Phobos (RA2: YR engine extension) v0.4 – Release Highlights and Project News

Hello!

Kerbiter here, with news about the newest (very much belated, sadly) stable release of Phobos v0.4!

Before we get to the update highlights, a few words about the project state. As you may have noticed, we didn't have a stable release in a long time, due to some very hard to debug issues in the development builds that were not acceptable for a release (thankfully, they all are fixed now; special thanks to the new CN-based volunteer tester team). Also, at some point the development of the project slowed down due to reduced maintainer activity. We were accumulating feature contributions from new contributors and almost reached 150 concurrently open pull requests, which is a lot. But thankfully, our contributors learned pretty quickly and were enthusiastic enough to pull through that period, and coupled with me setting up a more self-sustainable system with different contribution complexity levels, we got a more robust team setup. Please welcome our new crew members - CrimRecya, Ollerus, ZivDero, NetsuNegi, TaranDahl, DeathFish, FlyStar and Fryone!

Sadly, you can't really prevent situations like this on a free voluntary project. Best that anyone can do is promoting the project (videos and callouts to specific features used in your promotion material help greatly), so that more people know about it, and donating to Phobos crew members to support us.

Unfortunately for myself, I am still suffering from a long-going military conflict in Ukraine, so at this moment, all donations are vital to me and are my main source of income. I can accept donations via Patreon or PayPal (no fees; PM me to @kerbiter in Discord or Telegram for details).

Over the last 8 years I've done a lot for C&C community (I lead the main classic C&C modding community, CnCNet client maintenance, co-founded Phobos and lead it to this day), so I believe that if everyone who enjoys my work donates as small as $1 a month - I wouldn't need to worry about finances anymore at all. Your help is especially appreciated in times like this; even if you don't donate - spreading the word to players and modders will help a lot.

• With a new SW.Next tag now there can be custom multi-part superweapons like the Chronosphere, allowing modders to design more elaborate superweapons and support powers.

• We've implemented our own INI section inheritance, which works on any section of any INI and supports multiple inheritance in form of a special $Inherits INI key. This, along with our own $Include support, supersedes corresponding Ares features that were partially documented and partially working, and allows modders to have clean and organized INI files.

• One of the big achievements of this release is that we were able to set up interaction with Ares (versions 3.0 and 3.0p1 are supported) in a similar way we interact with the game. This allowed us to reuse Ares type conversion logic and create a type conversion warhead. Not only this, but our wonderful contributors also managed to fix some bugs in Ares, though this wasn't in the scope of the project.

• On UI side, most tasty addition is the digital display. Just like the health bar or shield bar or even pips, it can be used to display information in numeric form for a unit or building. With a lot of customisation options, it can be used to display anything from health to ammo count. Pretty default font included, but you can use your own.

• Weapons and warheads received a lot of tasty stuff too, like the addition of return weapons, revenge weapons and even multiple warheads on a weapon.

• Veinhole, veins, weeder and chemical missile logics from Tiberian Sun that were partially in the engine got restored, much to the like of many TS total conversion mods.

• Known to many modders AttachEffect from Ares, which allows adding temporary effects to units and buildings, has been reimplemented and augmented with more features, including custom tint on voxels (which also got applied to shields).

• Few small but very, very significant changes for visuals are customisations and fixes for voxel lighting. Now modders can customize the position of "sun" relative to voxels. Apparently, the vanilla engine sun position was either near the horizon or even below it, resulting in voxels being lit up from the side, even though most of the Yuri's Revenge maps are daytime maps. Look how pretty the voxels can be with the lighting properly adjusted:

• As for other visual nifties - there's now support for rendering shadows of all parts of the multi-part voxels (think turrets, heli blades, etc) and TurretOffset support for SHP vehicles.

• What is also worth mentioning is that, during the prolonged time 0.4 was cooking, lots of optimizations, bugfixes and polish was applied, thanks to the hard work of our maintainers and testers, resulting in an experience better than ever!

The changes may feel underwhelming after such a long wait, but rest assured - we have a lot of stuff cooking for 0.5, which should come a lot sooner, because of course, such a release schedule that we had up to this day isn't optimal. People get busier, and to be fair - our stable release branch was always quite slow compared to devbuilds, which made people mostly stick to devbuilds, and when the time comes - it's pretty heavy to do releases. And I have also noticed that frequently people found bugs on a devbuild soon after its release, but the followup bugfixes didn't come until the next one, leaving people with using nightlies. So it's logical to introduce a followup version after a devbuild one. Naturally, with less usability of current stable releases, it makes sense to instead have those followup releases as stable builds. In this case, each new devbuild (or a pre-release) on a main branch will be starting a new stable release cycle, and after some much shorter timespan to fix bugs (maybe a few interim releases) a stable version will be releases.

• Download the release at GitHub releases
• Read the documentation at ReadTheDocs
• Contribute to Phobos at official GitHub repository
• Donate to us if you enjoy Phobos!

Over and out,
Kerbiter