Welcome back, Commanders! After more than a year and a half, the OpenRA team proudly presents Playtest 20221203. It is finally here!


There have been tons of massive changes under the hood, and with reduced contributor activity, it took us a very long time to catch and squash all those pesky bugs. With the help of our third-party mods and people testing the devtest builds, we believe we finally have a stable release on our hands. We are incredibly excited to showcase a number of new features and improvements that have been built up over the last year and a half:

• One highlight feature is the new hierarchical pathfinder, which massively increases performance on large or more complex maps.

 HPF helps units to predict obstacles better ahead of them.

• Our new net code brings major improvements to multiplayer. Your games should feel much smoother and units more responsive in both low and high latency settings.

• We have added transient text notifications matching speech notifications. Now you can play without sound!

• The fairly recent Dune film has brought many players to Dune 2000 and a decently sized multiplayer community was born. With the feedback from the community Dune 2000 has received a number of balance and polish changes.

• Tiberian Sun has also received its fair share of features and bug fixes. This time around the highlight is tilting on slopes.

OpenRA now supports tilting on slopes!

Some of the more visible new features and improvements include:

• Measures against sound/notification overlap. No more u-u-u-u-unit lost
  
• Measures against spamming the multiplayer lobby and in-game chat
  
• The ability to mute players
  
• Support for disabling the chat in replays
  
• An in-game encyclopedia in Dune 2000
  
• New Red Alert missions
  
• Community balance changes for all mods

Notable changes for mappers and modders include:

• Automatic map reloading in the background
  
• A change to the way speed is calculated for ground units
  
• A new map format that includes the map preview (minimap) in the map versioning (map hash)
  
• Loaders for more audio formats (e.g., mp3 and ogg), and formats used by the remasters
  
• Many linting and documentation updates

As well as some other changes worth mentioning:

• Toolchain and changes to support the .NET 6 runtime
  
• A massive amount of upgrades to both in-game and client UI
  
• Many more hotkeys became rebindable
  
• Substantial progress towards localization

All in all, 615 pull requests were merged since the last release, and 552 issues were closed, bringing the total number of open tickets down by 141.



This post covered just a small subset of all the changes and improvements added since the last release. We encourage anybody interested in finding out more to read the full changelog. Head on over to the download page to install the new playtest and let us know what you think in the comments below, on our forum, community Discord server or on GitHub. Happy playtesting!