Our first playtest of 2014 is long overdue, and marks a significant step forward from our holiday release.
A brief sampling of our full changelog is included below.General gameplay improvements include:
- Air units can now attack-move and guard other actors.
- Players can now place beacons on the map to signal teammates.
- Time-delayed support powers will also place beacons.
- Unit husks can now be force-targeted and destroyed.
- Engineers (mechanics in RA) can salvage unit husks to return them to the battlefield.
User-interface improvements include:
- A new mod selector interface, which now appears the first time you run OpenRA.
- The offline skirmish mode from Tiberian Dawn has been added to the other mods.
- Significant UI improvements for spectators and replays.
- Integration with the OpenRA Resource Center for installing custom maps when joining a game.
Specific mod improvements include:
- [D2K] Implemented concrete plates, and structural damage for buildings built on the ground.
- [D2K & RA] Saboteur / Tanya can now place C4 on vehicles.
- [RA & TD] Tanya / Commando can now place C4 on bridges.
- [TD] Added several of the original campaign missions.
- [RA] Added the Allies Phase Transport and and Soviet Hijacker units.
- [RA & TD] A number of balance changes (see the full changelog for details).
Changes that impact mod and custom-map authors include:
- Improvements to the Lua scripting API.
- Removal of the legacy scripted missions.
- The legacy (RA & TD) map converter has moved from the map editor into OpenRA.Utility.exe.
- Added --upgrade-mod and --upgrade-map utility commands to automatically upgrade a mod or map targeting release-20131223 to the latest version.
- A number of trait properties have changed from pixel or cell units into world units. Use –upgrade-mod to automatically convert these.
A significant issue was discovered with our Lua integration late in this playtest cycle. This shouldn’t significantly affect scripted missions, but caused the shellmaps (the animations that run in the main menu) to become unstable after some time. Rather than delay the playtest further, we have disabled the shellmaps until the issue has been fixed. The shellmaps will be restored before the next full release.
We have also been nominated for the Linux Game Awards Project of the Month for May 2014.
If you’d like to help improve the profile of open-source Linux gaming, then be sure to vote for us (or one of our competitors, they are great projects too!).
A brief taste of our new playtest changes can be seen below:
The new mod chooser is styled after our website, and better highlights the official and custom mods.
Concrete plates have been added to D2K, and the turrets now integrate properly with walls.
Beacons and radar pings will now notify you, your allies, and spectators of any important events.
The Allied Phase Transport can transport three infantry, while remaining cloaked from enemy view.
I'm impressed. Just came over to say thanks for the huge effort and great work. Much appreciated. Gonna spend some time with c&c in my holidays.
Played for about 1,5 hours, well, that's my humble opinions:
- Stats should have kills/deaths ratio
- AI in RA on normal diff. builds a lot of power plants for no reason (anyway AI needs solid build limit of certain build types)
- In RA player should have option to decide: do player needs to hide build panel on double click on type button or have separate button for that. On fast clicking game it's annoying to see your panel moving away too much.
- Sliders for UI windows everywhere where lists are present - must have.
- When you go to MODS section from loaded mod you have only 2 options - load mod or quit. It needs "Cancel" button to not load mod again.
- Annoucer should have delay time for same types warnings. "Silos needed", "Silos needed" sometimes repeat in less that second. 5 or 10 seconds will do just fine, IMO.
- Airports and helipads could have "Attack-Move" rally point.
- Never noticed before that TD has silo usage meter - I liked that feature very much, very convenient.
- I think that special "Spectrate/Stats/Quit" menu is needed after defeat/win condition in single player missions.
Anyway, I liked implemented features in this version. Had no serious troubles so far. Strongly support. Good luck!
I seriously though that the d2k screen was from the original. Only thing for it to be perfect is the carryals.
I think you guys should specify that the beacons are only revealed to yourself, allies, and spectators. Because at first I didn't quite understand, and I had to read the entire thing before I found that.
some nice improvements.
i have noticed that in the prison break missions the objective is "crush all opposition" when it should be "capture the prison"
i also am finding that when choosing a map some of the images wont load or take a long time to, only showing the start positions
placing silos behind refineries selects the refinery
unable to target units on the ends of the bridge
i think it would be good to label the missions by the faction and mission number