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OpenRA, the free and open source real-time strategy game engine for playing classic Westwood games has a new testing release up. Additionally, Fractured Realms, a game powered by OpenRA tech has a pre-release.

Starting with the news about OpenRA itself, the Playtest 20200418 release is quite a small one comprised of bug fixes. These include improving multi-player to reduce desyncs, fixed issues with lobby player colour and faction validation and improvements to the single-player campaign support.

They've had a few testing releases lately, and they said they've actually had a surge in online player numbers so they're trying to make it as stable as possible in the next release and they need your help testing it! Details on that here. It's easy to do, as their stable releases and testing releases comes with an AppImage for Linux.

Related to this is a new game called Fractured Realms, a game built with OpenRA, created by members of the French CnCSaga Community. Taking place in some far future, where remnants of the ancient Federation are fighting against their former colonies over the control of a powerful resource called "Diastim".

Fractured Realms now has a trailer:

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Better than that though, it also has a pre-release available to download and play. Tried it out myself for a little while today, and it has some interesting gameplay features. The Conclave, one of the factions, has an interesting mixed-up power and tech system, that requires you build multiple Ion Traps. These give you a power radius to place buildings, while multiple add to your tech level enabling you to build more advanced units. On top of that, you can also place other structures into them to give some bonuses like wider vision. Lots of cool things like that.

Reminds me a lot of some other classic and less well-known RTS games I played back in the RTS heyday, it's a shame it's not a genre you see too much in now.

Pictured: Fractured Realms on Linux, an enemy bomber is about to meet my AA hovertank.

Amazing what OpenRA can do. I really do hope to see more developers use it, as it's highly polished and the cross-platform support for both single-player and online multi-player is awesome. Not only that, with the upcoming stable OpenRA release, they're making progress on modernizing their rendering engine too with more up to date OpenGL and smooth-zooming.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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10 comments

razing32 Apr 20, 2020
Looking forward to this :)
And since they have a working prototype up it;s great.
I was following another called Crystalized Doom but that has not posted an update since 2018 :(
coolbober Apr 20, 2020
Thank you for keeping me updated with this one.

I raised up with dune 2 and later with dune 2000. Despite all of those new games - Dune/OpenRA is still on top on my laptop.
EagleDelta Apr 20, 2020
I've been trying to test Fractured Realms, but when I click on anything I get the following error in the log:

QuoteException of type `System.InvalidOperationException`: Unit `t2_command_relais` does not have a sequence named `icon`

Anyone else run into this?


Last edited by EagleDelta on 20 April 2020 at 4:24 pm UTC
Julius Apr 20, 2020
FR looks really awesome. This seems to be the GPL licensed source-code: https://github.com/Divadawm/Fanwars
Not sure if the license also covers all the art assets though.
Julius Apr 20, 2020
Quoting: EagleDeltaI've been trying to test Fractured Realms, but when I click on anything I get the following error in the log:

QuoteException of type `System.InvalidOperationException`: Unit `t2_command_relais` does not have a sequence named `icon`

Anyone else run into this?

yes same issue on a Ubuntu20.04 system.
Julius Apr 20, 2020
Ok Fractured Realms is currently broken on Linux (edit: Only Ubuntu and derivatives?), but we did a PR to fix it in the above linked repo. The problem I have is that compiling OpenRA seems to be next to impossible on Ubuntu20.04 due to some Mono shenigans and I don't have access to my Manjaro PC for some time. Seems like on Arch installing "msbuild" is possible and then one can compile and test the fixed version of Fractured Realms.

For me I can just hope they release a new Appimage with the fixes soon.


Last edited by Julius on 21 April 2020 at 12:30 am UTC
Liam Dawe Apr 21, 2020
The screenshot was taken on Manjaro, works fine there...
Julius Apr 21, 2020
Quoting: Liam DaweThe screenshot was taken on Manjaro, works fine there...

Odd, so Manjaro doesn't mind all the file capitalization issues that happen when developing on Windows? How do they achieve that? Hmm, maybe you used a strange filesystem that has to work around that?
EagleDelta Apr 21, 2020
Quoting: Julius
Quoting: Liam DaweThe screenshot was taken on Manjaro, works fine there...

Odd, so Manjaro doesn't mind all the file capitalization issues that happen when developing on Windows? How do they achieve that? Hmm, maybe you used a strange filesystem that has to work around that?

Check the ModDB page. They uploaded a new AppImage fixing the initial bug. That said, I found other bugs.
Julius Apr 22, 2020
Quoting: EagleDeltaCheck the ModDB page. They uploaded a new AppImage fixing the initial bug. That said, I found other bugs.

Thanks, that seems to work on Ubuntu 20.04 now :)
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