OpenRA Progress – Polish, Editor, Minions

Tuesday 11 May 2010 - Filed under Uncategorized

We’re still working hard on OpenRA, and it’s starting to pay off. Most games play to completion now, rather than desynchronizing. The highlights:

1. We had a great semi-public playtest in the weekend, which involved about 100 downloads and many games played, giving our new teamplay code a good beating. This has also shown up a lot of areas where the game needs more work, particularly in the pathing support.
2. Matthew (beedee) has put together a great new website for us, which you can find at http://open-ra.org. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, but our conversion rate has skyrocketed, so he must have done something right!

   

3. We’ve also got prebuilt packages for a few major Linux flavors up on the website now – currently supporting Arch Linux and RPM-based systems. Debian/Ubuntu users can use the RPMs via Alien. We might also offer a native Debian package soon. Users of other distributions can either use their equivalent of Alien, or build from source. Follow the instructions at http://open-ra.org/getinvolved.html
4. Similarly, we’ve got prebuilt packages for Mac OS X up on the website. They’re kindof large, though – blame nVidia for producing ~30MB Cg binaries for that system. We’re still hoping to do something about the bloat, but for now, at least it WORKS.
5. We’d like to welcome a new minion team member – Booom3. So far he’s been helping us add hotkey support for the building palette, which is much appreciated.
6. The Windows build now includes a fully-functional map editor. It’s also available for other platforms if you build from source. The editor supports both RA and CNC, and apparently WORKS too, since I built a new 3-player map “Snowy Ridge” using it. Check it out:

As always, keep playing the game; let us know when you find stuff that doesn’t work quite right, and drop into freenode #openra for a chat with the developers if you have any questions.

Thanks!

2010-05-11  »  admin