It Came From Red alert! is a mod that brings the original Red alert into Red alert 2: Yuri's Revenge.
It requires Red alert 2: Yuri's Revenge V1.001.
Beta Releases 1 and 2 do not require additional patches, Beta Release 2.5 requires Rock Patch 1.08SE for all features to work correctly, Beta Release 3 requires NPatch Special Edition #0019 or newer for all features to work correctly and Pre-release Candidate 1 does not require any additional patches.
ICFRA! has had at least 86000 downloads across its various releases. Unfortunately a ModDB stats reset prevented an accurate count from being maintained but the estimate is that the mod may have reached just short of 100,000 downloads overall.
The mod was started on 25th November 2006 as I was becoming frustrated trying to play Red Alert without some of the interface features added in later games (primarily the right click scrolling, the tabbed sidebar and queueing the production of units), the mod was first announced on the 29th November 2006 and Beta Release 1 was released on the 1st of December 2006 with mostly RA2 graphics and Red Alert code.
This initial release was soon followed by Beta Release 2 on the 2nd of January 2007 which included alot of new graphics, some missed units and a number of accuracy fixes, but a couple of significent bugs that were found after release lead to a BR2.5 being released on the 7th of January that required the Rock Patch.
Beta Release 3 emerged on October 14th 2007 with a number of accuracy fixes and graphical updates/additions including additional terrain, redone building graphics with animations and new graphics for the capturable tech structures aswell as making use of the newer NPatch (SE #0019).
There was sporadic progress on a fifth and final version of ICFRA!, to be dubbed Release Candidate 1. It had a few small but significent changes (the Tesla Coil fires properly for example) but was primarily going to be focused on allowing maps and missions to be made by enabling the campaign menu and including the singleplayer only units like Volkov and Chitzkoi. Damage frames for the buildings and completion of the terrain were two major jobs which I was struggling to progress through, therefore preventing a release from happening. I lost some files relating to the batch processing I was doing which made it even harder, then I lost interest in modding C&C games and moved on to Unreal Tournament 3. Eventually I lost interest in modding altogether.
In December 2012, over five years since the previous release and in the face of people privately asking for different versions of the mod, I realised just how much I'd changed since BR3 and decided to make the most recent version of the mod available.
I wanted a quick way to get mod, which was labelled up as Release Candidate 1, out so I put "Pre" in front of the name to show the mod wasn't completed. Pre Release Candidate 1 was born.
With PRC1 a lot of small but significant bugs were fixed (including the iconic firing of the Tesla Coil and the flame ball graphics for the Soviets) there was a big weapon range fix for Tesla weapons and the V2 Rocket Launcher, some singleplayer only units were coded into the game to allow people to make maps, the vehicle graphics were switched to the team colour versions and were updated with newer voxel processing methods.
Perhaps most important of all was the divorce between the mod and the community patches it had become reliant on, PRC1 requires only vanilla Yuri's Revenge v1.001 for maximum compatibility and ease of use. This very slightly negatively affected the mods ability to properly recreate Red Alert but I felt it was worth it.
While PRC1 was an important update to the mod it wasn't the complete release version I wanted it to become. The terrain was never completed, the AI was never overhauled, damage frames were never finished and some other issues were never properly tackled. The PRC1 release therefore went live with my to do list as part of the release notes.
PRC1 marked the likely end of the development of It Came From Red Alert!
The mod expanded vastly beyond my original intentions, though sadly fell short of what it could have been. Nevertheless it was consistently popular.
I would like to thank everyone for the kind comments the mod has received over the years and apologise that I never managed to finish it.
