29 Years Online

CNCNZ.com has turned 29 today. While I was preparing to talk about another quiet anniversary, it would be remiss of me not to mention a recent humble, but definitely welcome blip of activity here on the forums – thank you to all who drop by! Even with modern ways of connecting communities, it is nice to see people remember classic places like this.

It has also been nice to witness other things that happened in the community since the last writeup:

• Zero Hour has had a true renaissance since the official source code was released last year. Most notably, the teams behind the SuperHackers’ community patch and the GeneralsOnline server have been instrumental in fixing the issues that the game has had for a very long time, and have, in a short amount of time, managed to gather a playerbase the size of which has not been seen since the GameSpy shutdown of 2014.
• Red Alert 3 and Kane’s Wrath received some pretty impressive community updates, the latter even getting proper skirmish AI improvements very recently. Tiberian Sun and Yuri’s Revenge got more iterative changes under the hood and some that are aimed at custom maps, but it is still great to see so many classic titles get updated for all players to enjoy.
• The oldest-running fansite, the French CnCSaga, turned 30 this year. Happy anniversary!
• Renegade X officially left public beta with version 1.0, with the Tiberian Sun-themed Firestorm apparently just around the corner. W3D Hub‘s standalone titles have been getting thoroughly polished as well. OpenRA has been busy with tweaks, interface, Dune 2000 campaign support and even adding the ability to play with Tiberian Dawn Remastered assets, though only in playtest builds for now.
• Mods, as usual, are a very active space with Dawn of the Tiberium Age (with the Shadow Exodus update), Red Alert Redux, Rise of the Reds, Tiberian Sun Synthesis, Tiberium Dusk, Zero Hour Enhanced and more.
• While the usage of AI is still very much controversial, it has resulted in some interesting projects like OpenCNC3D/RA3D and Zero Hour Reforged.

With as many community projects going around, aimed at both vanilla and mod players, there’s no way people can ever get tired of this franchise.