The Red Alert Mod Interview

[Plok 327]

Blbpaws, a member of C&C Labs, talks about their latest project - The Red Alert, a total-conversion mod for Red Alert 3 that brings all the units, structures, and most importantly, all the fun of the first Red Alert game into the RNA engine. We've participated in their beta and now waiting for the full release, which will possibly come this summer. Here are some of the questions we've asked him:

Could you tell us something about yourself and your team?
Sure. At Command and Conquer Labs, we're best known as the group that did two pretty famous mods, C&C All Stars and C&C 3: The Forgotten, in addition to a variety of smaller projects. Modding C&C is a blast for us, and something we've been doing since the Generals days. One of the neat things is the global nature of our projects. Our staff for C&C 3: The Forgotten involved people from something like 11 countries, all of whom have never met.

Your mod seems to have a great multiplayer potential. How are you going to organise multiplayer games? Running a server, perhaps?
We agree it definitely has great multiplayer potential. Multiplayer in the original Red Alert was limited by the connectivity issues inherent to 1996 and 56k modems, but happily those are mostly gone and we hope fans will take advantage of the balanced and exciting gameplay we're offering. Games can be played over EA's server.

You can read the full interview right here.

[Inferno 22]

Epic mod is epic.

[Gben 20]

These are the sort of mods where I wish they could have 'vanilla' modes and 'enhanced' modes.

A vanilla mode where it aims to match the original game flaws and all, and enhanced where perhaps some liberty has been taken with the interpretation for balance and modern expectations perhaps.

 

('Mode' could mean 'map rules' I guess.)

[RainXc 0]

Nice interview man.

[mirza044 4]

These are the sort of mods where I wish they could have 'vanilla' modes and 'enhanced' modes.

A vanilla mode where it aims to match the original game flaws and all, and enhanced where perhaps some liberty has been taken with the interpretation for balance and modern expectations perhaps.

 

('Mode' could mean 'map rules' I guess.)

 

This! It would be nice if vanilla mode could be released first, after that they could continue to do "experiments" with their vision what could be different/enhanced with/in mod. Why I say this? Because it's really getting annoying when some great mods gets too much time to develop only because moders trying to "enhance" and change vanilla mode.

[Plok 327]

This mod already has been developed for a long time. When you see their ModDB profile, their newest shot is a year old! And the full release is coming this summer. If you're that impatient, sign up for their beta.

[mirza044 4]

This mod already has been developed for a long time. When you see their ModDB profile, their newest shot is a year old! And the full release is coming this summer. If you're that impatient, sign up for their beta.

The Red Alert mod development getting really well and it's fast paced, but some other mods (like C&C3 mod - Tiberian Dawn and some other "recreation of the some original game" mods) taking eternity to develop. I didn't tried to criticize this particular mod.

[Golan 6]

"Vanilla" and "Enhanced" modes usually take similar time to develop, the number of new assets is usually quite small. It's more a problem of mods being mods, i.e. not commercial projects.