Plok

A new and very detailed interview with Louis Castle has just been published. As part of the Titans of the Industry series, Alex Mejia of Human Interact sat down with Westwood's co-founder to talk about pretty much everything - early days with SSI, Dune, The Lion King, Monopoly, Command & Conquer, Blade Runner, move to EALA, details of how the studio worked with the technical limitations of the time, behind-the-scenes business circumstances, his perspective on what is important in game development... the works. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in his work or just the gaming industry.

Even with EA doubling down on releasing their back catalogue on more digital storefronts, this news came out of left field: Tiberium Alliances, the browser game from 2012 most of us tend to even forget exists, received a Steam page. The game whose servers have outlived many core titles over the years apparently has enough of a playerbase to warrant a proper PC frontend. The release date is not yet known, nor whether a Steam account will be enough to connect or will it still depend on EA accounts.

Patches for C&C: Remastered Collection continue surprising us, but the changes are welcome nonetheless. This is another smaller service update which fixes crashes on Intel drivers, proper GPU detection, maximum framerate limits and tooltips. Here's the official changelog:

C&C Attack Copter was shut down from Pogo.com 14 years ago. No archive was made.

Another year has passed. And another year we've been online. People come and go - more so in other spaces than here, mind - but ultimately there is always an ongoing interest in the franchise, no matter how small it may seem. This spring's Steam release of older Command & Conquer games brought some new buzz, and an additional incentive for community projects to go on. Thanks to sites like SteamDB, there's now a tangible and surprisingly consistent number of players to point towards and say - it's worth keeping the lights on for them. While this site is mostly an archive of old files, news and discussions at this point (surprisingly even to me, people still make use of it as such), I am confident that no matter what happens, the players and the tool/mod creators will keep the series alive long into the future.

The SAGE Engine modding crowd might know: https://discord.gg/TfdcQTn

The Worldbuilder has issues with present-day systems. You can apply the 4 GB patch on it: https://ntcore.com/4gb-patch/ Or, if you're not comfortable with that, go to View -> Set LOD (last option in the list) -> Very Low or Low.

Moments ago, the Steam and EA App versions of Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection received a hotfix, specifically the 2D titles in the compilation. While a major patch is being developed, this hotfix was pushed forward after recent Windows Insider builds had broken compatibility with the games as they were thus far. Thankfully, the DDrawCompat build 0.5.3 was made about a month ago which, among else, fixed these issues. Below is the official announcement: To apply the patch, simply allow Steam/EA App to auto-update the games.

As could be expected for a game of this description, Command & Conquer: Rivals got immediate and overwhelmingly negative reactions on social media, forums, fansites, the C&C subreddit, and Discord. It hasn't even been a full day since the announcement at EA Play 2018, and the #NotMyCnC hashtag has already exploded on Twitter. The reactions vary from Angry Joe's rant shown above, an elaborate analysis by our friend @Banshee from Project Perfect Mod, Boogie2988's table flip, Genna Bain's comment on how the late Totalbiscuit would've reacted to this, repeating comments on how bad the model of Kane looks, and even PC Gamer taking a jab. Here at CNCNZ.com, we will continue to cover all news regarding Command & Conquer: Rivals as we have for every other official game in the past, despite everyone's sentiments towards the game, including our own that mirror everything linked above, as it is our duty as a fansite to bring you the latest news on Command & Conquer, whatever they may be. Relatedly, we have just opened a page on our gallery for C&C Rivals concept art and renders, and will keep the gallery updated as more assets become available.

Pretty odd. In GenPatcher, press F8 and send the text it generates to Legionnaire so he can see what's up: http://legi.cc/faq/#how-can-i-contact-you

Please also check in GenPatcher's "Playing Online" tab that the "Hide IP..." option is turned OFF.

You can just Google "what is my IP" If you're trying to use a closed-off LAN, the only other thing that I can think of is a firewall/antivirus blocking the game on your computer specifically. Go through Legi's checklist as well: https://legi.cc/bugs/

Check if your ISP is giving you an IPv6 address instead of an IPv4.

The latest versions of Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection were published with new executables, which naturally caused incompatibility with several community tools, among them the irreplaceable GenPatcher and GenTool. However, their developers were quick enough to develop tweaked builds so everyone is on the same page. GenPatcher, the one-stop patching tool for fresh Generals and Zero Hour installations, received three versions by now - 2.07 beta, 2.07b and 2.07c. In addition to the new TUC releases being supported, the tool is no longer falsely detected by Malwarebytes, registry and serial key issues are adapted for the Steam version, and includes Windows Media Feature Pack among its redistributables that are installed if not found on the system. As for GenTool, the quality-of-life improvement tool for Generals and Zero Hour, version 8.7 brings the following changes: New Features Added compatibility with Generals and Zero Hour The Ultimate Collection (Steam, EA App) Added warning message popup for non-x87 compatible generals executables Fixed game version mismatches for various compatible executables Fixed missing hashing of scb files for game version hash generations Fixed C&C Online login kick by generating random ergc game keys when so required Added -showFrameCount command line argument to draw frame counts Fixes/Improvements Fixed severe performance degradation with Steam Overlay (GameOverlayRenderer.dll) Fixed crash on application boot with Windows XP 32 Fixed dysfunctional GenTool Updater in Windows XP Fixed theoretically unsafe code with Windows XP Fixed minor inaccuracy of FPS counter and FPS limiter Fixed incorrect terrain draw distance after changing camera height Changed Upload Player ID generation by adding another salt Improved game version names for uploaded txt files Removed forceful disabling of Origin In Game (IGO32.dll) Updater: Improved patch file formats and capabilities Updater: Improved the maps patcher for future map releases Updater: Removed the replacement of the Zero Hour no-CD game.dat Updater: Removed the replacement of the Generals Origin generals.exe EDIT (30 March 2024): GenTool was bumped to version 8.8 to fix a slowdown issue on Windows 11 related to the framerate limiter. To keep your installation of Generals and Zero Hour as up-to-date and stable as possible, download GenPatcher, then GenTool (as the former currently includes the previous version of the latter).

If you mean the patched launchers, they are currently obsolete. Last month's update changed too much for them to be viable still. They are also completely useless for the Steam versions because Steam never used those launchers. To revert the games to a usable state, verify the files from EA App or Steam (whichever you choose to keep) and only apply the individual community fixes (GenPatcher/GenTool for Generals and Zero Hour, CnCNet patches for the older games etc.).

I legitimately forgot about that. Some things are better left out of one's mind... *shudders*

Not many of us left in forums in general :/ Everything's moved to Discord and Reddit, and even then not much is going on most of the time. As far as the franchise goes - since you left, we got a combined remaster of TD and RA1 in 2020, with an actual source code release. Just this month, pre-TibWars games made it to Steam. Several fan tools got made or tweaked, active mods are not as plentiful as before but the heavy hitters are still live and kicking. A lot happened, but there was so much dead air in between that it doesn't much feel like it.

Precisely why all other open-source projects steer clear from it. It moves away too much.

This isn't the C&C:Online support forum, nor do we have resources to help with networking issues there. Please direct support requests here: https://forums.revora.net/forum/2735-cconline-support/

A few years ago, EA started publishing their old titles on Steam again, after they were able to put their EA Play subscription on the store. Since it had a much narrower range of games on Steam than it did on EA App (ex-Origin), EA decided to put a selection of their old games on Steam for the first time. Among them... was finally Command & Conquer: The Ultimate Collection. The caveat is that as of now, C&C games older than the Remastered Collection are no longer available separately. However, if you owned C&C 3, Red Alert 3 or C&C 4 (expansions included), you will not get a duplicate in your library and you can even get a discount. The 2D C&C games, which were the toughest to get running on modern PCs, have been packaged with DDrawCompat to simplify installation, as well as their respective map editors, which is a welcome addition. While servers like CnCNet and C&C:Online have been around for many, many years now, they have not been natively implemented, but This comes after days of speculation fueled by changes that were going on on the previously existing games on Steam - cloud saves support was added, Worldbuilders (although glitched) were added as part of the default installation, and users noticed Steam app IDs that were simultaneously affected, that belonged to the other C&C games and were there for a while, only dormant. Fast forward to today - classic EA games like the Command & Conquer series, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and The Saboteur (2009) are now available on Steam both as full purchases and as part of the EA Play subscription. While he has been silent for a good minute, Jim Vessella a.k.a. Jimtern reached out to the community on Reddit with the post shown below: Head on over to Steam to grab The Ultimate Collection - with a launch discount of 60%. EDIT - 8 March 2024: Our guides for installing games have been overhauled, but especially the one for The Ultimate Collection.

Could it be the same issue that affects the Worldbuilder, where a mistake in the registry files breaks compatibility? https://www.cnclabs.com/forums/cnc_postsm142499_World-Builder-and-a-Steam-install.aspx#post142499

Physical copies haven't been sold in over a decade, especially as the industry has moved to all digital. You can only get them from third-party sites like eBay and Amazon these days. The game is on sale often on Steam (every 1-2 months, usually 75% off), and you can even contact EA Help to give you a free copy of the game on the EA App if you show them a photo of the game you own.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/cnc-3-original-campaign-balance-patch

https://web.archive.org/web/20160505204608/http://www.cncnz.com/_files/CC_TS_DADossier.pdf

This normally is the case, but not for C&C. We already got C&C Rivals without a proper game being planned at the time. Petroglyph themselves aren't aware of any TS/RA2 remaster plans, either.