevertheless these are pretty much bug fixes at once! Congratulations if they work anyhow.

And does this what you are saying mean that you can fix the voice of the GNRL or not?
And it seems that you are on to expand the revealing to cloaked units and buildings... sounds good!

Flamethrowers: On the Playstation Version there are extra fades for scorchmarks on sand and brigde tiles etc. ...
But enabling them only clear terrain would still be better as it is now. Would be a kind of temporary workaround.

As for the other bugs the Range Bug has the highest Priorit of them. At least please fix the Ranegbug if you can :-)
And i would like to know how did you patched the missile silo icon and which icon did you use for correcting it?

And btw which sound did you apply for the Nuke Impact?

Edited by Bullet, Thursday, 19 January 2012 - 11:55 AM.

[AlexB]

Why are you talking of converting the fixes to an exe patch?

You said I'd make his life easier, which I doubt. I have no plans to convert it into an exe patch.

And does this what you are saying mean that you can fix the voice of the GNRL or not?

Wait and see. There will be a way to fix it.

But enabling them only clear terrain would still be better as it is now. Would be a kind of temporary workaround.

I have yet to see the bug in my RA edition. What is the exact problem? The craters or scorch marks are drawn, but the cell below suddenly looks like clear terrain? Or is has the scorch mark some temperate or snow pixels on them which looks weird?

As for the other bugs the Range Bug has the highest Priorit of them. At least please fix the Ranegbug if you can :-)

Yeah, I know it's nasty. You can win certain missions like Soviet 3, Mousetrap or Besieged quite easily...

And i would like to know how did you patched the missile silo icon and which icon did you use for correcting it?

I used the original icon and edited it using an image editor. Nothing special about it.

And btw which sound did you apply for the Nuke Impact?

KABOOM22, the sound played when buildings are destroyed.

[Bullet]

Flamethrowers and Flametowers: The scorch marks are drawn, but the cell below suddenly looks like clear terrain. That´s right, that is the Problem.

For the Missile Silo Icon could you please send me your edited Icon?
And let us know how we choose which Missilesilo Icon and which Nukeimpactsound will be taken by your Program.
How do you configure this?

Thanks

Edited by Bullet, Thursday, 19 January 2012 - 11:43 AM.

[CCHyper]

So, pretty much most of what i'm working towards is now done...

[AlexB]

Hi Bullet,
I'll try to reproduce the scorch mark bug, thanks.

For the Missile Silo Icon could you please send me your edited Icon?
And let us know how we choose which Missilesilo Icon and which Nukeimpactsound will be taken by your Program.
How do you configure this?

The new cameo will be included in the project. It is just a file named MSLOICON.SHP in the right location so there is nothing special about it.
The nuke sound cannot be changed right now and I don't plan to make it customizable yet. What would it be good for and is it more important than, for example, the range bug? Hi Hyper!
Nice to see you again  
Hi all!
For today I'll make it short. Spend the last day to do this:

• Infantry electrocution animation added to interior theater.
• Mines will spread ore evenly around themselves.
• Crew will not end up in walls when selling high buildings.
• Additional check prevents infantry from shooting at targets out of range.

More information soon.

[Chad1233]

I really love to see somebody working on the game I love! But I have some questions... Since you will be doing this alone (Which is a shame really) will you include some fixes/features Hyper was gonna add? He was going to redo the GUI of the Skirmish/Online screen as in implent features that one has as the other does not like tabbed maps, add a MCV un-deploy option, Slow Unit Build, and add some new features like map preview (The code is from PSX version) allying with the AI without it being buged. Fix for the country stats so England and France are usefull. Desert and Winter converted to RA... Again I just wanted these since you are going to work alone.... Hes done all the research for this if you ask him.

And this is a funny request make Greece, Turkey, Spain, selectable countrys heck even Hyper enabled them but they had minor bugs like radar names and side problems (Turkey is soviets) you can enable them for offline play and they wont be selectable online. (I tested this) it is really simple to get the game to make them show up though.

I will gladly help you test all this by the way!

Edited by Chad1233, Friday, 20 January 2012 - 02:57 PM.

[AlexB]

Hi Chad1233,
I don't know whether I like to change the UI yet, can't tell for now.
Adding up to 8 terrain types should be easy, but there are some requirements that have to be met first. Most of them related to templates.

There are two ways to fix the England and France bonus issue: Change the values in rules.ini or change the way the values are read (reading value, saving 1/value). Haven't made a decision yet.

I enabled the countries for skirmish. (No guarantee it will be in the release version, though.) No problems with radar names or images so far. (While doing this, I found the reason why the skirmish dialog settings sometimes aren't saved and fixed it.) The other changes will have to wait.
And I will gladly accept the offer to test

 

This boring screenshot shows the newly enabled skirmish countries in the German version. Ok, the list of language changes pretty much gave it away already, but in case it went unnoticed: while an English Red Alert is required, the project tries to unify all language editions. To achive this, the mix file loading has been changed and extended to load language specific mix files before their English counterparts. A minimal installation will take about 6 MB, optional French and German language packs with texts, cameos, voices and sounds take some additional 22 MB. I'll also create a pack to support German and French videos, which will be a little larger. More on this later.

[Chad1233]

Well the countrys work entirely offline without them showing up online but would be nice to select them online. XD

But it would be fun to play around with them in skirmish anywho.

By the way will you think about trying to implent a smooth scroll when you hold right click? Like in TS, and RA2. Hyper made the scroll weel work on the sidebar which was amazing and the D as a deploy key was pretty cool!

Edit: No news or screenshot is boring to me AlexB! I would listen to Hyper's every find in RA1.

Edited by Chad1233, Saturday, 21 January 2012 - 01:52 PM.

[pichorra]

Add the NODIGEST patch. Allows to use unnofficial maps in WOL Red Alert 1.

ra95.exe 3.03 english

0x1ef1b0: 00 4E 6F 20 44 69 67 65 73 74 00 31 00 44 69 67
to
0x1ef1b0: 00 4E 6F 44 69 67 65 73 74 00 00 31 00 44 69 67

or any other way to add it

[Chad1233]

What do you mean? Fan maps already go into the fan map tab that's in the 3.03 lobby.

[AlexB]

@Chad1233: The countries do work, but I try not to change such aspects of the game for everyone. So to become official, there needs more work to be done.

I'll look into the scrolling and deploy functions later. 
Hi pichorra,
thanks, I added a patch that does the same (setting the default Digest value to NODIGEST). Is this your fix? 
Hi all,
I suspect almost nobody would be interested to know about the other language versions in an english community, but I'll post this anyhow. The size of both the French and German videos is about 880 MB (only counting movies with spoken language), and because they are already compressed, they cannot be compressed significantly again.

Enter DLL: The language packs will come at less than 35 MB each. That is less than a twelfth of the original size. This was achieved by implementing an in-place dubbing mechanism. When Red Alert loads a movie, the DLL tries to load an AUD file by the same name. It will be decompressed on the fly and replaces the sound stream as the movie plays. At the moment, the largest setup file is less than 90 MB.

Videos with text inserts won't be replaced yet because of their sheer size (~130 MB). The censored German movies won't be included either.

Speaking of censoring, the project includes an uncensored German language pack, that is, no more cyborgs, no oil and no metallic crush sound, Sarin gas instead of hydraulic oil, and civilans instead of farming Technobots. Of course, purists can re-enable the censored version quite easily.



While the insert text is still English, the crickets clearly chirp in German or French. The movie is deinterlaced. The other screenshot shows the uncensored German Counterstrike mission Saringas 1 with uncensored cameos.

Due to popular demand of a single person , here's the Missile Silo cameo:

[Nmenth]

the crickets clearly chirp in German or French.

Whoa, you even got German and French crickets to dub for you?

[AlexB]

I found some in a nearby clinic for the restless legs syndrome. I also hired a german table that looks almost like the one von Essling and Stavros use. Almost no difference, could be twins. The rest is post production.

[pichorra]

Yeah, that was the NODIGEST fix. Thanks for adding it

A way to port it to C&C95 later?

[AlexB]

Hello guys,
today I'd like to annonce some things modders may like.

First, I already mentioned the movie list is expanded. This can be achieved by a file named movies.ini, which contains a [Movies] section with all the new movie IDs. Like

0=ALL20
1=TANYNUDE
2=WHATEVER

This is also how a new file called themes.ini works. You can define up to 255 music themes now, edit the old ones, change the name without the need for adding it to the language file. The project will contain some of the Retailiation remixes and the unreleased track Journey, which can be installed optionally.

The tutorial text file has been expanded from 225 to 1024 lines.

The expanded mix loading order will read Expand mixes from Expand99.mix to Expand2.mix (plus the original Expand.mix), as well as 99 Hires mixes, and up to 10 Movie mixes. For localisation purposes, ExpXXX99,... HirXXX999,... and MovXXX9... named mix files are also loaded, XXX being the language abbreviation like FRE and GER. (This is also how the project manages it's language specific additions.)

Briefing texts support the pipe character (|) to force a page break, so no more awkward wording is needed to hit the default page break on the spot (last space before the 510th character). This means you could use more than two pages (the entire text can't be longer than 1024 characters, though).

I hope these features are intuitive and reasonably easy to use.

On a sidenote, I noticed a problem last night that needs to be fixed. This means the testing build will not be available today as I planned, sorry. But it would make little sense to have something tested while I tear it apart in the meantime. I'll hurry, promised!