asronline

I wish they open sourced RA2 - I love that game, I heard they lost the source code :/

Right!!

Sweet!!

I have a Renegade one going that does all of this from scratch (different engine) so it's def more than capable!

I can't tell you how many new hours I've poured in it since bringing it to my iPad

Let me give it a go :)

EA released the Generals source under GPL v3, the GeneralsX project got it running on macOS/Linux, and I've taken it the rest of the way: native iOS and iPadOS builds of Zero Hour, plus Apple Silicon macOS.

What works (all verified on a real iPad and iPhone):

Campaign, Skirmish, and Generals Challenge: full missions, objectives, cutscenes, saves All audio: music, unit voices, EVA announcements, Challenge taunts, briefing FMVs Touch controls built for RTS: tap select, drag a selection box, long-press deselect, two-finger camera pan, pinch zoom Self-contained install: game data ships inside the app bundle It's the real engine: unmodified game logic compiled for ARM64, rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal. Not emulation, not streaming.

No game assets are included or distributed. You need your own copy (Steam sells Zero Hour) and a script pulls the data from your own account. Code is GPL v3.

Repo, with a full engineering log of every bug and fix (the black-minimap one is a 2003 texture-format fallback that ate the alpha channel; worth a read if you like archaeology): https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/blob/ma...

Building: macOS is about four commands; iPhone/iPad needs Xcode and a free Apple developer account since you sideload your own build. Known issues (long-session memory on iPad, a rare backgrounding crash) are documented in the README.

Credit: fbraz3/GeneralsX did the heavy macOS/Linux lifting, TheSuperHackers keep the community codebase alive, and EA did a genuinely good thing releasing the source. The engine fixes I found are heading upstream so every platform benefits.

(And of course, not affiliated with or endorsed by EA, and sorry China had to deal with all of those particle cannons in that demo video)

Already found something quicker I would buy using this than the standard google results, thanks so much! Love how it blends in seamlessly with my searches too.

Damn, I’ve already found two products I’ve been searching for for months via google and ending up with the same results. Ty!

I definitely agree that Facebook could improve on the whole video sharing experience. Right now, videos are discovered via popular pages, which means you've got to like them and then have your feed flooded by content you weren't necessarily going to watch; a dedicated page for videos could be great. Anyway, keep it up - nice mockups!

Oh, and yes to putting an end to comments where everyone is tagging their friends.

My mind...

Called it! Check out my blog post from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8613878

So, I agree that this may complicate the experience depending on how it's implemented, but as I mention in the post, if you're not a power user and don't want to see all of this - FB could maybe place a switch in group settings that could turn all of these extra features on. Features like moderators, tags, can easily be ignored if you don't need/use them.

Exactly! When I was telling me friend about the post he kept saying "that sounds like a forum." But I guess the point here is, Facebook can maintain that great casual social network feel and still make Groups a lot more powerful than it already is.

I was hoping Rooms was one step in that direction, but I'm pretty sure they're treating it as a separate product, given how you can also stay anonymous etc.

I definitely think they can compete against Game Center with this. I know I'd pick Steam over Game Center any day given that I game on my PC a lot. However, the App Store is a tricky one on iOS because of the restrictions Apple imposes. It's possible on Android. But on iOS maybe you'd have offers like get the promo code for the mobile version of the game via Humble Bundle or something? Not so sure.

Oh for sure, similar to the way OnLive were doing it. I'd call this feature a game changer.

Edit: added this to my blog post quoting you.