Archived News » Playtest 20150524

Posted by Matthias Mailänder at 2015-05-24 10:40:00 +0000

It has been a month of busy development. Time to get back to testing!

The major changes this time around include:

A whole new in-game map editor, with many benefits over the old editor.

Improved system integration with openra:// server join URLs. Give it a try from our live server list!

server join URLs. Give it a try from our live server list! Implemented production building upgrades that unlock additional technology for Dune 2000.

Several enhanced classic missions have been added to the Tiberian Dawn mod.

In the Red Alert and D2k mods you will now be notified upon encounter of enemy units.

Unfortunately, an oversight in the way that we package our windows installer meant that the performance of our Windows release-20150429 builds was much worse than it should have been. We have fixed this for playtest-20150524, so Windows players should find the game runs about 30% faster!

Also general performance improvements have been integrated that affect all platforms. Kudos to RoosterDragon for his continued effort to optimize our source code.

The refined system integration adds a lot of convenient features:

Hardware cursors will now work more reliably on Microsoft Windows.

On Mac the dialogs won’t hijack finder and the dock icon won’t get lost upon restarting.

Linux AppStream compatible software centers will now show a nice preview.

Double-clicking an .orarep file will now directly start playback of the replay.

Our new in-game map editor took over a year of development time, and it was worth it!

It is truly cross-platform as it uses our game UI; finally a map editor on Mac OS X!

No more rendering glitches. Almost WYSIWYG editing, because we re-use the game renderer.

Support for all file formats, i.e. voxels, isometric terrain and Dune 2000 sprite actors.

You can now keep an overview of installed custom maps and delete them in the same menu.

Click Extras - Map Editor from the main menu in any mod. To all our enthusiastic mappers out there: Your feedback is invaluable at this stage. We will remove the legacy OpenRA.Editor.exe in the nearby future.

Great news for tinkerers. You can now use voxels in your own mods and maps. See our updated trait documentation. The Lua API for mission scripting has also been enhanced while we proceed to implement remakes of the original campaigns.

More details and links to pull request can be found on our changelog page.

You can find the installers for a variety of supported operating systems in our download section.

Please report problems on our bug tracker. We plan to do a new stable release based upon these changes soon.

Keep track of your thirdparty maps from OpenRA Resource Center

and delete unwanted ones in the updated map chooser. One by one the results of the student project to import the original Tiberian Dawn missions is integrated.

Thanks to the THM course instructors for their creative teaching methods. The on-going quest to finalize the Dune 2000 mod has reached a new milestone

with building upgrades which re-create the original tech tree. The in-game map editor is also a vital part of our Tiberian Sun support initiative.