Wouldn't be better a new complete rewritten engine?

[~EagleScreen~]

Wouldn't be better to work in to code a new rewritten game engine?
Don't get offended, you are doing a big and great work. But, how much sustainable is the task of to binary patch and patch an old abandoned engine?

[Renegade]

Yes, a complete rewrite would be more flexible, and the idea has periodically been coming up for years - it's nothing new.
Ideally, it'd be something like an SDL-based, open-sourced reimplementation of the game, akin to OpenTTD.

OpenTTD reached version 1.0 on April 1 this year, after 6 years of development.
They have 16 distinct team members listed on their contacts page alone, and, being an open source project, they got quite a number of contributions from the community.
Now compare that to Ares's team.
Sure we could start a project like this. But it'd take at least a year until it's in a state in which it'd be useful for general playing, and years more until it'd be in a state akin to stock YR.

It's been tried before. Multiple times. As far as I know, all teams failed.

Writing a complete game from ground up with only a handful of people is a shitload of work, and as much better as it would be, right now, Ares gives quicker gratification.
Would I like to see OpenYR one day? Would help working on it? Hell yeah.
But that would be a future project, independent of Ares - as a replacement for Ares, it's not viable.

[~Guest~]

Some people is working in patches since years and years to improve RA2-YR, this has been excellent, there is no dude that Ares is a great tool which will allow to have good improvements and good mods in a short time. But each year will be more difficult to maintain and to improve this old game, so a parallel project making a newer Open Source RA2-YR will be very convenient looking at the future.
I already know what are you thinking right now about me: less talking/asking and more working/coding! LOL I probably will do it when I become ready, by the moment I am not a very good programmer.
Think that if people had started the Open Source RA2-YR years ago in place of patches, now probable we would have a functional Open Source RA2-YR, and working on it would be much easier.

[Renegade]

Yes, that's true, of course - had we started years ago, we'd be done by now.
But had we started years ago, RockPatch would never have come as far, since the half the time would have been spent working on OpenYR, and Ares would probably never have happened - why waste time creating a C++ "patch" if you're working on a more flexible C++ game anyway?

You always have to see it in terms of work and capacity: Every work you invest into OpenYR is work that is not invested in Ares (or other patches).
If there were a significant force of C++-speaking volunteers who'd say "this Ares stuff is way beyond us, but we'd help with a plain clone", then it'd be a possibility - because we'd have the manpower to do it.
But as long as it's just us, every hour we work on OpenYR is an hour we don't work on Ares. And if neither Ares nor OpenYR is released, because Ares is developed slower, and because OpenYR isn't done yet, the community will not be happy.

[~EagleScreen~]

Yes, stop Ares development now would be a bad idea, it is very advanced.
The option of making a YR clone from scratch should be for a middle-long future, afer we have a good stable and usable release of Ares.

[Orac]

I don't believe that an entirely new game is remotely necessary once we have a good stable and usable release of Ares.
Ares keeps adding new functionality, in the same way that a new game would. The more of Ares there is, the easier it will be for new things to be added.
By the time that the majority of RA2's hardcoding is removed and the global tags have been deglobalised, there seems very little that a modder can't do to make it seem like a totally different game anyway.

In conclusion: Good job, Ares devs!

[DCoder]

Thank you.

[~EagleScreen~]

Ofcouse, Ares make easier than ever before the game modding. But I have in mind compatibility questions, in not very much time, we will have difficulties to can run RA2-YR in modern systems: we will need to use old computers and old operating systems, and the game probably will never make the most of the newer computers capacity.
For instance: some people have serious problems to run Yuri's Revenge in dual core systems, it usually crashes, you have to install an old Windows version like Windows XP to can play a LAN game, and surely we will have more problems each year.

[Blade]

There are patches for LAN on Win 7 so that is nonsense and YR runs fine on my 64 Bit Win 7 system. Its not like it NEEDS to make use of the multiple cores and such, it was designed to run on far more modest hardware. By the time it becomes a real issue, we'll have VMs or Emulators that run faster than the original hardware anyhow.

[Nighthawk]

Out of curiosity, how does YR fare under Windows 7's XP Mode?

[Blade]

Can't say I've tried it personally since it runs fine in 7 native, but I was planning on installing it in a few xp VMWare machines to do some network play testing at some point so I'll let you know how that goes.

[~EagleScreen~]

First: Are that LAN patch compatible with Ares and mods?
Second: Red Alert 2 can't be installed on a virtual machine or wine, the installer won't run and exits with this error message:
"A debugger has been detected, unload the debugger and try again".

[Blade]

1. To my knowledge, yes.
2. If it can't be installed on VMWare, how come there are RA2/YR preinstalled VMWare virtual machines available on torrent sites?

[DCoder]

Because we're not the only ones who can reverse engineer the game to remove that check.

[~Guest~]

http://www.ppmsite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24410

Custom engine under development!