
OpenDUNE – An open-source recreation of the game Dune II - mariuz
https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE
======
slowmovintarget
Dune II was the game I bought a Soundblaster card for. It was one of the first
games with voice acting. That the Soundblaster also worked for Wing Commander
was a bonus.

My favorite tactic in Dune II was to build concrete tiles right up to the
enemy's base and start planting turrets. You can do a Protoss cannon rush in
Starcraft, but the tactic was available in Dune II first.

It seems like this distribution requires the original game files. I tossed my
5 1/4" floppies when PCs stopped shipping with floppy drives. Silly me.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Using defensive structures offensively in such a way does seem like such an
RTS tactic that probably wouldn't get used IRL - does any have any examples to
prove me wrong?

~~~
RyanZAG
WW1 trench warfare. Trenches generally had pillboxes which could be described
as defensive structures, and the entire trench warfare was about slowly
building these defensive structures towards the enemy.

~~~
lostlogin
Tunnels were part of this too along with defensive counter tunnels. These go
back a surprisingly long way and it’s worth reading the Wikipedia page for the
ancient Greek account of tunnel warfare. The way they detected enemy
tunnelling activity is clever.

Modern offensive tunnels pop up in the news regularly in the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict and occasionally with Noth Korea too.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_warfare](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_warfare)

~~~
edw
Since you mentioned the Greeks, anyone with the slightest interest in Ancient
Greece should read “A War Like No Other” by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a
fascinating account of the Peloponnesian War. There’s a chapter on siege
warfare.

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rattaz
Also see Dune Legacy, which includes source code. Includes modern
conveniences. More open than the other Dune2 remake projects too.

    
    
        http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/
    

For developers: (C++)
[http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/development/source...](http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/development/sourcecode.html)

    
    
        clone using git:
            git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/dunelegacy/code dunelegacy-code

~~~
hjek
Even networked multiplayer. Dune Legacy is great. Wish there was a free game
content package, like just like FreeDoom for the Doom engine.

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tunap
My brothers & I, late 40's & early 50's, to this day start our infrequent
phone convo's with:

"Reporting".

"Acknowledge".

Gonna have to fire up my old XP tower tonight....

~~~
vanderZwan
> "Reporting".

> "Acknowledge".

I, early 30's, read that with a Russian accent ( _Red Alert_ was an amazing
game). Funny what difference a few years makes.

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ggambetta
Just a couple of days ago, during lunch, I was talking about this game with
two of my teammates. It had been my first contact with the RTS genre (which it
arguably invented in its modern form) during my early teens, but they hadn't
even heard of it.

Later I sent them a link to the Wikipedia article about it. One of them said
_" wow, this is the mother of all RTSs!"._

The other one said _" wow, this game is a bit older than I am!"_

:_(

~~~
sockgrant
What about Warcraft 2 or Red Alert? Those seemed like the precursors to modern
rts

~~~
Xylakant
Dune II was released 1992, Warcraft 2 in 1995, C&C Red Alert in 1996. Dune II
was the first RTS with mass market success and had a defining influence.

~~~
ekianjo
Mass market, yes. But Herzog Zwei for Megadrive was out earlier and was
already a RTS. It was not very good (at least my memories of it are not good -
playing with a gamepad was a nightmare) but it was already going in that
trench.

~~~
iuguy
You can go back further, the original Herzog on MSX had RTS elements, and
1984's Stonkers[1][2] for the ZX Spectrum was the first commercially published
RTS (AFAICT). Whether it's sales constitute mass market success is a different
thing.

[1] - [http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-
spectrum/stonkers](http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/stonkers)

[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-TkuFVj48E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-TkuFVj48E)

~~~
kungtotte
Dune 2 invented the C&C/Warcraft/Starcraft style RTS though. Other games had
RTS elements to them before that, but not like Dune 2. And certainly not to
the extent that subsequent games tried to copy their successful format.

~~~
iuguy
I'm not sure I follow. I linked to a video of an RTS game from 1984. Stonkers
(AFAICT) invented the RTS. It didn't have RTS elements. It was an RTS, similar
to Dune 2 and the others to follow.

Most of the successful games that copied Dune 2's format were written by the
same studios (Westwood for the C&C franchise, Blizzard for *Craft).

------
aidos
I introduced my kids to Dune II a couple of months back and they loved it.
They now like to pretend to be sand worms rolling around the lounge in their
sleeping bags.

I haven’t really done any gaming in years (other than The Witness). Still
reminisce about all the hours spent playing Dune and Syndicate and the like.

~~~
viraptor
I'd pay a lot for a _good_ reimplementation is syndicate. It was so good in
its simplicity and so good in controls.

Syndicate wars was both an improvement and a failure at the same time in many
ways unfortunately.

~~~
stormking
Have you tried
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/268870/Satellite_Reign/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/268870/Satellite_Reign/)
?

~~~
viraptor
Yeah, I tried it for quite a while and found it really disappointing. Maybe I
fail at playing it, but it seems to move between syndicate-style global map
which is OK and restricted missions which are super slow, super annoying
episodes where you get kicked back to the beginning for every stupid mistake.
You just can't afford an open fight at the beginning and it's so slow I
couldn't progress to real upgrades. It basically turns into a stealth game
where any detection means you're swamped by new units and dead.

This is much different from syndicate where if you messed up, you just faced a
bigger fight. You could die or survive, but it was a fair fight without sudden
reinforcements.

~~~
stormking
To be honest, I bought it but never found the time to actually play it. I
loved Syndicate on the Amiga, thought. Some time during the 2000s, I tried
Syndicate Wars, but its crude 3D engine was a real turn-off.

------
hyperman1
I loved this game, and i loved its bugs even more. A fun one was how the
starport allowed you to build more than te maximum allowed number of units.
The resulting buffer overflow got worse and worse as you went further and
further over the limit, causing all kinds of weird glitches. My favorite was
an enemy turret waltzing diagonally over the map without any respect for
mountains or walls, shooting my base every time it passed by.

~~~
rvanmil
My favorite bug was hijacking the carryall that drops off the harvester when
placing a refinery very early in the game by letting it repeatedly pick up the
harvester until it decides to stick around :)

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seanwilson
It's funny to remember Dune 2 and Warcraft 1 didn't let you select multiple
units. You had to click and move one unit at a time so group attacks were
really tedious and cumbersome. I was always curious why the interface
designers didn't think to add multiple select at the time.

~~~
muydeemer
in warcraft you could select groups of 4 as far as i remember

~~~
esrauch
Warcraft 1 you could select multiple but you had to hold ctrl when doing it so
I think many people didn't realize.

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hal9000xp
I think this may be relevant to leave it here. There is also an open-source
re-implementation of the classic Tomb Raider engine:

[https://github.com/opentomb/OpenTomb](https://github.com/opentomb/OpenTomb)

------
Ericson2314
I followed this a bit at the beginning. What isn't so obvious is that this is
actually a super faithful reverse engineering that was then modernized. For
example, here's a random old commit:
[https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE/commit/c6ff4733a78c3e74...](https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE/commit/c6ff4733a78c3e749e3b19eae71e6840f835a237)

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bitxbitxbitcoin
Worth plugging just because it's tangential - 0 A.D. is an open source re-
creation of the game Age of Empires 1.

~~~
takluyver
0 A.D. is much more ambitious than a re-creation of AoE1. It's a complete game
in its own right, albeit heavily influenced by the AoE series.

------
sheeshkebab
browser version of Dune 2

[https://epicport.com/en/dune2](https://epicport.com/en/dune2)

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COil
We are getting old!

~~~
erric
By the second, even! :)

Boo!

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mck-
There's also OpenRA for the C&C fans; it includes Tiberian sun as well as Red
Alert, both with original sound track and multiplayer enabled:
[http://www.openra.net/](http://www.openra.net/)

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stnp
How difficult would it be to implement massive maps with today's technology?

~~~
gliciige
Technology, you’re trolling right?

~~~
stnp
How did you misunderstand my question?

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aquova
Huh, somehow I never knew that it was an old PC game, I was only familiar with
the Sega Genesis version of the game. In any case, this game is fantastic, and
I'm excited to try this version out.

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tschellenbach
It's a great game. The 1st (adventure game) is available as a free download
for OSx. I replayed it a year ago, it was so much fun.

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
Just had to promote this game a bit more.

Categorizing Dune 1 as an adventute game is a little to simplistic IMHO. The
way it gradually morphs from an adventure game into a strategy game is one of
the most enjoyable and unique gaming experience I’ve ever had. And is a large
part of why I remember this is one of the best games ever made.

Absolutely do play it through if you haven’t.

~~~
dpio
Yes! Such a great game. I remember playing it frequently just to find all the
sietches. Then when the atomics came in and Gurney Halleck was like, "OMG
ATOMICS!"

This game had so many great moments. One that pops into mind is sending Fremen
units to attack a Harkonnen base and they would literally start marching
towards them on the map. Another is how the NPC's eyes wound randomly bulge
when you were talking to them.

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indescions_2018
Arguably the "first" RTS. Not sure about SDL2 support. But clean C/C++ might
be a good candidate for WASM port to web. Still need .pak assets...

Recall many abandonware variants of Dune games floating around the web back in
the day. With some incredible cut scene art ;)

~~~
girvo
SDL2 worked well through Emscripten, so I'm pretty certain it'll work well
under WASM?

~~~
azakai
Yes, SDL2 works equally well in Emscripten in both asm.js and wasm.

------
ninjamayo
Ooohhh my favourite game of all time. I loved this game, I almost missed my
university exams for this. I know a friend of mine who actually didn't speak
to his girlfriend for a couple of weeks since he was playing the game.

------
influx
Video games are the one thing I wouldn’t mind a straight remake with modern
graphics. I hate it with movies, but I’m surprised it hasn’t been mined more
often with games.

~~~
jimnotgym
I thought the relaunched The Secret of Monkey Island on Steam actually lost
something with it's remade graphics

~~~
tspiteri
You can switch to/from the original form any time with F10.

~~~
jimnotgym
I know, but it still doesn't look right on high dpi monitors! I also found a
psychological barrier where I knew I could have modern graphics just by
pressing f10 again. Silly I know.

The point remains true, the old graphics made beautiful use of meagre
resources

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equalunique
Emperor: Battle For Dune (2001) was my first Dune game. Wish I could play that
again. Story mode was quite fun.

------
damir
one hack I used over and over again was to take one soldier near enemies
harvester and shoot it once. The harvester would hurry to drive over that
soldier but then it would stop harvesting. I only had to wait enemies run out
of that stuff harvesters were used for....

~~~
bolle
Ha, we used to destroy our own full harvester: you could get 1.5 times worth
of spice out of it.

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dddw
the AI becomes notoriously hard after a couple of levels. Impossible even.

~~~
jandrese
The problem I remember is that your own units have no AI at all. Also, there
is no mass select. So if you're fighting against something with long range you
have to manually select each unit and tell them to walk 2 steps forward so
they can start shooting back, otherwise they will just sit there and eat
bullets until they are dead. The game isn't great at notifying you when your
units are being shot either.

I remember dropping the game quite hard when Warcraft came out.

~~~
hyperman1
Another problem is the enemy AI cheating without shame. In later levels It
will rebuild its buildings even if your units are in the way, even if it has
no money, even if it has no construction yard.

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S4M
It looks nice, anybody knows how to build it on Linux?

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michal-franc
I would love to see Open Fragile Allegiance - Anyone?

~~~
toxik
Jesus christ that game was hard to get for a 10-year-old Scandinavian kid.
Even the name is hard!

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accnumnplus1
And there goes the rest of my weekend. At least.

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tobyhinloopen
OpenRA?

~~~
mig39
OpenRA has Dune 2000 :-). I think that's a remake of Dune 2, isn't it?

Would be great if it had the original!

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titanix2
For Dune 2000, there is the OpenRA project which reimplements the C&C game
engine in C#. [http://www.openra.net/about/](http://www.openra.net/about/)

~~~
mrguyorama
I was going to mention Dune 2000. The music is STILL wonderful, as was much of
the live action video. Unfortunately the installer is a 16 bit program, which
prohibits installation on modern Windows, but if you copy it over from an
already installed system, it actually works great!

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Kenji
> OpenDUNE is written in ANSI C (C89)

Wow! That's badass and hardcore! Not even C++ or C99. Gotta respect that. No
clean header for fixed size types (uint32_t), no vectors, no references.
Coding like that is tough.

~~~
jcl
It's a by-hand recoding of a C decompilation of the original game's binary.
Using C++ -- or any abstraction that departs from the original code or memory
structure -- would actually have made the process more difficult, at least
initially. And given that the project was started using MSVC in 2009, C99
would not have been an option at the time.

The history shows the level of dedication that must have been needed. E.g.:

[https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE/commit/eed60258](https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE/commit/eed60258)

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dbuder
This was the first strategy game I played, I think on a Windows 3.1 486, and I
was generally awful and had to use very cheap tactics for almost all the
levels beyond the first few, usually go around the map and pop up and attack
the important buildings.

I did manage to finish it as Arteides though, I had a line of sonic tanks for
defence and would make a mobile construction site and hide it behind my base
for when the missile hit (which I never knew the name of bc I never got far
enough in the other campaigns to use it). I had to wait until all the spice on
the map was depleted and then go and mop up the enemy bases. I was never that
proud, but my older nerdy friends always reacted with shock and disbelief that
I had finished it.

