Hi all,
You all probably know the old gem that was C&C: Tiberian Dawn & C&C: Red Alert...well...the nice and talented people over at http://openra.res0l.net/ are trying to revive this old classic trough opensource software.
You're able to play C&C: Tib dawn (skirmish) and C&C: Red Alert (skirmish) they're still working on the single player scenario part but skirmish is working, with bots or online, whatever you desire.
The program writes in the My Documents folder for data and content it downloads from the internet and is unable to install in a protected PC (like work or school)
Here's a quick description as posted on their website:
OpenRA is a Libre/Free Real Time Strategy game engine supporting early Westwood games like Command & Conquer and Command & Conquer: Red Alert.
Any possibility this coming as a portable app to be playable on a USB/Thumb drive even only the singleplayer would be fine, since there are bots included.
Many thanks peeps.
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These kind of projects port the game engine only, you still need files from the original game itself.
Reading the wiki, OpenRA can actually download the files itself, which unless you can find documentation stating that the original game files are either open source or freely distributable as well, makes this app a no-go as it would be illegal.
Aye you're absolutely right, however you're presented with the option to install from CD or download (in-game) from the internet, that being said if you have all the .mix files needed to run the game (which is a meager extra 10mb if you don't count the music, otherwise its about 50mb) you could just copy them into the needed folder without the need to download them again.
Openwarzone 2100 had the function to download low/medium/high quality movies for the singleplayer campaign, so I'm assuming it's possible to do the same with the data files needed for OpenRA to start, seeing as its all freeware.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
EDIT: I see you're point tho, thought everything has become freeware regarding this game, seeing as it's been released for free to the public.
Looked further into it, both games have been officially released under a freeware licence, and since this app doesn't package them but downloads them just as an online installer would, it is legally open for making portable.
As much as I would love to do it, I have enough on my plate at the moment. If anybody else picks it up is up to them, otherwise I will get to it when my schedule gets a bit quieter.
Cheers would be wonderful, anyone else interested in this project is also welcome to try obviously, but many thanks already to winterblood.
This is entirely possible. Actually we added this ourself in https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/3686 and removed it in https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/commit/de574910e5a1b6b67acfea47e1bab45c... from our Windows installer as we had to constantly tell people not to do a portable install into %ProgramFiles when you need admin rights to write in there. If you add a safety check in your portable installer to avoid people locking themselves out and having content download and settings/logs save fail, then you have packaged OpenRA as a portable app in no time.
Everyone else can install it on a USB stick and create the folder .\Support there manually and profit already.