PortableRA Beta

[Iran 12]

Well here's a Christmas present to all of you Command and Conquer fans out there.

I've been working on this for the last two months. Essentially this is a modular Red Alert 1 build where components like the campaign are optional, it's completely portable (no registry keys, expansions can be enabled/disabled on the fly), has (support for) various bonus content integrated (small infantry patch, The Lost Files videos, extra music etc). It has fixes for most non-code issues like the misspelled Missile Silo cameo icon and it's possible to enable/disable showing all the official maps. There's also support for language packs.

I've been working with hifi on improving ra303p with tons of patches and additional features. I've written a config tool (with the design copied from Nyerguds' config tool from his patch), a game launcher, a few patches to cnc-ddraw and I made a stand-alone map editors package with the latest patches made by Nyerguds and FunkyFr3sh plus hacked support for the Desert and Winter theaters added by my patch. You can find more info about the in development ra303p changes at:

 

https://github.com/cnc-patch/ra303p/blob/master/README.md

https://github.com/cnc-patch/ra303p/blob/master/docs/features.txt

 

There are 130+ features listed, this includes stuff like high resolution support and extra theaters.

I'm looking for people willing to test this package as the owner of redalert1.com has interest in using it in one way of another and the owner of redalert95.tk makes his own Red Alert builds using this package as base. It also would come in handy to have the larger files (e.g. music and videos) hosted on a few stable community sites instead of free file hosts. And last of all I'm still searching for a better background for my launcher program.

Downloads and project home page: http://iran.cnc-comm.com/redalert

Edited June 26, 2013 by Iran

[klandri 2]

I granted you my approval over at reddit. This is a pretty nice job!

[Madin 11]

An outstanding effort!, thanks for this!

[Chad1233 0]

Allying with the AI crashes it I only tried doing it once though.

[Nyerguds 100]

Allying with the AI never worked properly anyway...

[FunkyFr3sh 7]

so cool

hehe

[Iran 12]

I'll upload an installer for all the videos once I'm back from going to my family, hopefully today. I'm gonna reupload the main installer with some small changes and a nice update to the launcher, it now shows the player count of people online :

 

[Iran 12]

Annddd done.

[Chad1233 0]

@Nyerguds iran made it possible to ally with them again and worked in his earlier test builds but now for some reason it crashed my RA1.

[Nyerguds 100]

Chad1233: not my point. Even when allying worked, the AI acted weird anyway, and winning conditions weren't adapted to the alliance, so it wasn't really useful.

[Chad1233 0]

My main point is that it worked to some extent as the AI acted a lot better then it did in vanilla RA when iran was messing with the AI

[Iran 12]

So uhm could you give me a memory address of where it crashes?

[Chad1233 0]

oops lol Here you go!

 

[Iran 12]

Okay, thanks! Haven't checked it yet but it looks like it's crashing in some of my code as opposed to crashing in normal RA95 code. Are there any steps to reproduce it? Are you running a rules.ini file with the new keyword to enable AI fixes loaded?

Edited December 27, 2012 by Iran

[Chad1233 0]

Just ally with the AI and it happens everytime... I pretty much did it right after downloading portable RA.

[Iran 12]

I can't ally without a rules.ini file with the AI fixes enabled, do you have that?

[Chad1233 0]

Maybe I don't know as there is no rules.ini in the main folder I downloaded from you... I didn't touch anything, ran RA, went straight to a skirmish game, attempted to ally with them and the game crashed.

[Iran 12]

Can't reproduce it, tried it with 3, 4 and 7 AI players. No crashes and no successful allying.

 

I've set up a project homepage, thanks to Tore and hifi for hosting me and helping me get set up. In addition I also added Linux and Mac installation instructions.

Edited December 28, 2012 by Iran

[Iran 12]

Okay it happens when you try to ally with one AI player in-game...which doesn't work of course even when it's fixed because there's only one AI player remaining.

 

I'll fix that in a few days.

[Iran 12]

I've fixed the before mentioned crash. I've made no-CD optional now and instead of checking whether mission files used by the expansions exists the expansions can now be turned on/off in REDALERT.INI. I integrated all the files from the expansions in the main game files so counterstrike.mix and aftermath.mix aren't needed. I cleaned up smallinfantry.mix a little bit (had a few unneeded icons) and placed it inside redalert.mix. You can now enable/disable loading smallinfantry.mix inside REDALERT.INI.

 

I've been working on some debugging text stuff. There now is a new REDALERT.INI option to enable/disable debugging. I intend to make thisoption control any writing to debug text files like OUT.TXT or RECON.TXT, but I'm not sure what extra debugging lines to add myself.

[Iran 12]

I've made an improvement to the FiXAIAlly= rules.ini keyword, it now will make the AI ally back. CCHyper contributed code to allows you to scroll the sidebar with the mouse wheel. I updated the patching system so it now uses an executable with more space for custom code, this fixes an issue where I had limited space for my code patches, it also allows me to have an icon for the ra95.exe executable.

 

I've patched cnc-ddraw so it sets an icon in the task bar for the game. I've also added a new [General] RULES.INI keyword 'ParabombsInMultiplayer=' which will allow you to enable parabombs in multiplayer (after buying an Airfield by default).

 

In addition to that I fixed an issue with the launcher where I forgot a directory separator character when looking up REDALRERT.INI. I've change the way the game loads MISSIONS.PKT, CSTRIKE.PKT and AFTMATH.PKT so they will be loaded even when expansions aren't enabled and with new REDALERT.INI keywords you can control if they are loaded or not. In essence this makes the custom .PKT files PortableRA used to use unnecessary, and to clean up the game folder I use this new system.

[Storm 0]

Awesome work

I would like compile the current ra303p-iran patch from github.

Can you describe me perhaps what I must do ? (Short)

Or do I need deep knowledge to do this?

 

Thanks for any help.

[Iran 12]

Hi, you should install mingw or gcc and nasm then once done to compile if you're on Windows run build.bat in the repo, on Unix do 'make'.

Edited January 1, 2013 by Iran

[Chad1233 0]

Nice one on the fixes! When will you release this version?

 

Edit: Oh wow I just got the crash by trying to ally with a player in multiplayer when it was 3 of us.

Edited January 2, 2013 by Chad1233

[Iran 12]

I'll update the package tomorrow. I was gonna wait until I had some more things done but that seems to be a severe issue.

 

Btw I think I almost found out why the issue with the AI sending stuff to the top left of the map occurs. Will take a bit of extra debugging though.

Edited January 2, 2013 by Iran