Playtest 20150118

We wish everyone a late happy new year and prepared a new playtest which builds upon our Halloween release.

The main focuses of this release were improving stability and performance, as well as implementing some of the missing features that make Dune 2000 unique.

These playtest builds provide a snapshot of our current development for feedback by our testers. You can help shape the future of OpenRA by testing them and reporting bugs or simply letting the community know what you think.

Some highlights in this development build are:

Added carryalls and sandworms to the Dune 2000 mod
Added countries (with their own unique abilities) to the Red Alert mod.
Added an often requested lobby option for disabling the “Short Game” mode.
Improved performance and memory usage across the board.
Added hardware cursors support for smoother mouse movements.
Added new missions: GDI 03, Soviet 01 as well as Survival 01 and 02.
Fixed Fort Lonestar and the Dropzone minigames not starting.

See the changelog for more details on the playtest changes and bugfixes.

The playtest-20150118 build is available from the download page.

We have put a lot of work into streamlining our development and release process, which included a shake-up of our Linux packages. We now provide distro-specific RPM via the openSUSE Build Service, but recommend that most users install OpenRA from their main distribution repositories. We have also fixed the “bad quality” package warning that occurs when installing our Ubuntu package.

Countries — The Red Alert mod introduces support for sub-factions inspired by the way Red Alert 2 introduced them. These countries have special units or support powers, but otherwise have a lot in common with the Allied or Soviet army they belong to.

Game server browser — We overhauled the server browser. It is grouped by mods with the currently loaded one on top, but you can now join any game if the mod is installed. The ingame interface has been updated to use the same new color scheme as the web-based game server overview. We also added a filter for password-protected servers.

Sandworms and Carryalls — Let your slow harvesters make use of the convenient airlift shuttle service, and save your units from becoming worm food! Carryalls and Sandworms are now included in our D2K mod. The worm balancing is a work in progress, and they can be disabled in the lobby options.

Heightmaps — Paul is making good progress in implementing the height map support required for all next generation titles such as Tiberian Sun. It will take (at least) several months to polish this into a glitch-free experience that can be shipped in stable releases.