Project Perfect Mod News

The Dawn of the Tiberium Age is constantly being updated recently. The latest patch, has received an important set of fixes for the CnCNet multiplayer, according to Rampstein, one of the staff there. Here's the official post about it:

^Rampastein wrote:

We just released a small update containing some important bug fixes (especially for CnCNet multiplayer) and a few other changes.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age/tutorials/change-log

Added: You will now see a splash screen while while the launcher is loading (Credits: Rampastring).
Changed: The refinery will now look like the TD or RA version depending on the faction you're playing as (Credits: Bittah Commander).
Changed: The "Sandpit" multiplayer map will now expand after 15 minutes instead of after just 3 minutes (Credits: Bittah Commander).
Fixed: The Allied/Soviet Mobile Construction Vehicles used the image of the GDI/Nod version since the last update.
Fixed: The starting positions and teams of different human players would often get switched after starting a game (Credits: Rampastring).
Fixed: The Allied and Soviet AIs will now build the Rifle Infantry and Rocket Soldier again.
Fixed: An incompatibility with a CnCNet server update prevented you from joining or hosting games whenever you'd change your user name (Credits: Rampastring).

As usual, grab it via the Launcher and enjoy crushing your friends in properly working multiplayer again!

Use their own launcher to update your copy or download the latest version and have fun!

Hello everyone, specially Tiberian Sun modders. Today is a happy day, a very happy one. One of the bugs that haunted me for years when I modded Tiberian Sun is now history... at least if you download and use the latest HyperPatch v0.3, created by CCHyper. Here's his words on it:

Quote:

Second official release of the HyperPatch project. This version contains a fix (hopefully) for the bug that has plagued many modders for years and years, the "Orca Transport" bug.

Bittah has tested this feature of the new patch, so many thanks to him! But I would appreciate any feedback, and will try to fix any arising problems as soon as possible.

So, the changelog is as simple as stated below:

Quote:

; ***** PATCH INFORMATION 0.3 *****

BUG FIXES/EXPERIMENTAL:
- A human controlled AircraftType that is able to carry passengers would get it's target cell
corrupted, resulting in the Aircraft never landing. This is now fixed.

Anyway, if you still mod Tiberian Sun, what are you waiting for, to download it? The download link? Oh yea, of course, here it is:

- Download HyperPatch v0.3.

For more information and support, use the HyperPatch Forums. Enjoy it!

Hello ladies, gentlemen and everyone else. Today is the day of the year where I can be more sincere in the news and less carefull about posting predictions. Afterall, if I'm wrong... look at the date, ok? I do have an insurance for lies for the next hours. I am not a seer and nobody else is, so, I'm sure that a part of the content of this news might not eventually become true or could be a distorted vision of a reality.

Command & Conquer is the franchise that inspired the rise of this site and has the games from our best mods here. So, we do have a special care for this franchise here. The latest interesting release from this franchise was the expansion of Red Alert 3, Uprising. Then, things went downhill with Tiberian Twilight (which even became a swear word for the last community manager) and this Free To Play service which was aborted a couple of months ago, with the whole team behind it being dismissed.

Back in Gamescom, I had high expectations for the last C&C game, although I had some doubts about the success of its monetization. I've even told Alex06 that we could meet again in Germany next year. Well... a game being aborted with the whole team dismissed can change my opinion. I'm gonna be honest, Command & Conquer is dead. There is no way it will be successful at the hands of EA anymore. And there are a couple of reasons for it:

1) Command & Conquer is successful only as Real Time Strategy. There were attempts to bring other genres to it. They've all failed, although Renegade was fun. They did not sell well at all and several studios were closed due to that, with their staff dismissed.

2) Real Time Strategy games are restricted to PCs. Does anybody play the XBox 360 version of Tiberium Wars? Does anyone remember that there were C&C3 and Red Alert 3 for mobiles? Is there anyone still playing Command & Conquer for Nintendo 64 or Red Alert Retaliation for Playstation? I think the answer could be yes for a very restricted group of people. RTS games requires you to select a group of units, scroll the screen and issue order into groups. At least one of these 3 tasks will provide issues for touch screens, stylus, joysticks or any other interface. And PCs... are going downhill as a gaming platform, just as the success of the newest Microsoft Windows operational systems. MacOS and Linux machines doesn't have the same amount of gamers as Windows PCs yet.

3) Microtransactions on Real Time Strategy games are polemic and ruin these games. And believe me, EA is no longer satisfied to sell a box of a game and its expansion every year. Games with this kind of policies doesn't provide the same profits of pay to win free to play games of other genres. EA might no longer be willing to spend millions of bucks on this kind of game anymore.

So, that's it. It's just a matter of time until CommandAndConquer.com disappears. Several traditional C&C sites are abandoned like Planet CnC, CnC World and Command & Conquer: Filefront or totally dead like CnC-Source, CNCDEN, RADEN. One of the few exceptions at the english community is CNCNZ.com, which will eventually get bored of posting news about Renegade-X only. The mod community is still alive, because modding is fun and challenging. But they will eventually become a smaller isolated ghettos unless they successfully expands into other things.

The closest thing that could be called at this point a C&C game under development is OpenRA, which will soon feature support for Tiberian Sun resources and some of its mechanics.

Fans of real time strategy games should rely on games like Starcraft 2 which can be modified with its map editor and 3dsmax. Another game that is looking to be promising and, maybe, remind Command & Conquer in several aspects is the Grey Goo. It should bring the mechanics from C&C and even Tiberium will be there... with another name and style, of course: as molecular nanotechnology that is out of control self-replicating bots as explained in Wikipedia.

It's too early to know if Grey Goo will be successful or it will become dust like many other Petroglyph products.

Anyway, what we can conclude here is that, if you are thirsty for more RTS games, you'll either have to look into user made mods or beyond the scope of Command & Conquer games. That doesn't mean that EA may not try to produce another C&C game, but the chances of success are minimal, if it exists.

March has been a buggy update for Colony Wars, Literally.

Showing some planned units for the Colony...

The Roach (Alternate Main Battle Unit) ,Scorpion (Elite Infantry) & Pillbug (Suicide Unit)

A Preview of the Standard Main Battle Unit of the Colony the Soldier Ant. Brutish Giant Insects that take alot of damage and aren't pushovers in confrontations.

Hatchlings. Which function as the Colony's Building Survivors and impromptu Combat Infantry.

The Swarm, Slightly mutated angry gnats.

That's all for now... Excelsior.

Today, a new version of Ares has been released. For those who doesn't know, Ares tweaks the game executable from Yuri's Revenge adding features for modders and fixing bugs. Here's the official words from AlexB on this 0.6 release:

Quote:

Hey guys,

Ares 0.6 is out! If you have followed the development, it will hardly surprise you that 0.6 is a service release and does not contain as many new goodies as the previous ones. Many features were updated internally, but several glitches in the game were fixed also, like GIs in Battle Fortresses jamming Tesla Coils.

The new features can't be easily grouped under labels like "cloak", but some are related to each other. For example, CellSpread has been enhanced quite a bit, and it is now possible to make buildings only be hit by the same weapon once. So if you use warheads with obscenely large CellSpread values way beyond reason, that will work nicely and buildings will no longer be affected once for every cell of their foundation. No surprise there, is it?

That's almost all for today, and I think it isn't relly news to you. Maybe next time. If you had hoped for more: I also got the limits out of Sight.

See you soon for 0.7. Until then: Happy Modding!

Announcement: https://launchpad.net/ares/+announcement/12571
Download: https://launchpad.net/ares/+download
Documentation: http://ares-developers.github.com/Ares-docs/

Here's the changelog:

Quote:

Release notes:

Ares 0.6 is a service release focusing more on internal changes and improved stability than features.

Changelog:

- CellSpread enhancements
- Factory built by certain country Prerequiste
- Aircraft Carriers and Destroyers can cloak now and gain experience from their Spawns
- Tech Buildings can be returned to the Neutral country if owner defeated
- Exploit of Battle Fortress jamming charging defense structures fixed
- Helicopters can be made to animate their rotors if hovering in air
- Many minor fixes

And that's, it. Download Ares and get modding. You may also use Ares's forum at PPM to provide your feedback and discuss the next direction of the project.

The Launcher interface above has most likely become quite familiar for you in the last few years. In 1.11 it was used not only for checking updates and making it possible to download custom components, but it also allowed you to change some important compatibility settings needed for running DTA on some systems. In 1.12 it has so far remained necessary for checking updates. Until the next update, that is.

With the next update, DTA's client will get a huge update. You no longer have that old Launcher interface requiring an additional click before you get in-game, but instead its functionality has been moved into various other windows. One of them is the changed options menu:

As you can see, the custom components and update settings have been moved to the options menu. With the next update we're also introducing the new Renderer option, which replaces the old, hardcoded Windows 8 fix which forced on Windowed mode as well as the possibility of disabling DDraw hardware acceleration on Windows XP. This new option makes a large difference especially for those of you who use Windows 8; now you can use the TS-DDRAW renderer, which improves performance significantly compared to the old Windows 8 fix and also makes it possible to play in full-screen mode. For more information about the Renderer setting, please read the following blog post: http://www.moddb.com/members/rampastring/blogs/explaining-the-renderer-option-in-dta

You might also notice that a few options in the Audio section have changed. The next update seperates Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn tank cannon sounds from each other, so that RA tanks use RA cannon sounds and TD tanks use TD cannon sounds. Now you can also customize which game's building crumble sound to use (the sound that is played when a building is destroyed). In testing some people found the RA cannon sounds annoying, so if you prefer the old way of Allied and Soviet tanks using the TD cannon sounds, you still have the option for that.

The next update is going to be the largest single update for DTA 1.12 yet. As such, it naturally also includes a lot of new things in addition to just technical updates. In particular, single player missions are coming back, with some new missions as a bonus. We'll detail our single player missions in a seperate news post when we actually release the update later this week.

If you played The Toxic Diversion in DTA 1.11, you already know that our missions are generally fairly challenging. Unless you're extremely skilled in classic Command & Conquer, you're going to need to save and load the missions a couple of times before you finally manage to beat them. As such, our new client naturally supports loading saved games directly from the external menu; you don't need to start a skirmish game to load a saved game anymore.

We've also changed the name of DTA_Launcher.exe to just DTA.exe. That means that your possible desktop shortcuts aren't going to work anymore; you're going to need to create new ones. We apologize for the inconvenience; we aren't planning to change the filename again in the future.

The largest update for DTA 1.12 so far, which will be released later this week, contains a lot of other changes in addition to the improved client and single player missions, including ones requested by the community. One such change is that skirmish settings will now be saved. Some CnCNet reliability issues have also been fixed. We'll detail all the significant changes and all our single player missions in a seperate news post when the update is finally released.

Until then, have fun crushing your human and/or artificial opponents both online and in skirmish!

The long-awaited singleplayer update is finally here! Not only does it include the Toxic Diversion campaign from 1.11, it also includes 4 completely new single player missions for you to enjoy. Let me detail all the singleplayer content along with their difficulty levels, included with this update for DTA:

GDI Campaign: The Toxic Diversion - The same well-received 4-mission campaign with 4 different ending missions as it used to be in DTA 1.11, with some bugfixes and small improvements. Which ending mission you get depends on your actions in the first 3 missions of the campaign. The first 3 missions are more or less easy, but be ready for a challenge in the last mission.

GDI Mission: Under Siege II - Free your base from Nod's siege, get some tiberium and drive over Nod with Mammoth tanks. A remake of Nod: Under Siege from Tiberian Dawn. A fairly slow-paced and relaxing mission, but you need to be decent at micromanaging. This mission was also included in DTA 1.11.

Nod Mission: Reunification - Break through GDI's encirclement with your fleet and reunify it with the rest of Nod's forces. The easiest mission of the set. Anyone should be able to beat this and have fun with some attempt.

Nod Mission: Eradicating the Red - Eliminate a massive Soviet production facility as Nod after cutting off the Reds' support from GDI. An extremely difficult, long and epic mission. Think you're one of the better C&C players in the world? You can prove your skills by beating this mission, even on lower difficulties. For those who want to beat it on Hard: good luck, suckers!

Soviet Mission: Red Paradise - Take control of a Soviet base after freeing it from Allies' siege and destroy an Allied base. Scales very well with the difficulty slider; if you pick Easy, the mission is fairly easy, and if you pick Hard, the mission will give you a challenge.

Allied Mission: Desperate Grip - Defend your base against Nod until reinforcements arrive. Not a hard mission, although players who can't perform many actions per minute might need to lower the game speed.

Note that our difficulty scale is generally higher than Tiberian Sun's. When the TS Hard AI could've attacked you with 4 minigunners, in DTA you should expect 20 minigunners.

This update also includes a lot of other changes in addition to the single player missions. A lot of bugs have been squished and balance improvements and additions made. Some highlights:

Two new maps, Hectic Oasis and Alpine Assault (both shown above), have been added.
The V2 is now better balanced, with a higher cost and a higher minimum range.
Ship combat has been improved; Cruisers and Sea Shadows are now much weaker against other ships.
The AI now fires nuclear missiles again.
Custom maps are now supported. Place them into Maps\Custom\ and you'll find them under the Custom game mode.
The CnCNet lobby is now far more reliable.
The Renderer option has been added, along with TS-DDRAW which drastically improves performance for Windows 8 users.

To see the full changelog, head on to our changelog page.

Last but not least, don't forget to update your shortcuts! With this update, we've renamed DTA_Launcher.exe to DTA.exe. Once again, we're sorry for any trouble this might cause to you.

Enjoy getting your units and bases blown to pieces in the new singleplayer missions and in improved skirmish/online games!

The timeline for Single Player Missions have been added. The starting year will take in 2025 during the fall of Ukraine that leads to World War 3. The players will be able to use campaign units such as Mongoose, a Sonic Amplifier unit that can shake enemy units off the balance with powerful sonic waves and Magnetron that can lift enemy units up in the air and bring it to them. Use them to lead your army to victory!

Allied Nation ground unit roster is almost complete, missing Battle Fortress, Harvester and Lancer MBT. Allied Nation will be completed ground unit roster once these units are created.

Now, for new voxels that are official on Soviet and Allied roster list. These have been a huge work for me to get most of the ground units done.

Prism Tank

Repair Drone

Stigma IFV

Allied MCV

Phantasm

Tesla Tank

Apocalypse Tank

That's 9 new voxels in 1 month. Viele Voxels!

That's all for news, Commanders and Comrades! *Salutes*

Hello everyone! Once in a while, I receive emails from desesperate users who are unable to beat our CAPTCHA in order to register in our forums. We've been looking for a reliable CAPTCHA that can be used at as many machines as possible. We've found one a while ago and, after some tests, it seems to be reliable enough to replace the current one.

So, today, we have replaced it with the new one for guest posting and to register an account. So, registering here is much easier now. If there is no bot spam in the forums in the next days, this CAPTCHA will be the official one, otherwise, I'll place the old one back. I just don't want this place to become haunted by bots like many other forums around the world.

By the way, it is always important to remind that any member who act like a bot (by infesting the forums with random unauthorized propaganda) os imediately banned and all its posts are deleted as quickly as possible, with no warnings whatsoever.

If you've visited PPM or any other site in this server earlier in the morning, you might have been surprised with an internal server error or something of the sort. We had a MySQL upgrade which was done out of nowhere. Fortunately, it is over already and everything went fine.

PPM is being haunted by error 503s (service unavailable) for a couple of years already, although things got more intense in these latest months. I've been hunting what has been crashing the site with little to no success recently. I trully hope that this MySQL upgrade help me with that, since it optimizes its usage on multiple core computers.

Since the MySQL upgrade happened, PPM seems to be running smoothly. I hope it continues like that for a while. But if it doesn't, be patient and try refreshing the page after a minute. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Hello everyone! I've spent many days fighting in two fronts. One was a massive amount of error 503s that haunted this website and everything under it and.. the second was my thesis.

The error 503s were reduced to acceptable levels after some heavy tweaks at our website and News Tracker system. The site is running much faster now.

I've also taken the time to change the CAPTCHA system, although I think that isn't being used as I expected, unfortunately.

We also have a 'cloning vats' feature that should help to increase a bit the activity of this news sector, although not much. It allows me to clone a post as a new topic in a different topic. So, posts about mod releases or new tools could be duplicated at the Community News section or even as an official news post. It's not like every post could be cloned and show up as a presentable news at this place, but it's better than nothing.

Another thing that was done discretly is that we have revealed our advertisement plans, if anyone desired to spread the word about its products here with an interesting partnership. We need to keep this place running and that, unfortunately, cost money. So, this is our deal. If you are interesting, make sure you identify yourself, your company and post when you send us an email, otherwise I'll understand that as a spam post and it won't be responded. I'm already flooded with spam daily at all my email accounts.

Regarding my thesis for my doctorade, that's a much more complicated issue. I've been spending a very long time trying to create a method to generate proper texture coordinates to models exported by Voxel Section Editor III. The program has many methods to do that, but none would be useful to export these models into games or do anything useful with the models at the moment. The problem of automatically partitioning a polyhedron and aparametrizing it as a polygon projected in a plane is an open issue, although there are many solutions, where the vast majority may take hours (literally) to run on highly dense and detailed models such as the ones generated by VXLSE III. I'm not looking for something optimal, but for something fast that somehow minimizes the amount of seams and distortion generated when creating triangles and cutting vertices.

I.e:

A sample polyhedron with a shape of a 'V'.

The texture obtained from the parametrization of the polyhedron.

Once I handle this issue, I'll be able to simplify the mesh and provide a non-animated model to be exported. Unfortunately, this is just a small part of the pre-requirements to start my thesis and I have about an year to actually defend its viability. My situation is really complicated, but I'm sure I'll figure out a way to progress with that.

Red-Resurrection Multiplayer Beta 2.1 is here, packaged in an easy to use installer! The mod comes with all you need to play including Ares and CNCNet and no longer conflicts with other mods - just install and run the launcher to get online or into skirmish.

Also including...

The latest and greatest Ares 0.6 stable release for better performance and new features!
A brand new mod launcher created by Thear of C&C Amnesia.
A new aerial arsenal for the Allied forces.
An improved AI.
Bugs and balance changes including an overhaul of all weapon ranges.
Improved visuals with a new voxel palette meaning nicer unit lighting and other graphical tweaks.

Download Now
View 2.1 Changelog

Mod Features

Uses the Ares DLL engine expansion to provide greater gameplay depths with new support powers and unit abilities.
Features the Allies and the Soviets with new weapons of war and almost entirely new arsenals.
Four countries per faction in multiplayer each sharing special units and with a unique weapon of their own.
Over 50 extra multiplayer maps sourced from the community and edited to work with the mod.
New multiplayer gamemodes: Survivor and Z-Day.

Official Website
Official Forums
Installation Help

The War Factory, our hosted Red Alert 3 mod, is in dire need of 3D modelers to help them. The objective of the mod is to increase the amount of units from the 3 factions of the game and share these units with the community. Zengar Zombolt, the mod leader, is so desperate that he posted this:

Quote:

This is the end. I have a Final shot at this, so I'll take it here, were my Main CnC modding began.

There is just about no one left in RA3 modding, and I ask if anyone wants to help This attempt to show some light at the end of the CnC modding timeline.

Anyone would be nice, but any 3d cnc experience would be great. TW or (probably not) Ra3 experience would be best

PPM has had the whole rainbow of CnC modding, from Dune to Tib Wars. But I hope that the last of the RA3 mods ends with a bang, not a whimper.

Likewise our Red Alert 3 modding forums, The War Factory forums also don't seem to get much activity at all. And honestly, I do not understand why there are so few people modding this team. After all, it is the latest game powered by the SAGE engine with official modding support. Even the activity from the Tiberium Wars editing forums is much higher than Red Alert 3 counterparts, which means that the restriction of using 3ds max only to create models is not the only obstacle for that game.

So, even if you are unable to help The War Factory, provide us some feedback on what could make Red Alert 3 more attractive for modders.

And finaly, if you have a RA3 mod and you want a forums and a webspace to get some feedback, we can host your mod here.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. For starters, I would like to apologize for not posting PPM or community news as often as I used to a couple of years ago, I have become a very busy man since the golden days on PPM so keeping on top of the community and everything that happens around here other than for my own mods is a difficult task to keep on top of, I give kudos to Banshee for being able to do it so well!

It has been bought to my attention today by Apollo that EA plans to shut down over 50 multiplayer game servers, this will apparently happen this year on the 30th of June!The article that I was linked to contains all the necessary information on what games will be getting the axe, unfortunately, some of these titles were some of mine and maybe even your personal favorites. Here is the list of games EA will be shutting down. The list includes not only PC games, but Nintendo DS and Wii games as well.

Battlefield 1942 for PC and Mac (including The Road to Rome and Secret Weapons of WW2 expansions)
Battlefield 2 for PC (including Special Forces expansion)
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for PlayStation 2
Battlefield 2142 for PC and Mac (including Northern Strike expansion)
Battlefield Vietnam for PC
Bejeweled (r) 2 for the Wii
Bulletstorm for PlayStation 3
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for PC and Mac (including Kanes Wrath expansion)
Command & Conquer: Generals for PC and Mac (including Zero Hour expansion)
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 for PC and Mac
Crysis 2 for PC
Crysis for PC
Crysis Wars for PC
Dracula Undead Awakening for the Wii
Dragon Sakura for Nintendo DS
EA Sports 06 for PC
F1 2002 for PC
FIFA Soccer 08 (KOR) for the Wii
FIFA Soccer 08 for Nintendo DS
FIFA Soccer 09 for Nintendo DS
FIFA Soccer 10 for Nintendo DS
FIFA Street 3 for Nintendo DS
Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers for PlayStation 2
Global Operations for PC
GREEN DAY: ROCK BAND for the Wii
James Bond: Nightfire for PC
Madden NFL 08 for Nintendo DS
Madden NFL 09 for Nintendo DS
Master of Orion III for PC
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for PC and Mac (including Breakthrough and Spearhead expansions)
MySims Party for Wii
MySims Racing for Nintendo DS
MySims SkyHeroes for the Wii and DS
NASCAR Sim Racing for PC
NASCAR Thunder 2003 for PC
NASCAR Thunder 2004 for PC
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 for PC
Need for Speed: ProStreet for Nintendo DS
Need for Speed: Undercover for Nintendo DS
Neverwinter Nights 2 for PC and Mac
Neverwinter Nights for PC, Mac and Linux (including Hordes of the Underdark and Shadows of Undrentide expansions)
SimCity Creator for Wii
Skate It for Nintendo DS
Sneezies for the Wii
Spore Creatures for Nintendo DS
Spore Hero Arena for Nintendo DS
Star Wars: Battlefront for PC and PlayStation 2
Star Wars: Battlefront II for PC and PlayStation 2
THE BEATLES: ROCK BAND for the Wii
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 for Nintendo DS

I have seen this news before prior to being linked to it today, but I wasn't entirely convinced whether or not it was genuine until I researched it myself a few moments ago.

EA Representatives wrote:

As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 percent of all peak online players across all EA titles - where it's no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running.

Here is a direct link to their official service updates page.

Thanks to the hard work of some very talented young coders, the what-appeared-to-be-impossible has now become a possibility. I am talking, of course, about pre-determined starting locations, teams (AI-AI, Human-Human and AI-Human), Randomizable factions, game modes etc. etc. This new tool is the Twisted Insurrection Client, created by Rampastring featuring Spawner feautres by Iran of CNCNet.
This new client is the same as the Dawn of the Tiberium Age client, also created by Rampastring, only it has been modified entirely for TI's usage. It makes full use of Spawner's features, so pre-set teams, starting positions, random faction generating, game mode selecting etc. are all available from the click of a button, among many other features (some little quirks like unlimited loading screens, pre-placed buildings, briefings upon mission loading and such). This has been a long time in the works, but it's finally ready for Twisted Insurrection staff testing!

This has probably been the number one requested feature (other than "please make GloboTech a playable faction") and I am very happy to inform you all that it is finally here and ready for Public Beta 5. The skirmish and online set-up screens are very similar to those used in Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, you can get a glimpse at how the layout currently looks in these images, though please note that the graphics are not final and will most likely be edited before the public release:

This is what we have been waiting for before we planned to release Public Beta 5, and now that it's out of the way, our work-load has decreased dramatically, so it doesn't look like there are going to be any more delays. Once some other smaller tasks are finished, we will be ready for the public release.
The new client is now where everything will be set up. Skirmish games, Campaigns, Online Games, Loading Saved Games, In-Game settings and everything else will all be done via the client.

The only kind of drawback from the client at all is that in-game menus had to be scrapped in order to make use of the Spawner features, but to me, that isn't actually a drawback at all but rather a massive step forward. Rampastring is constantly working on the client so there will be many more updates to come in the future as he improves upon it.

Thanks for reading, ladies and gentlemen and I hope you enjoyed the update. I have very high hopes about the release of Public Beta 5 this summer and I hope you are all as excited as I am! Just a few more things to tick off of the to-do-list and we're good to go. If you have any questions or feedback to give us, now is the best time to do so! Thank you.

And before anybody asks: This client and Public Beta 5 will be fully functional with Windows 8.

In a couple of months Hecthor Doomhammer and along with some other people who have access to the mod will do some streaming for Colony Wars. For those not in the know, Colony Wars is a partial Conversion Mod for Yuri's Revenge using Ares that plans to add in a fourth side known as the Colony (A revived Bug Army bent on revenge) as well as adding a whole lot of new toys for each of the original 3 factions of Red Alert 2.

In the mean time here are some updates for the new/old units you may see in the streams...

The IFVs now have Anti-Tank Turrets (The Anti-Tank Mode is unlocked when you put a Guardian,Flak Trooper or Initiate inside)

The Allies finally unveil a new unit, the Archer MLRS. The Archer MLRS functions as their T3 Anti-Air & Long-Range Anti-Armor Vehicle.

Replacing the Navy SEAL for the Talon Ops are the Shinobi. Light-footed Assassins who wield sharp shurikens and also are able to throw their C4 instead of planting them up-close like the Navy SEAL.

The Syndicate Mothership gets a facelift as well. Her weapons still unchanged as she can still fire powerful dissintegrator laser alternating between her 3 Turrets.

Introducing the Soviet Army's Second Support Power available from their Palace. The Decoy Army posing as Rhino Tanks & Half Tracks clever Soviet Army Players can use these to sow disinformation in the battlefield or just use them as cannon fodder.

And last but not least are everyone's favorite dumb muscle on Yuri's side are the Brutes. Now available in 2 flavors. The Yellow Brutes come out of the Academy. The Grey Brutes are produced by the Genetic Mutator. (Which now only affects enemy infantry) The Grey Brutes are immune to mind-control and have very little sellback value to discourage people grinding them back for profit.

That's all for now, Excelsior! True Believers!

Twisted Insurrection - Public Beta 5, it has been a very long time in the making, but it is finally reaching it's hotly anticipated release this July! After lots of hard work, we have finally managed to confirm a set release date for the next version of the mod, and that release date will be July - 19 - 2014! There has been an incredible amount of work done to Twisted Insurrection since the release of Public Beta 4 back in late 2012, the mod is almost unrecognizable from all of it's previous releases and feels much more complete and polished than ever before.

Twisted Insurrection is a stand alone modification of Tiberian Sun, meaning you don't need to own Tiberian Sun to play. The mod features a completely new in-depth story-line which puts you in an alternate timeline where the Brotherhood of Nod were victorious during the first Tiberian War rather than GDI; After the Brotherhood used the Ion Cannon to destroy an irreplaceable monumental structure, the Global Defense initiative lost all UN support leaving them in total disarray. This is where our story begins.

Along with the complete overhaul and replacing of the original games graphics and having it's own all new soundtrack, Twisted Insurrection brings you all new units, infantry and naval forces to command as either The Brotherhood of Nod or the Global Defense Initiative in both singleplayer and multiplayer missions along with all new structures and base defenses to build as well! The mod also introduces the GloboTech corporation and contains all new campaigns for both GDI and Nod, plus some additional bonus challenge missions and several hidden maps so there is always plenty more to play. TI also features all new game-modes and over 100 multiplayer maps to play either online or in skirmish mode.

Do you have what it takes to drag the shattered Global Defense Initiative out of ruin? Or will you crush all who oppose the will of Kane and his Inner Circle? The choice is yours commander.

Twisted Insurrection - Public Beta 5 Features:

Windows 8 Support
All new Skirmish/Online set-up Options
Completely Standalone (No CD/TS Required)
A new in-depth story-line
Completely revamped graphics
Over 40 new single-player campaign missions
Over 100 new multi-player maps
Smoothest ever game-play
Excellent online game-play
Official CNCNet Support
All New Units
All New Structures
Enhanced Skirmish and AI
Custom cinematics
An all new Original Soundtrack
Over 1200 changes since Beta 4!

Thanks for reading, ladies and gentlemen and we hope you are as excited for this release as we are! With the bad news about the official Command & Conquer games losing their online support and servers, we hope that Twisted Insurrection will fill the void that has been created for some of you! On that note also, the recent news on C&C Games losing their servers will not effect Twisted Insurrection, thanks to the usage of CNCNet.

It's been eight months since the last news post & nearly a year since I posted anything new about D-Day. During that time I've had to deal with some difficult personal issues which has ended with me moving to a different country with only what I could fit in a suitcase. Nothing can stop me from modding tho, so armed with a backup of D-day's files on a USB stick I've soldiered on.

Now on to some actual D-day news! As I have mentioned a few times over the past year the next version of D-day will focus on adding Japan as a new side, I'm happy to report that they are now nearing completion. Over the next two weeks I'll be posting all of the Japanese units completed so far & to start things off here are their cargo & transport units.

Isuzu Type 97

Type 97 was based on an Isuzu commercial truck design, it shared many common parts with the Isuzu Type 94 Truck. Type 97 was one of the most common trucks used by the IJA during World War II.

In D-day the Isuzu Type 97 is used as the Japanese supply vehicle in Pre/Early-War.

Nissan Type 180

Nissans second mass produced military truck, heavily based on a 1937 Chevrolet truck design. It went though several evolutions during the course of the war with many parts being simplified and changed from metal to wood in an effort to save materials. It proved to be quite a successful design and was produced until the early 50's.

In D-day the Nissan Type 180 is used as the Japanese supply vehicle in Mid/Late-War.

Toyota Su-Ki

The Su-Ki was an amphibious cargo truck based on the Toyota To-Ki. It was used by IJA forces to transport cargo around islands in the Pacific.

In D-day the Nissan Type 180 is used as the Japanese supply vehicle in Post-War.

Isuzu Type 94

Before World War II the IJA used commercial trucks which proved to be unsuitable for the hardships of military service. So seeking a more robust vehicle the IJA commissioned Isuzu to design a 6 wheeled truck specifically for military needs. The Type 94 design went on to become the standard military truck of Japan & more were produced then any other Japanese truck during World War II.

In D-day the Isuzu Type 94 is used as the Japanese transport in Pre/Early-War.

Type 1 Ho-Ha

Development of the Ho-Ha started in 1941 with prototypes being built soon after. The army preferred to use fast trucks over slower armored carriers though, so interest in the project was lost. By 1944 the need for better infantry protection was greater than that of speed so mass production of the Ho-Ha started, the worsening war situation and the lack of raw materials meant that only a limited amount were produced before the war ended.

In D-day the Type 1 Ho-Ha is used as the Japanese transport in Mid/Late/Post-War.

Type 1 Ho-Ki

The Type 1 Ho-Ki was designed as a fully tracked armored carrier which could also be used as a prime mover for towing artillery and field guns. It however suffered from the same difficulties as the Type 1 Ho-Ha and only a limited number were built, many of which were lost at sea when the ship transporting them to the Philippines was sunk.

In D-day the Type 1 Ho-Ki is used as the Japanese transport in Total-War.

Type 4 Chi-So

Designed as an armored personnel carrier and prime mover in the closing stages of World War II, only a few were built before the war ended.

In D-day the Type 4 Chi-So is used as the Japanese construction vehicle in all time frames.

Lastly I have to unfortunately announce that the next version of D-day will not be release on D-day's anniversary this June 6th like the previous years. I have something else planned to mark the occasion tho which I hope will make up for it.

A new play test version of OpenRA (20140525) has been released today.

Quote:

The focus of this playtest has been improving our low-level engine code, but there have been a few nice player-facing improvements, too:

- Fixed the shellmap issues that were present in the previous playtest.
- Added a Battlefield News indicator, so we can keep you up to date on with the latest community news.
- Further improvements to the lobby and replay interfaces.
- Significant reductions in load time.
- More balance improvements!
- More bug fixes

The whole changelog can be viewed at their wiki while the game can be downloaded at their official site. Have fun!

OpenRA, the engine that tries to recreate (and improve) the old Command & Conquer RTS games, is close to release a new official version. They are already on release candidate state and no longer adding features until the next official version is released. Two days ago, they've released another play test version, the 20140602. Here are some of the changes, when compared to previous play tests:

Quote:

Fixed crashes when OpenRA Resources returns invalid data.
Fixed the automatic map download not updating the lobby after completion.
Fixed a crash on non-English locales (Windows).
Another significant improvement in CPU performance.
Added 3 new Lua scripted missions and skirmish maps.
Polished the support beacon display.
Improved pathing for engineers and passengers.
Fixed compatibility with Debian Wheezy.
Fixed the startmenu shortcut on Windows.
Fixed problems in the Red Alert SNOW tileset.
Fixed a regression where spies could be identified on the radar.
The web infrastructure has been ported to a new faster site: openra.net

You can read the full list of changes from this version at their wiki and download the latest play test at their official download section. Have fun!

The Dawn of the Tiberium Age 1.1232 is online.

HyperPatch 0.3: the day that Aircraft Transport bug is gone!

The (null) future of Command & Conquer franchise

Colony Wars - March 2014 Updates

Ares 0.6 has been released!

Technical changes in DTA's next update

The Dawn of the Tiberium Age 1.1260 Update Released!

World Domination: April - May 2014 Updates

New CAPTCHA for PPM forums.

Latest downtime: MySQL upgrade.

Quick Heads Up!

YR Red-Resurrection 2.1 is now available!

The WarFactory is in dire need of help.

EA Is Shutting Down Over 50 Multiplayer Game Servers in June

The New Twisted Insurrection Client [TI]

Colony Wars April-May 2014 Updates

Twisted Insurrection - Public Beta 5 Release Date Confirmed!

D-Day is back in action.

OpenRA Play Test 20140525 has been released!

OpenRA Play Test 20140602 is now available!