TiberianDawnHD VS Spring RTS game engine

All the art and sound assets come from a legally purchased copy of C&C, specifically the "C&C Remastered Collection" on Steam or Origin. OpenRA uses the assets from that, so it's all legal! Stratagus does the same thing with Warcraft assets.

https://github.com/OpenRA/TiberianDawnHD#asset-installation

There's a remaster version of OpenRA TD, not for RA yet tho: https://github.com/OpenRA/TiberianDawnHD/releases/tag/release-20230225

But wait, there’s more! This release brings major behind-the-scenes changes towards supporting the C&C Remastered Collection assets. This support is still incomplete, but works well enough that we are today also releasing a development preview of “Tiberian Dawn HD”. It is a separate release and can be downloaded here. This preview is multiplayer-compatible with the main 20230225 release, but performance, memory usage, and loading times have not been optimized, and do not reflect the expected final requirements. The C&C Remastered Collection must be installed through Steam or Origin, and the project README provides installation instructions for macOS and Linux.

This release brings major behind-the-scenes changes towards supporting the C&C Remastered Collection assets. This support is still incomplete, but works well enough that we are today also releasing a development preview of “Tiberian Dawn HD”. It is a separate release and can be downloaded here.

There's work being done to support the remastered assets in OpenRA: https://github.com/pchote/TiberianDawnHD

Just download, install and play. You need to have the Remastered Collection in Origin or Steam and it will get the assets from there. Enjoy. https://github.com/pchote/TiberianDawnHD/releases/tag/playtest-20221203

Seems the support would be a realistic feature, though, because it's based on https://springrts.com/ that does support MacOS X.

springrts: Designed for 3D rts games. May be worth looking into if that's what you're making. The site is kind of lack luster so I didn't do too much digging around.

...or Total Annihilation Spring, nowadays known as Spring RTS: https://springrts.com/

My current favorite is Beyond All Reason. Before BAR, my favorite was Zero-K. Both BAR and zk use the same game engine, SpringRTS. BAR and zk are very similar to one another, and they're successors for Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.

Obligatory mention of another open source RTS engine (lineage tracing back to the original Total Annihilation): https://springrts.com/

Non-OSS Engine?

Total Annihilation for sure, the spiritual successor Supreme Commander is great but a bit too different for me. There's an open source recreation that's a bit rough to learn at first, but it's my favorite game of all time called Spring RTS. https://springrts.com/

The other thing is that if you're going to make an engine focused on rts games, you should probably study an existing RTS-focused engine. For example, here's the source code for Spring. Learn what it does, why, and how. You might decide this is good enough for what you want to do. You might decide this is pretty close, and you'll only want to extend it rather than start from scratch. You might decide to still start from scratch, but at least you learned something about requirements/ methods/ etc.

Pretty much any game on the Spring Engine (which Zero-K is on) will work on Linux.