OpenD2k - cross platform reimplementation of Dune 2000

[Feda]

Impressive! Very nice. The Flame Tanks are something which should exist in all Westwood games, and they kinda do, only red alerts and dunes don't have them :D

[mvi]

The source code for http://d2kplus.com/soundeffecttool.php would be helpful.

http://code.google.com/p/dune2000plusone/source/browse/trunk/Dune2k1/SoundRSEditor should be what you're after

[Feda]

btw, i guess that high-res will be available, right?

[Matthias M.]

btw, i guess that high-res will be available, right?

OpenRA uses modern technology and supports any screen resolution.

[Feda]

Nice.

Btw, did u think about some kind of Stealth Tanks for Ordos? It fits their House's profile :)

And also, my opinion is that the game needs some kind of artilery units, cuz the siege and missle tanks are not so much of an artilery element. (also, deviator's innacuracy makes it useless, so does the fact that it doesnt affect structures)

[Matthias M.]

Btw, did u think about some kind of Stealth Tanks for Ordos? It fits their House's profile :)

And also, my opinion is that the game needs some kind of artilery units, cuz the siege and missle tanks are not so much of an artilery element. (also, deviator's innacuracy makes it useless, so does the fact that it doesnt affect structures)

Stealth Tanks are possible with the engine. The Ordos Quad could become a stealth unit. Artillery already has increased attack radius. Only the Deviator stealing units needs some coding. It currently just shoots missiles.

[Feda]

Nice, but watch out not to make them too strong. Also, I hope that this version will remove the capability of spamming 1 bilion units to the battlefield and wait 1 hour in the middle of the map because the atreides player jammed all the entrances with sonics. I want more balance to the game, and I want it to be mroe like less-units , but well controlled, instead masses or armies :) Something like Tiberian Dawn, where to get some stealth tanks is not very easy. If all the ordos quads will be stealthed and the unit spamming system will remain, this will make ordos too strong :D I hope u understand what I mean.

Here is an example video about the spamming thing:

Thats the way matches are played online. It can't be played in any other way, thats why I want that the new version to be not about spamming, but like few units well controlled. :)

[Nyerguds]

You seem to have black-to-transparency errors on your graphics (the Atreides hi-tech has the most glaring errors)... do please treat paletted images as paletted when editing. Preferably, convert them with a palette where the first colour isn't black.

[Matthias M.]

You seem to have black-to-transparency errors on your graphics (the Atreides hi-tech has the most glaring errors)... do please treat paletted images as paletted when editing. Preferably, convert them with a palette where the first colour isn't black.

Maybe the https://github.com/Mailaender/OpenRA/blob/dune/mods/d2k/bits/d2k.pal is broken or I have to define that black should be transparent somewhere. I added this to the TODO list.

I am currently kinda stuck anyway. Extracting game files from the CD's setup.z fails. The BLOX*.R8 files need to be converted into TMP tileset files which I don't know how. Also the SOUND.TS needs to be extracted, resampled and OpenRA needs support for WAV files. Infantry frames need to be resorted and the shroud tiles work completely different. So development will halt at this point if I don't get any help.

[mvi]

Already pointed you to the source code for extracting audio from the TS

[Matthias M.]

Already pointed you to the source code for extracting audio from the TS

Yup, but the engine would not support the extracted WAV files yet. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/2174 Music and announcements in AUD format are already added to the game.

I can already convert the BLOX*.R8 to PNGs. The OpenRA tileset builder crashes https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/2178 and relies on custom BMP files. As it is a GUI application it also can't be automatised. The command-line utility lacks a PNG > TMP converter. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/2194

Someone already did the infantry frame resorting but lost his batch and sequence files so I have to do it on my own.

Lately I fixed the AI so this is already working. The map editor also works, but has only few tiles available. The original Dune 2000 lacks one if I understood correctly.

[Matthias M.]

Thats the way matches are played online. It can't be played in any other way, thats why I want that the new version to be not about spamming, but like few units well controlled. :)

The Red Alert mod does not speedup unit construction with multiple war factories. Maybe this will already help.

[Matthias M.]

I did not manage to solve any of the major problems mentioned above, but I am still quite addicted to finishing my project. Added the mouse pointers and spice including spice blooms that generate spice like the mines in Red Alert or blossom trees in Tiberian Dawn. Looks ugly but finally the spice harvester does something :)

[CTLN7]

Great stuff guys !Looking forward to a release :) .Love to see Dune 2000 being alive after so many years ,the game of my childhood :D.

[Feda]

I did not manage to solve any of the major problems mentioned above, but I am still quite addicted to finishing my project. Added the mouse pointers and spice including spice blooms that generate spice like the mines in Red Alert or blossom trees in Tiberian Dawn. Looks ugly but finally the spice harvester does something :)

Keep up the good work, don't give up! You made some very nice things out there.

[Nyerguds]

Maybe the https://github.com/M...2k/bits/d2k.pal is broken or I have to define that black should be transparent somewhere.

No, that's exactly what you're doing wrong. There is no 'colour' defined as transparent, there is a PALETTE INDEX defined as transparent, and that's index #0, no matter what colour that is. The actual graphics of the game don't contain colours. The game, when loading these graphics, doesn't know 'black'. It does know, however, that any pixel on them that has colour index #0 has to be treated as transparent.

To convert it correctly, you need to CHANGE the first colour on the palette to a new colour that is unique on it, and then define THAT as transparent when converting, to make sure it doesn't mix up with the REAL black colour on the palette.

[Matthias M.]

The black distortion on top of the heavy factory is not a transparency issue. The part that is black seems to be in team color. It is the overlay. I am using the RA RenderWeaponFactory code to put the two parts together and for the Atreides heavy factory it doesn't seem to put the right pixels over each other as the black gap is rendered over the team color squares. I don't see the transparency issue for the hightech factory. There is a dark brown color that is correctly translated into shadow and black is transparent in-game. I recently added blox*.r8 file extractor and fixed TilesetBuilder so that now terrain and unit palette are identical. Maybe this will solve some problems.

[Matthias M.]

I am considering this alpha quality now. You get the latest snapshot at https://github.com/M...RA/zipball/dune and compile it with make/msbuild/Visual Studio C# 2008. On Windows you might need to copy some DLLs from https://github.com/O...naryOnlyInstall

Once done you only need to follow the in-game instruction as the mods automatically rips your Dune 2000 game files when he can not find the content. You still need a local installation as the InstallShield setup.z extractor currently fails. I suggest you use version 1.02 from http://www.abandonia.../Dune+2000.html as my R8Reader crashes with DATA.R8 of different versions. A tester reported in IRC that some kind of "Gold Version" does not work yet. I guess it's version 1.06 which adds grenade throwers and new terrain.

I completed the first terrain set.

You can create new maps with the map editor. If you post them here I will add them to the distribution as I currently only have an ugly test map. The shellmap is currently also just a blank replacement.

[Nyerguds]

I just looked into the colours issue, and it seems the problem is that the Dune2k remap colours are exactly in the opposite order as the OpenRA ones. All fades from bright to dark become fades from dark to bright in your graphics, with the originally-brightest colour becoming transparent on yours, for some reason.

I'd help you in converting the graphics but I honestly don't have a clue what kind of graphics OpenRA uses. I'm a bit of an expert when it comes to paletted graphics and correctly preserving house colours, shadows and transparency, though. I've been doing it for ages on all kinds of C&C graphics.

[Matthias M.]

I convert the Dune 2000 game files to C&C SHPs which you should be familiar with. To make it easier for you to fix it I uploaded the Atreides High-Tech factory: http://content.open-...le=units&id=160 and this is the palette that is used for the extraction and rendering in-game: https://github.com/M...2k/bits/d2k.pal To me it looks like as if not the whole team color spectrum is interpreted correctly as team color.

Good news by the way: my Dune 2000 mod has been merged into the OpenRA project and will be shipped with the next playtest.

I am also thinking about basing everything on the DATA.R8 and BLOXXMAS.R8 supplied by the 1.06 patch to use only Freeware content that can be downloaded easily. It will lack the mouse pointer and the voices though.

[Matthias M.]

Screenshot of my resource editor handling Data.R8 although I seem to recall according to Sib Grem's editor there were a few hundred more.

I can't compile it on Linux:

Warning: Assembly 'System.Deployment' not found.

Error CS2001: Source file `/home/matthias/Projekte/dune2000plusone-read-only/Dune2k1/ResourceEditor/ResourceEditor/Extensions.cs' could not be found (CS2001) (ResourceEditor)

I wonder if it can open the 1.06 Patch DATA.R8 as my code currently fails at frame 0 with bpp set to 52 so something must be really messed up here.

[Nyerguds]

I convert the Dune 2000 game files to C&C SHPs which you should be familiar with. To make it easier for you to fix it I uploaded the Atreides High-Tech factory: http://content.open-...le=units&id=160 and this is the palette that is used for the extraction and rendering in-game: https://github.com/M...2k/bits/d2k.pal To me it looks like as if not the whole team color spectrum is interpreted correctly as team color.

Well, it depends on what OpenRA uses as remap range. I'm guessing I have to look at the RA palette to figure that out.

[edit]

The conversion (to reverse the colours) is dead easy, but the transparency problem may be due to the last palette colour being reserved for a special function or something. As I said, I don't know much of OpenRA.

[edit again]

I can't seem to find any information on what setting in a mod determines which colour range it uses as remap in OpenRA... could you point me in the right direction?

If the last colour is indeed unusable I will have to switch the remap to one of the other rows on the palette to make it work.

[Matthias M.]

I reported is as a bug as I can't solve it on my own: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/2213 There is some documentation at https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/Palettes-and-Remaps As documentation is kind of a problem in OpenRA I suggest you join irc://chat.freenode.net/openra and ask chrisf.

[Nyerguds]

Ah. I'll look into that, thanks.

[edit]

I see. They've been really stupid. Instead of actually making a system to define how remap is handled, they just use the enum "ra", "cnc", "d2k". Which means that the incorrect handling of the d2k remap, including the odd transparency error, is purely inside the actual OpenRA code.

[Matthias M.]

https://github.com/M...les/system.yaml stores all palette related settings. But the palette extraction and experiments were done 2 years ago by someone else. No one got this far yet, to get buildings and mouse pointers in game so this is new land for OpenRA developers.