Aloha! FunkyFr3sh has published a new version of CnC-DDraw called CnC-DDraw 5.9.0.0. For those unfamiliar with it, CnC-DDraw is a rendering alternative for old games that uses Direct Draw, making them compatible with newer systems and improving their graphics. You can use it on games like Command & Conquer Gold, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Carmageddon, Carmageddon 2, Warcraft 2, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, Age of Empires, Age of Empires II, Theme Hospital, Populous: The Beginning, Outlaws, Dungeon Keeper, Dark Reign: The Future of War, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, Atomic Bomberman, Dune 2000, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Commandos, Red Baron 3D, F-16 Multirole Fighter, F-22 Raptor, Nox, among others. Here is the official announcement from CnC-DDraw's staff about CnC-DDraw 5.9.0.0:

Quote:
Instructions

  • Download cnc-ddraw.zip and extract it into your game folder
  • Start the game

The game doesn't work? Please check the Readme file and the wiki.

Hotkeys

  • [Alt] + [Enter]                  = Switch between windowed and fullscreen mode
  • [Ctrl] + [Tab]                    = Unlock cursor
  • [Right Alt] + [Right Ctrl]  = Unlock cursor
  • [Alt] + [Page Down]        = Maximize window

Changelog

  • Frame rate limiter is now working with vsync enabled as well
  • Megamap mouse wheel zoom is now working with Total Annihilation in windowed mode
  • Fixed a crash with custom levels in Captain Claw
  • Fixed a bug in Nox where chapter screens were being skipped
  • Fixed a bug where you couldn't skip the movies in some games
  • Added a new feature for fan-patched games - switch between windowed/fullscreen mode via PostMessage WM_TOGGLE_FULLSCREEN (WM_APP+117) and WM_TOGGLE_MAXIMIZE (WM_APP+118)
  • Improved Performance
  • Added support for Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns
  • Added support for Enemy Infestation
  • Added support for Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
  • Added support for Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2 (Software renderer only)
  • Added support for Vermeer


You can learn more about CnC-DDraw by visiting the Official Website. You can grab the latest version of CnC-DDraw by clicking Here. And this is all for today! Enjoy CnC-DDraw and provide your feedback about it so it can get better.

Comrade General! We have news for you. Reinforcements have arrived from Notepad++ as version 8.5.8 has been recently published by their crew. For those unaware, Notepad++ is a free and open-source code editor and Notepad replacement that runs on Windows. It supports several programming languages, multiple tabs, plugins, and is based on the powerful editing component Scintilla.

Here are the changes and the fun stuff from Notepad++ v8.5.8:

Quote:
Notepad++ v8.5.8 Change log:

  • Fix the “Clear Read-Only Flag” command not working immediately regression.
  • Fix saving files losing Alternate Data Stream issue.
  • Fix data loss issue due to no room on disk for saving.
  • Add Win10/Win11 Restart-application feature.
  • Fix user-created session being modified behavior on exit.
  • Improve document list display performance.
  • Update Scintilla to v5.3.7 & Lexilla to v5.2.7.
  • Fix unwanted Afrikaans installer language issue.
  • Fix a crash issue while reading settings from the cloud.
  • Fix security issue CVE-2022-31901.
  • Enhance non-saved search text’s persistence in the Find dialog combo box while pressing an arrow key.
  • Make auto-checking of Find InSelection configurable (resizable & can be disabled).
  • Perl enhancement: Update Stylers & the keywords for Perl v5.38.
  • Fix “Single Line Uncomment” uncommenting an extra line issue.
  • Fix the “Next Bookmark” command, not resetting the current column issue.
  • Allow the menu command Window->Windows to be assigned a shortcut.
  • Fix wrong categories in Shortcuts Mapper.


If you are curious about Notepad++, visit the Official Website, and Forums to obtain further information about it. Download Notepad++ Here. And that's all for now! Have fun and enjoy Notepad++!

Hello everyone! Today is still September 30th here, and it is PPM's anniversary! PPM, as a certain Messiah, lives in Death, regardless of its activity in the forums. And truth to be said, you can't kill the Messiah, isn't it? PPM is an old community that has exists for 23 years. It started with a Tiberian Sun mod called PPM: Final Dawn, and now we have almost everything except the bloody PPM: Final Dawn. Rumors say that this mod will be released one day.

In PPM's last year of existence, we had a huge influx of news posts. I mean, I had a hard time finding the news about its last birthday. It was on page 9 already, where each page has 50 news posts. In the previous years, I'd find it on page 3 and sometimes even on page 2. And this is a result of how our news system evolved. Today we cover a lot of news every month and a lot of new subjects. We cover mods hidden in the depths of Discord, YouTube, ModDB, GitHub, and some other places. Sometimes we even announce the release of a project before the project itself announces it. This is a result of a very hard work that made news posts be created in terms of a few minutes, while it used to take some hours to write a single news post a while ago. The very hard work goes from our internal system that hunts these news posts and BBCodes them (and sometimes we had to write special scripts for special cases, such as Dawn of the Tiberium Age releases or Chrono Divide updates). We also have a system that speeds up news posting and helps me with the keywords, but I do have to edit them by the end of the day. I also use third-party solutions for grammar checking.

The huge flux of news posts changed the behavior of our visitors. Today, most of the news posts do not receive comments, which is a bad thing. I mean, it is more fun when people interact with us, isn`t it? And there are more people browsing the forums as a guest instead of registered. A small reminder is that registered users see less propaganda than guests (or no advertisements at all in the forums).

Our news posting system is just a start. We can do much more than simply create news with it. In the future, we may create or organize content with it, such as tutorials, graphic/map resources, and coverage for new games. To be honest, we are using it to track news from games that are not officially covered on our main site and subsites, such as Tempest Rising and Storm Gate, although I am not posting everything I see about these games yet.

Regarding the birthday itself, I do not have a present this time because it is hard to handle several things that are happening in my real life right now, but hopefully, most of these problems will end in six months or less.

The best I can offer is our lovely traditional cake:



The credits for this birthday cake goes to this Reddit topic

Comrade General! We have news for you. A new version of CnC-DDraw, known as CnC-DDraw 5.8.0.0, has been published moments ago by FunkyFr3sh. CnC-DDraw is a rendering alternative for old games that uses Direct Draw, making them compatible with newer systems and improving their graphics. You can use it on games like Command & Conquer Gold, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Carmageddon, Carmageddon 2, Warcraft 2, StarCraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, Age of Empires, Age of Empires II, Theme Hospital, Populous: The Beginning, Outlaws, Dungeon Keeper, Dark Reign: The Future of War, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, Atomic Bomberman, Dune 2000, Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Commandos, Red Baron 3D, F-16 Multirole Fighter, F-22 Raptor, Nox, among others. Here are the official words about CnC-DDraw 5.8.0.0:

Quote:
Instructions

  • Download cnc-ddraw.zip and extract it into your game folder
  • Start the game

The game doesn't work? Please check the Readme file and the wiki.

Hotkeys

  • [Alt] + [Enter]                  = Switch between windowed and fullscreen mode
  • [Ctrl] + [Tab]                    = Unlock cursor
  • [Right Alt] + [Right Ctrl]  = Unlock cursor
  • [Alt] + [Page Down]        = Maximize window

Changelog

  • Does now support a few chosen opengl shaders even without having any files in the Shader folder (Nearest neighbor, Bilinear, Bicubic, Lanczos, xBR-lv2)
  • Updated Italian Translation (by @Kappa971)
  • Added partial support for Captain Claw DVD movies (No upscaling support yet)
  • Added a preset for NOX (CD Version)
  • Fixed performance issues with EV Nova on windows
  • cnc-ddraw config can now disable GameUX on Win 7 (Prevents a bug where the game doesn't start properly and runs in the background)
  • Anti-aliased fonts are now disabled by default for small fonts (ddraw.ini -> anti_aliased_fonts_min_size=13)
  • Added new .ini setting "min_font_size=" to increase the size of small unreadable fonts
  • Fixed a bug where some resolutions were not displayed in the in-game list on high refresh rate monitors
  • Fixed a bug in cnc-ddraw config where the names of the hotkeys were displayed in the wrong language
  • Fixed a bug where some games could randomly freeze while playing a movie
  • Added experimental downscaling support (can now run games at high resolutions such as 4k even if the monitor doesn't support 4k)

Note: To use the new downscaling feature cnc-ddraw must be set to either Fullscreen, Fullscreen Upscaled, or Borderless. Just start the game using a high resolution (the limit is 16k currently), and cnc-ddraw will automatically enable downscaling support. If the game doesn't have a way to force a custom resolution, then use the "custom_width" and "custom_height" .ini settings to inject any resolution you want into the game's resolution list and then just select it in-game.

Example:

custom_width=3840

custom_height=2160


You can find more information about CnC-DDraw by visiting the Official Website. Download CnC-DDraw 5.8.0.0. And this is all for today! Enjoy CnC-DDraw and provide your feedback about it so it can get better.

Are you picking this up? Good! ^Rampastein has released a new version of C&C World-Altering Editor called C&C World-Altering Editor v0.9.3. For those unaware of what is being written here, C&C World-Altering Editor is a map editor for the Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun, which originally started as a map editor for Dawn of the Tiberium Age. Here is the official announcement from C&C World-Altering Editor's staff about C&C World-Altering Editor v0.9.3:

Quote:
Major update to World-Altering Editor. A rough changelog compared to v0.9.2 follows.

Contributors: Rampastring, ZivDero, Morton

New features:
  • You can now resize WAE's window from the borders of the window, like most Windows applications
  • You can now toggle fullscreen (aka borderless windowed) mode with F11
  • Added option for Render Scale. This defines how big the editor's graphics are compared to the window resolution

    • These options have made the Display Resolution, Render Resolution, and Upscale UI settings obsolete, so they have been removed.

  • File->Open and File->Save As now open the native Windows file selection dialog
  • Added "Browse" buttons to the main menu for game directory and map file selection. Clicking on these brings up the native Windows file selection dialog
  • You can now load the map-wide overlay image dynamically through Tools->Load Map-Wide Overlay
  • The minimap and megamap (F12) work again
  • All object properties windows (for buildings, vehicles, and infantry) now have an arrow button next to the "Attached tag" field. Clicking on this button opens the trigger that is attached to the object's attached tag.
  • Editor themes have been unhardcoded. You can now modify them through Config/EditorThemes.ini
  • Implemented preset options for script actions that reference houses
  • Implemented graphics preview for pasting of overlay. This might come with a slight performance impact when you copy a lot of overlays, but it didn't seem too bad in some quick testing.
  • You can now scroll the tile selection interface using the Up and Down arrow keys

Bugfixes and improvements:

  • WAE's fullscreen mode (F11) now properly takes multiple monitors into account and maximizes the window on the monitor where the application is currently shown instead of always using the primary monitor's resolution as the window size (and thus ending up too big on secondary monitors that were smaller in resolution than the primary monitor)
  • The editor now supports defining -1 (meaning none) as the Waypoint of TeamTypes
  • Fixed a crash when drawing an animation that had no graphics
  • Fixed a crash when drawing a building that had no graphics
  • Fixed a crash when deleting or unselecting a house in the Houses window
  • Fixed a bug where the editor failed to properly parse SHP frames that were more than 256 pixels wide
  • Fixed a bug where damaged buildings drew the regular shadow instead of the shadow of the damaged frame
  • Fixed a bug where the image of a structure was not immediately refreshed when its HP condition changed
  • Fixed a bug where AUto-LAT only supported one base LAT ground type for a LAT
  • Improved object sorting for rendering. This fixes some z-issues with buildings
  • You can now place smudges over already placed smudges when placing smudge collections
  • Smudge collections now constantly get their image randomized in placement mode to make it clearer that you are placing one of a collection
  • Fixed a bug where the scroll bar of the sidebar object selector was not updated when categories were expanded through searching
  • Improved the usability of the "Check distance" tool
  • Fixed animations not being rendered on map-defined buildings
  • Made some messages about map errors more detailed
  • The waypoint placement tool now uses a diamond-shaped cell cursor
  • Improved the texture of the "Framework mode" button (Credits: Bittah Commander)

Height support:

  • Fixed deletion mode cursor action not taking cell height into account
  • Fixed copy/paste of terrain not properly taking height levels into account
  • Fixed low bridge placement cursor not taking height levels into account
  • Fixed "Check distance" tool not taking height levels into account
  • Fixed tunnel rendering not taking 2D mode into account
  • Fixed terrain copying cursor not taking 2D mode into account
  • Fixed terrain generation cursor taking 2D mode into account
  • Fixed tube deletion cursor not taking 2D mode into account
  • Fixed Change Techno Owner cursor not taking 2D mode into account
  • Fixed Tiberium value calculation cursor not taking 2D mode into account
  • Fixed waypoint placement cursor not taking 2D mode into account

Game-specific:

  • ts-patches (TS): Added support for new CreateAutoSave trigger action
  • Phobos (YR): Trigger events, actions, and script actions can now use any ID number
  • Phobos (YR): Added support for integer-type local variables


For further information about C&C World-Altering Editor, visit the Topic at PPM Forums, Official Website, and Discord Channel at C&C Mod Haven. C&C World-Altering Editor is available for download Here. And that's all for now! Have fun and enjoy C&C World-Altering Editor!

Vengi 0.0.27 has been released!
Sep 20, 2023 - 00:04
Hello everyone! Vengi 0.0.27 has been published by mgerhardy recently. For those who are not acquainted with it, Vengi is a voxel engine that includes VoxEdit, a voxel art editor that supports several volumetric pixel file formats, such as Command & Conquer vxl, Minecraft, Quake 1 bsp, Ace of Spades vxl, as well as some other voxel editors such as Goxel and MagicaVoxel. Here is what we know about Vengi 0.0.27:

Quote:
Changelog
A more detailed changelog can be found on github.

Join our discord server.

See the documentation for further details.

Known issues.

0.0.27 (2023-09-19)
Breaking changes:

  • Renamed globals for Lua scripts. Added a g_ prefix to them. You have to adapt your scripts

    to work with the latest version with vengi (if you use them):

    • scenegraph is now g_scenegraph
    • palettemgr is now g_palette
    • noise is now g_noise
    • cmd is now g_cmd
    • var is now g_var
    • XvecX is now g_XvecX (ivec3 is for example g_ivec3)

General:

  • Added cvar voxformat_pointcloudsize for point cloud formats
  • Added Polygon File Format (ply) mesh and point cloud support (ASCII and binary)
  • Fixed regression with GLTF exports
  • Added a new Lua script to slice a node into smaller pieces
  • Expose shape generators to Lua
  • Fixed color intensity handling for kvx files
  • Added write support for kvx format (used in e.g. voxel doom and eduke3d)
  • Added support for Voxel3D v3a format

VoxEdit:

  • Fixed regression about not rendering the shape volumes anymore
  • Implemented scene graph panel drag-and-drop popup
  • Added brush support and new editing features
  • Fixed spurious crashes for windows

oasis



Minecraft greenfield



lospec ui integration



For further information about Vengi and VoxEdit, visit the Topic at PPM Forums, Official Website, and Discord Channel. You can grab the latest version of Vengi and VoxEdit by clicking Here. And this is all for today! Enjoy Vengi and provide your feedback about it so it can get better.

Hello, ladies and gentlemen! The developers from Dawn of the Tiberium Age have recently shared some bits of the recent progress on their project. For those unaware of what is being written here, Dawn of the Tiberium Age is a stand-alone mod for Tiberian Sun that combines Tiberian Dawn (Command & Conquer 95) and Red Alert featuring a classic mode and an enhanced mode. Here is what was shared about it on ModDB:

Quote:
DTA: Covert Revolt Development Update



Greetings Commanders!

We shared some news about our upcoming Covert Revolt (CR) singleplayer campaign during our TS 24th Anniversary live-stream event last month. This news post echoes the news for those who missed the stream.

If you haven't heard about the CR campaign before, check out our earlier news post and trailer!









The image above outlines the CR features we revealed during the stream. Consider this information additive to what we revealed last year - all the points that we revealed last year still apply, aside from the length of the campaign. I'm going to keep it simple and just explain each point in detail :

  • There is a branching storyline - CR has multiple points where you can make decisions that affect how the story will play out.
  • Currently I have 7 different endings planned for the campaign. Which one you get depends on what choices you make through your journey.
  • CR has 3 primary routes or branches: A, B, and C, which all have 2 or 3 different endings. Choices made during the early missions will decide which routes you end up on. Each route contains a unique set of missions - they're not just copy/pasted versions of each other, but each route can be considered a full campaign of its own.
  • Each route of CR contains between 14 and 20 missions. All routes of the campaign, when combined, will contain a total of over 30 original missions for you to play! Each mission also contains cutscenes with the "visual novel" style system that we revealed last year.

    • This means that one playthrough of the campaign can be expected to take around 20 hours (+- 5 hours, depending on your skill level and chosen difficulty), while a full "completionist" playthrough of all routes can take up to 50 hours.

  • I recently asked the public for testers, and a great number of people volunteered to test the campaign. In addition to people in our staff, this means that CR missions are getting a lot of playtesting and improvements based on feedback - you can be sure the experience will be polished when you eventually jump into the campaign yourself!
  • CR missions contain dozens of optional objectives. They bring a variety of effects - some tie into the branching storyline, some make the current mission easier, others make future missions easier or different, etc.
  • As said last year, I have paid special attention to difficulty scaling in this campaign. Our good number of playtesters have further helped with getting the difficulty scaling right. Easy is easy, while Hard is hard. Everyone who has beaten the original WW C&C campaigns should be able to also beat CR on the easiest difficulty levels and routes, while veterans will find themselves greatly challenged by the hardest difficulty levels.

Unfortunately, I also have to announce a delay for the campaign's release date. As originally announced, I wanted to release CR this year already. However, I realized that fleshing out all branches of the storyline so that the story does not feel "rushed" or otherwise low-quality at any point requires a greater number of missions. This is why the number of missions has increased from last year's 20+ to 30+, which has forced me to push the release date to the first half of next year.

I hope this delay will be worth it in the campaign's quality when it eventually reaches your hands next year.


Other upcoming updates













While CR is our biggest project at the moment, it is not everything that we've been working on. To keep you entertained during the wait, we are preparing big changes to our Skirmish AI. Particularly, it is in the process of learning to expand its base towards multiple resource fields, which will make it a much more competent, human-like, and simply fun opponent to face on most maps.

This change will also make AI more fair to play against because its expansion has allowed us to radically reduce its cheats while still roughly retaining its original difficulty. Thus, it will be possible to utilize various tactics against the AI that previously have mainly only worked against humans. For example, the AI is now vulnerable to economic starvation by hunting its harvesters, and eliminating its refineries or factories with flank attacks is now also easier to achieve (because its base is not only one big blob).

We will release a separate news post about all features of the new AI when we will eventually release it, sometime later this autumn. So, stay tuned for more updates, Commanders!


You can learn more about Dawn of the Tiberium Age by visiting the Forums at PPM, ModDB Profile, Discord Channel, and YouTube Video Channel. And that's all for now!

Welcome back, commander! The team from Dawn of the Tiberium Age has recently shared their recent progress on their project at PPM Forums. And today's spotlight goes to the AI bots and the way they expand their base. For those unaware, Dawn of the Tiberium Age is a stand-alone mod for Tiberian Sun that combines Tiberian Dawn (Command & Conquer 95) and Red Alert featuring a classic mode and an enhanced mode. Here is the official announcement from Dawn of the Tiberium Age:

Quote:
We have once again done the impossible.

This might look like a base built by a skilled human player who knows how to expand. But it is not. Instead, it is built by our new Advanced AI!

This AI expands through the map from one resource field to another. Once it has reached a resource field, it places a Refinery next to it, and then continues expanding to another one!

The AI also builds extra factories to bump up its unit production speed, depending on how many fields it has managed to expand to.

This makes the AI play far more competently on large maps with many resource fields and makes matches vs. the AI much more exciting and dynamic compared to the original TS engine AI, which preferred sitting in its own corner for the whole match.

Thanks to this smarter AI expanding logic, we were also able to heavily cut the AI's cheats while still having it be roughly as difficult as our old AI was! This opens the room for many human-like tactics to work against the AI, such as starving it by hunting down its harvesters!





If you enjoyed it, provide your feedback straight to the original topic about it at the Dawn of the Tiberium Age Forums at PPM, where you can also look at these picture in their full size.

You can check more information about Dawn of the Tiberium Age by visiting the Forums at PPM, ModDB Profile, Discord Channel, and YouTube Video Channel. That's all, folks! Stay tuned at PPM for more news coverage on Dawn of the Tiberium Age!