CCHyper wrote:

Hello C&C Community!

For those of you awesome C&C fans who I have not crossed paths with before, my name is Luke Feenan, aka. “CCHyper”. I’m a 20+ year veteran of the C&C Community, a long-time modder, and an Admin of CnCNet. I was also very fortunate to have been involved in the development of the C&C Remastered Collection under the mentorship of Jim Vessella.

Over the past year, I have been working alongside the amazing C&C stakeholders here at EA to restore the Perforce source code archives for the C&C games back to buildable states, which now provides us with the ability to patch these classic games in a deeper way going forward. As a long-time modder, it was amazing to finally get a chance to dive deep into the source code for these games and see how they work!

Today, I have been given the pleasure to share two major announcements for the C&C Franchise with you all!

# 1 Empowering the future of the community

For those of you in the community who know me, you will be familiar with my strong advocacy for video game preservation and my support for the video game open-source community.

It's almost 5 years ago now that EA released the source code for the C&C Remastered Collection DLL files. This release received praise across the video games industry and has enabled the community to create amazing content for the Remastered Collection. In reaction to the restoration process of the C&C archives, I wanted to take this one step further…

So, I’m proud to announce that we are releasing the fully recovered source code for Command & Conquer (aka, Tiberian Dawn) and C&C Red Alert under the GPL license! I know this will empower those in the community who continue to create content for these classic entries in the franchise, and I hope it will aid communities like CnCNet to continue to support these games and keep them playable for future generations. But let's not stop there!

The community over at W3DHub has been doing amazing things with the C&C Renegade engine for almost 20 years now, and their projects have been pushing the absolute limits of the game. To support them in taking the game and their awesome projects to the next level, we are also releasing the complete source code for C&C Renegade under the GPL license. All of us here are really excited to see what’s next in store for the community over at W3DHub and what they will be able to do with this release!

And finally, in appreciation of the C&C Generals community who have kept the game alive with their consistent energy and passion, hosting multiplayer tournaments, and producing amazing content, I’m extremely happy to share that we are releasing the full source code under GPL for C&C Generals and its expansion pack, Zero Hour! I know the Generals/ZH community is going to do amazing things with this source code release, and I’m excited to see what the team over at C&C Online does next with the multiplayer experience for these games.

You can find the source code on the Electronic Arts GitHub page;

- https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Tiberian_Dawn
- https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Red_Alert
- https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Renegade
- https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour

# 2 Steam Workshop Support

But now, onto our second announcement.

We are enabling Steam Workshop support for more C&C titles to allow users to upload their custom maps! We know this has been an ask from the community for a very long time so we are pleased to finally give all you map creators an official and permanent home on the Steam Workshop for your content. Now Steam Workshop support has gone live for:

- C&C Renegade
- C&C Generals & Zero Hour
- C&C 3 Tiberium Wars and Kane’s Wrath
- C&C Red Alert 3 & Uprising
- C&C 4 Tiberian Twilight

We have also updated all the Mission Editor and World Builder tools so you can publish maps directly to the Steam Workshop. When you subscribe to an item on the Steam Workshop (via the Client or webpage), the games will now pull that content down when you next launch the game and the maps will be displayed in the singleplayer/multiplayer map selection menus. We're all looking forward to seeing the fun and crazy maps you upload!

And to top this off, to support the Steam Workshop, we are releasing a “C&C Modding Support” pack, which contains the source XML, Schema, Script, Shader, and Map files for all the games that use the SAGE engine. This has been another wish from the community for almost 15 years now so we’re excited to finally make this happen, and we hope this helps you all in continuing to make amazing content and mods for the years to come.

You can find this support pack on the Electronic Arts GitHub page;

https://github.com/electronicarts/CnC_Modding_Support

I would like to take a moment to thank all the Community Playtesters who have supported us throughout this journey with their invaluable feedback and encouragement, also, a big thank you to everyone who has reported bugs and issues for the C&C games on Reddit and Steam. And of course to the whole C&C community for supporting these games for over 25+ years!

I would also like to thank the many people at EA working at various studios and departments across the globe who have helped make this happen (there are just too many to name!). Their support for this project and the C&C franchise was really motivating during the final push to launch. I also want to thank the amazing team at EA Partners for providing me with the freedom to execute this project and the resources to help make it happen. Additionally, a shoutout to all of those who have supported me throughout this journey who are not at EA or associated with the C&C franchise. You're awesome, and you know who you all are! Lastly, I would like to take a personal moment to thank my two biggest supporters here at EA and throughout this journey. Technical Director Brian Barnes, who gave me the respect and autonomy to develop this project in the technical direction I felt was best for the core community. And Jim Vessella, for pulling all the pieces in place, and continuing to share his experience, knowledge, and insight with me. (And, of course, continuing to champion the C&C franchise here at EA!). Thank you to both of you for always looking out for me.

Luke “CCHyper” Feenan

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- Fixed THAAD not firing.
- Improved Heavy Sam continuing firing after being destroyed - it needs more testing.
- Improved Helicopter dead logic. Thanks to that, Heavy Sam will immediately reengage new targets after the first missile hits the target, unlike before hit by multiple missiles while falling down.
- Fixed TOR-M1 AA system auto-targeting idle
- USA Spy Drone GP is now controllable, but flying speed is reduced by 15%

Quote:

============================= CHANGE LOG =============================
- Seals can now plant a total of 10 bombs (2 before). The time between the planting of the bombs is increased from 0 seconds to 10 seconds reload for balance purposes
- All upgrades that were using build unit logic are now reworked, and the structure will hide the unit from the command bar once built and will delete this object from the game for better performance
- Helipad no longer spawns infantry after being destroyed
- Construction dozer armor greatly improved against Jet missiles. 2 T0 Jets will be needed to kill it. Dozers HP increased by 10%
- All Command Centers build time reduced from 50 sec to 30 sec
- All Command Centers HP increased from 5000 to 6000
- Units code optimization for better stability
- All ground vehicle's speed was lowered and balanced. Overall, 15-20% slower vehicles are still ~10% faster than ZH vehicle speed.
- Slight reduction of GLA infantry movement speed
- Abrams and Griffin tank machine gun damage was reduced by 22%. AOE of the bullet reduced by 50%, Rate of fire slowed by 33%
- Phoenix tank machine gun damage increased by 10%, but Rate of fire slowed by 220%
- Phoenix movement speed reduced by 15%
- Many small code improvements and fixes in order to improve game stability and reduce mismatch chances
- Fixed Chinese SAM upgrade for some sub-factions
- Another code improvement. Some problematic codes were found, and others were optimized.
- Invisible objects used by radars and heavy SAM were found unneeded and removed
- AI improvements for better army composition.
- Easy AI starting money reduced from 10k to 5K, and Medium AI money from 10K to 7.5K to make it slower and easier
- Fixed neutron mines that were not showing after the upgrade
- Scud Launcher can be built right after Palace
- The ECM tower now jams missiles constantly and no longer requires active ability. The downside is the frequency is increased from 333ms to 900ms
- Z9 Harbin ECM emitter frequency increased from 333ms to 900ms. Module upgrade increased from 600 to 900
- Z9 Harbin EMP bomb upgrade cost reduced from 900 to 600
- Toxin Tractor build time increased by 1.5 sec
- F-16 Cluster Munitions upgrade cost reduced from 3000 to 2000 and build time from 45 to 30 sec
- Rebel firing range increased by 4 %, Damage increased by 17%
- Red Guard Damage increased by 17%, HP reduced by 10%
- Tunnel Network Cost reduced from 900 to 800, build time reduced by 10%, HP increased from 630 to 700
- Remade AI: Our AI developer DayV remade the AI, making it more human-like and a bit weaker so you won't have such a struggle as before. This is not the final version and it will take more time to make it better, so this is like an open test of it.
- LAN Mismatch reduction is successful - In the last few days, we have very stable team games, 2v2 and 3v3, showing that our 6-month efforts to fix the mismatch issue are in a very good direction.
We still don't know if the issues are all fixed, but in the last 7 team games, only one was mismatched when a player surrendered to his teammate, and soon after, this player quits. This is a known ZH issue, and we hope it was a ZH mismatch. So, PvP games are officially more stable with fewer mismatches.

Quote:

This is a small update that contains fixes for some bugs that were discovered in 5.1, as well as a new Fill option in the Image -> Canvas Size dialog. It also has workarounds for some bugs in Sentinel One (antivirus) that were causing crashes in the installer and hangs during app startup.

Change Log

Changes since 5.1:

• Added the ability to choose the fill color when expanding the image with Image->Canvas Size
  
• Fixed the ability to paste images with transparency from Firefox
  
• Fixed the ability to paste certain types of images with transparency from Microsoft Office applications
  
• Changed Edit->Cut and Edit->Crop to Selection to completely zero out pixels outside of the selected area, which could otherwise be a privacy issue.
  
• Fixed the inability to load an image with a bad ICC color profile. The color profile will now be ignored, and the image will be treated as if it had an sRGB color profile.
  
• Fixed the title bar text being drawn in the active text color when the window is not active when using Light or Blue themes
  
• Reverted the removal of the Settings checkbox that lets you disable over scroll
  
• Fixed a crash in the Levels adjustment UI due to a rounding error
  
• Fixed a race condition in resource loading that sometimes caused the zoom level in the status bar to display as “ScaleFactor.Percentage.Format”
  
• Fixed some graphical corruption, hang, or crash issues caused by Nahimic A-Volute malware
  
• Worked around a crash (“0xc000007b”) in the installer caused by Sentinel One antivirus.
  
• Worked around a hang at app startup if Sentinel One antivirus.
  
• Fixed many cases of screen blanking, rendering glitches, and crashes on systems with certain NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, and certain displays with support for overlays and/or VRR (FreeSync, GSYNC). This appears to be a bug in NVIDIA’s driver.
  
• Fixed effects calling Dispose() on the IServiceProvider when they shouldn’t have been. This affected plugins like CodeLab and Plugin Browser.
  
• Updated the bundled AVIF FileType to version 3.11.0.0 (thanks @null54!)

Quote:

This is a quick follow-up to the previous build, fixing a few more small bugs and improving performance.

Change Log

Changes since 5.1 beta (build 9070):

• Fixed a few more cases where tool shortcuts and tooltips were not working after certain actions.
  
• Fixed: PNGs are now correctly saved with the “Software” tEXt metadata indicating they were created with Paint.NET.
  
• Improved performance in various parts of the rendering and effects engines: CPU usage has been reduced, which permits higher GPU utilization.

Changes since 5.1 beta (build 9066):

• Fixed: Copy/Paste has been hardened against short-term intermittent errors and should no longer show spurious error dialogs (e.g. ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED) except in legitimate cases.
  
• Fixed: Certain shortcut keys, especially for switching tools, will no longer stop functioning if a floating window (e.g., Tools) is hidden and then shown by clicking on the button at the top right of the main window.
  
• Fixed: Tooltips in the Tools window will no longer stop functioning if a floating window (e.g., Tools) is hidden and then shown by clicking on the button at the top right of the main window.
  
• Removed the “Scrolling past the edge of the image (over scroll)” checkbox from Settings. This was enabled by default, and now it is always enabled.
  
• Fixed: The installer was occasionally showing an error about an InvalidGraphConfigurationException on some systems
  
• Added a KnownColorSpace API for plugins so they can create IColorContexts and IDeviceColorContexts for the Display P3 and ProPhoto RGB color spaces

Changes since 5.1 beta (build 9064):

• Fixed: @BoltBait‘s TextFunFactory plugin was not working on Windows 10 due to the lack of support for IDWriteFontFace6 (despite what Microsoft’s documentation states)