Tiberian Sun Rising mod for C&C3: Tiberium Wars

Ahrimansiah
I am more than happy to provide some more transparency for our long-time fans following the project and I can understand your scepticism. Now buckle up because this is going to be a long story so I apologise for the length but well. My way of trying to explain this concisely was in our news update above. It really wasn't the intention to slow down updates after last year’s MOTY and the timing of this update had nothing to do with MOTY since we have already won Best Upcoming before and as I confirmed in the update we sadly won't have a release during the MOTY window this year.

Last year we had a slew of updates for 2019 to end the year, We started testing release candidates putting them through their paces for a public beta release and found some concerning stability issues and worse than we initially thought. Now C&C3; memory problems have plagued other mods but we found this was really souring the experience and happening more regularly then expected.

So, we started investigating solutions and fortunately we’re very lucky to have some of the most experienced people with the C&C3; SAGE engine on the team in the modding community. We discovered a solution that would not only solve the stability issues, but the game performance overall was going to benefit a ton and in testing exceeded our wildest expectations. The price of this however was a pretty drastic overhaul of the project’s codebase refactoring massive sections and painstaking and tedious amounts of testing to implement.

We’ve been working on that since early in 2020, now memory optimisation and refactoring are largely invisible progress to our audience but also pretty draining it also makes planning news updates harder. So, this was a massive time investment on our part but also when we first started working this new process, we had quite a lot of technical problems with the engine at first. Problems we have since resolved after a lot of testing, trial & error and we now have refined the process and Tiberian Sun Rising has been migrating more consistently to this new codebase a lot more smoothly now.

Then COVID19 hit and that put a lot more pressure on not just me but particularly on members of my team. One of which was a key person involved in the optimisation phase of Tiberian Sun Rising that had helped make it possible in the first place. This really slowed things down as it was a lot harder for us to collaborate as they were having to work tons of overtime for months.

Fortunately, we still made decent progress and now things are generally slowly improving for most of the team. Besides optimisation during this time animations, VFX and other departments were completing work and polishing areas of the mod. Most of the team that were affected are now closer to amount of time they had to contribute before the pandemic started. Which has been a huge impact for my time as well as it made the optimisation journey easier and more like originally planned before COVID hit.

The optimisation process is now moving more smoothly than ever. But yeah this is why its probably felt like beating a dead horse to some of you its been a very though year. Also with my time and capacity just being completely drained by having to take on initial optimisation efforts solo, a new job in RL, COVID , keeping the team running I just haven’t had the time or energy to post updates much except on our Discord until now things have eased up a bit.

Now we’ve gotten through the hardest parts of it all and we are super excited about 2021 and ecstatic with how the mod is performing in latest builds where now this is something we can be proud of to launch but there is still more optimisation work ahead and more to code/content to migrate so we’re busy working on it as I stated in our latest update above. Also memory optimisation is not something many mods do so we really are busting out everything to make this the best experience we can for you when we launch (thou I’m sure there’ll still be bugs and hence beta) but being able to run stably most of the time was key for us to achieve that for you.

So, there it is, for those of you who made it through reading all that wow well I’m just happy you felt it was worth reading to the end. For anyone still sceptical I will be more than happy to do some comparisons of unoptimized TS Rising and the optimised version in progress in some of our updates next year to demonstrate just how massive the improvements are.

We're delivering every feature we promised there has been no empty promises and because we've never previously announced an actual release date there was no empty promise on a missed date ether. Yes it is true the whole project is a long promise but so is every game until it releases. By the way the years 2010-2015 were some of my most intense years working as a professional game designer in the industry and hence why a lot if that period I was pretty quiet. A lot of progress was still made on TS Rising but it was some super intense years working almost non stop round the clock.

Not many other modders here in the C&C Community juggle working in industry and modding. So I do just want it noted that it did make things more challenging then I had originally anticipated.

No by optimisation I mean actual memory optimisation this is a 32bit game and almost every C&C3; mod crashes the damn game because eventually, it goes over the memory limits for 32bit. Even Tiberium Essence suffers from this.

We've actually gone as far as memory profiling and extensive testing to massively improve/fix the situation. As we were finding it was affecting TS Rising more then Essense and other mods and getting quite frustrating for the player.

This is normally a process only professional game developers do, fortunately having worked on some professional teams where we did memory profiling/optimisation like this we know what we are doing here. (Though its a damn shame we don't have tools like Unreal 4 or Unity's memory profiling tools which woulda made this a ton easier).

That said we've mostly completed that stage of getting the memory usage way down we're still migrating everything to our new codebase without just undoing all the optimisation made. So it is a time-consuming process bringing everything in and maintaining the memory & technical standards we've put in place.

Tib Essense is in a different category since it's released I even voted for them (thou I usually do there a great mod). So just saying there aren't many mods in the Upcoming category but just be aware that released and unreleased mods aren't competing in the MOTY. But we've also won Best Upcoming in the past so look we're just honoured to still be nominated and voted so thank you all for continued support.

No problem I've been trying not to bog people down in technical jargon but also trying not to sound so vague it just sounds like excuses so been trying to find the sweet spot I do apologise for the walls of text was struggling to explain it concisely.