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oldglory

Desert and scattered snow terrain for RA

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Hi! I'm a new member here. Recently played CnC Gold and RA1 from the TFD disc, and thought they are exactly the same games with some minor differences. Most of the terrains, neutral buildings, and units look exactly the same in both game. As far as I learnt, the snowy terrain from RA1 has been patched into CnC, and was used in some additionas missions from the PSX port...

 

However, I haven't heard about any expansions or patches that ported the nice looking desert terrain, or the very rare scattered snow on grass terrain into RA1. Can someone help me with this?

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There are two big problems with adding Desert theater...

1. As you might know, C&C1 and RA1 are 256-colour games, meaning that at any time in the game, only 256 different colours can be shown on the screen at the same time. Now, to somewhat get around this limitation, C&C1 has a different colour palette for each theater. The sidebar icons are separate files for each theater so they can use an optimal nuimber of colours, and the UI and unit/structure graphics just use the colours on the palette that don't change between the theaters. However, Red Alert 1 only uses one single palette for all battlefield-ingame graphics, in all theaters, which means that the wide range of brown colours needed for Desert theater simply isn't in it. The "nice looking desert terrain" simply wouldn't look that nice at all.

2. The theater conversion between RA and C&C doesn't work the other way around. RA1's Snow theater contains all tiles C&C1's Temperate has, so the Snow theater could be implemented into C&C without any problems. However, RA1's theaters not only have a LOT more tiles, like cliffs on shores, which were simply left out when the RA Snow theater was put into C&C1, but the Desert shore and river tiles are also completely different shapes than the Temperate ones, so they can't replace any existing tiles in RA.

 

A third one worth mentioning is that I had to hack the C&C95 exe file to actually add the Snow theater to it without replacing any existing theaters. My C&C95 patch is a lot more than a simple mod, and the Snow was only included because someone I know had already done the conversion, years ago.

 

 

As you can imagine, the extra tiles in RA are also a problem for adding C&C1 Winter theater into RA. Not to mention, the "snow patches" tiles simply don't exist in RA.

Edited by Nyerguds

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Well, thanks for help. I thought it would be easier.

 

Just another question: are the snow patch theater used in other levels than the two in the original GDI campaigns?

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I chanced the Covert Ops mission "Ground Zero" to Winter theater in my 1.06 patch, exactly because Winter is hardly used in the game, but there are also a few multiplayer maps using it.

 

A full overview of all C&C maps can be found here:

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cncstuff/mappics/

This has the original theaters for everything though; you'll also see that the N64 mission isn't Snow there.

Edited by Nyerguds

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