Good night, everybody.

[Renegade]

I just lay in my bed for about an hour trying to sleep. I failed, 'cause my sleep cycle is shifted too far. Lying there, I started to think. About me, my engagement in the community, my experiences of the last few days, and, last but not least, the state of the community itself.

To say it out loud right at the beginning: I'm not sure I want to be a YR/RA2 modder anymore. I'm not sure I want to spend my time in this community anymore.

Let me elaborate. I started modding RA2 back in 2001. I was a newb, but other than the lazy, arrogant suckers of today, I didn't get online and expect to be served with a bible to modding. I learned through the ini and its comments. I knew of the Guide's existence, but never actually read it, because the comments answered any question I'd have. Up until weird shit happened. I checked once. I checked twice. I reverted, reverted more, cursed myself for not having done more backups. But nothing helped. I would add perfectly fine unit, the AI would go crazy. I'd take them out, everything would work. Oh well. By then, Yuri's Revenge was out and already in my possession, so I restarted the mod, this time for YR. Everything was fine again.

Until it happened again. The same shit. The same code auditing, the same reverts, the same curses. Finally, I gave up. For the first time ever, posted a real request for help at DZ.

Oh hell did I get beaten.

Anyway, after the usual "noob" calls and getting some straightforward words from several people (what today's fragile bitches would call "verbal abuse"), I learned that I had met a strange thing called the "100 Unit Bug", and that reading the Guide would have told me about it beforehand. Well. Since it was now evident the game included some "features" the comments smartly did not mention, I turned to third party documentation. I read the Guide. "Enlightenment" is a good word to describe what I felt. Whenever I said "He has taught us well" in regards to DeeZire, it was no joke. His Guide and his community created the modder I am today. That, and the next few encounters I had with this glorious engine.

After now knowing how to avoid this dreaded bug, I made progress fast. My skillz improved. I made less and less mistakes on first code, I created my own vxls in 3dsmax, puzzled together shps that were well-received, created me a soundtrack mix so I could play-test to the immortal tracks of Tiberian Dawn. Until the engine bitch-slapped me again. Single player, TD was fine. Yeah, I had my fair share of temp and improvised graphics, and some balance-decisions were..."disputed" to say the least. But nevertheless, the mod worked, and those who played it seemed to like it. Single player, that is. Because once you started a multiplayer game, you could say hello to Internal Errors bitchy cousin - the Reconnection error. Again, code audits. Again, all code seemed fine. I quickly figured out it was mainly due to my mines, but it took months until I found out the instant-ones were due to them being invisible - and the fast-coming, seemingly random ones stayed. You were lucky if you could play a 45 min game with a friend. Usually, you had but 20 minutes.

So I restarted. Again. Again, I had big plans. A new, great concept, and thanks to even more experience, coding was faster than ever. Of course, the engine could help but kick me in the balls through stupid plugin-limitations and the like, but by then, I was veteran enough to curse it, hack it, and forget about it.
Of course, the engine couldn't allow that.
It was then that our friend Whitey discovered what we call the "Whiteboy Bug" today.
I had plans for hundreds of units, through several hacks. I could fuck them all, because it was too dangerous. One captured building, and the game would have crashed. Users don't take shit like that very well, no matter how good or logical the explanation is.

That was March 2004. I continued another few months, playing around with ideas of massive amounts of RequiredHouses and the like, but ultimately, I had to realize the engine's masterplan: Playing on time. I was gonna get fucked IRL.

Welcome to school finals. The first half of 2005 I spent with my written and oral final exams; I'd still have had lots of time for coding, but...for what? I couldn't make my vision reality anyway? Instead, I started planning again. One mod to rule them all. One mod to rule them all. One mod to find them. One mod to bring them all - and in the coding fuck them. My goal was not circumvent the "limitiations" of the engine anymore. My goal was to anticipate them. To build the entire concepts around their cornerstones, so I knew how and that everything would work before I coded it.

DRILL INSTRUCTOR TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

The second half of 2005 and the first quarter of 2006 I spent with my fellow comrades in green. I was one of the few community members who was actually a Conscript in real life - but this little titular fun most definately wasn't worth it. Nevertheless, I was determined to do it this time. Like I always do for my project, I collected every single thought about it I had, created a universe, made up dozens and dozens of units, thought about the l33t coding techniques we could use to achieve cool effects and expand the way YR mods were seen by the community. And hell, my concept is mighty, and realistic. Ask D. All of it is based on known-to-be-working stuff.

Not even 36 hours ago I publically released a first early alpha. Not because it was worth it, but for traditional reasons. Yes, I've spent enough years on my mod's incarnations to have developed traditions around it already. However, the point is, when I tried to play it the next day with my little brother, I was not even ten minutes into the game, and already caused an Internal Error. Except Checker says it's a missing warhead. I say bullshit, I'm five years past the stage where I forget warheads. The engine says I don't give a fuck. I play without my frigate. But not for long. Because, even though I only added around a dozen units yet, Mr. Retarded Cousin spends me a visit again: Reconnection Error.

I've spent nine months in the army. Did the first public release since one year ago. And already I'm greeted by nothing else than non-descriptive error-messages for shit that's definately not broken. Oh, and did I mention that the IE happens the moment you click the cameo - way before any warhead is triggered?

On top of all that, I'm coding on my notebook now - Windows XP. And while it didn't give me a hard time getting YR to run, it obviously doesn't like the Launcher in connection with it - YR has to crash once a session before it works fine for the rest of it.


Why am I telling you all this? Firstly, because I want you to see the engine the way I see it: It's a steaming pile of shit.
It may have been cutting edge back when Westwood had to fake TS's screenshots to make it look cool, but today, it's less than a joke. It's miserable. Ridiculous. And it's holding us back. Think about it. Inbuilt unit-limit of 101+-something. A maximum of 74+-something cameos a tab. No new sides. No new houses. No new super weapons. No air to air combat. No third side GUI. Plugins are neutered. No terrain deformation, no EMP, no ice, no tiberium damage, no veins, no visceroids. Railguns that produce horrible lag when used normally, but work fine if you do stuff that actually shouldn't work.
Think of all the other ridiculous limitiations we have to bear.
Modding this engine may have been fun five years ago. But in an age were people can convert ego shooters to multi-level strategy-games, and EA gives mod support for that sorry excuse of a C&C they produced, it might just be a waste of time.

But, what's the alternative? I could sit tight, wait for The Quest For Dollars, and make it my goal to fine-tune it. Fix whatever EA got wrong again. That horrible son-of-a-whore logo for example. But what would I have to do for that? Learn a totally new way of coding. A new way of mapping. A new way of creating graphics. And where would I be then? Back in my cell on the green mile, waiting for EA to let support for the next game die - after all, the n00bs will pay for CPLUSC 2008 as well. And 2009. And 2010.

Now, if I need to learn everything new again, especially coding, wouldn't it be worth more to learn something that's not ruled by the iron fist of Electronic Ass? If I need to learn coding, learn working with a new engine, and learn creating graphics all over again anyway - why the fuck should I be stupid enough to bow to anyone's decisions again? Why can't I just create my own game?
I don't know how smart it is to tell you this right now, but the truth is, it's already in planning. I'll still have to learn C++, that's no question, but I've already got a broad idea of what I'm going to do, and I know which engine to take as well. And I already got another geek to join me.
I know creating a game takes years, and I know learning a programming language ain't an easy task either. But we just acknowledged that, to stay in touch with this millenium, I'd have to re-learn how to code anyway. And it might as well be a language that's not limited to EA's various uses of the SAGE engine.
And about those years...I've spent five years coding and got nowhere. If I spent one year learning and three years coding, I'll have a game that's 100% what I want, I'll never have to encounter a cryptic error-message again, and I'll have one year left to support my very own modding community.

I am tired of waiting for EA to do the right thing. They won't. They're greedy asshole motherfucking holding hostage and raping the series I love. And I don't see a reason to encourage them to do it by forming a part of "their" community any longer.

Which directly brings me to secondly: This community is dead. On the inside.
I come from a past most of you don't even know. A past where RA2 ModMakers was the biggest site for modders to be on. A past where DZ not just visited us once a year on christmas, but actually took part in our discussions. A past where 50 to 100 people where active in RA2/YR Editing at DZ, and not 5 to 10 + the latest asshole n00bs. A past where there were a dozen resource-sites, daily updated with new stuff. A past where there were dedicated sites to reviewing mods. When the hell did any of you see that the last time?

Oldbies. Fellow modders. Think about the following names: Eagle. DeeZire. Enslaver. StrikerPro. Robbie Bear. Psycho. Infraid. ALL THE OTHERS I FORGOT. DeeZire has left us for Pro:n00b and Bitches of Middle Earth. Where are all the others?
We are relics. Dreamers. We wait for the return of a past that was dead the moment Generals was set as the next "C&C".

I have seen the spreading doom around me for years, yet I vocally denied claims the community was dead. And I still do. The community I knew, the community I joined, is dead. Whoever doubts that just needs to monitor RA2/YR@DZ a few days. He'll be lucky if he sees someone post at all. But EA's community, the "new" C&C community, is still there. It's ugly as hell, retarded and n00b-torn, but it's still there. The truth is, these stupid bastards are our only hope. If they don't buy whatever EA serves them, C&C will not be profitable anymore. And that means death.

I don't say C&C is dead yet. What I've seen so far from The Quest For Dollars sounds promising. But what I do say is that C&C isn't C&C anymore. They may try to change it back as much as they want, because they've seen how bad their core community reacted to it, but truth is - they'll fail. Not willfully. Simply because, after all, it's nothing but a quest for dollars for them. They will try to combine old-school C&C with elements of new and "hip" RTSs, so the n00bs and their friends buy as many CDs as possible. It will probably be a nice RTS, just like Generals, as an RTS, was playable. But it won't be a true C&C.

If you wanted to bring back freedom to America - would the first thing you do be the destruction of the Statue of Liberty? Certainly not.
If you wanted to bring back old-school C&C to fans that have been waiting for a true sequel for years - would the first thing you do be destroy the very symbol that represents their beloved universe? If you're EA, the answer is yes.

Were are the remainders of Command and Conquer.
The future lies in the hands of the children of Command plus Conquer.
May Kane protect them from the greed of their creators.


Not all is lost for us. pd's RockPatch is like a bright torch in a land of darkness - a Battle Fortress, crushing the walls of the prison that held back the engine's features.
Alas, I, personally, don't know if I'm ready to wait another year to release something, just to have to fight the same old bugs again...especially not if I just played TQFD or DoW before, and know how good RTSs can be. And it's not like the engine didn't try to make RockPatch taste bitter to me already. Whether it'll be old bugs or new ones, it'll be the same old, non-descriptive error-messages all over again. And I don't know if I have that much time to waste.





I do not say I'm gone. Hell, I don't even say I'll stop modding yet. I just post what bothers my mind, in hopes to finally get some rest.
I just want you all, especially the oldbies among us, to think. About what we lost. About what we have. About what EA is going to bring us.
Is this the community you joined? Is this the community you enjoyed spending your time in?

How many more years of your life do you want to spend with this crappy engine?




My name is Renegade. And I love C&C.