We are proud to announce a new stable release of OpenRA!

Development for this release started about six months ago, and in this time 50 developers contributed a total of 1,232 commits that added more than 14,000 lines of code.

So what has changed?

A lot of work went into fixing minor bugs and omissions to make the game experience more pleasant:

• Nod units in the Tiberian Dawn campaign finally use their original silver coloring.
• Starting a game after installing a map no longer causes the player to be kicked from the server.
• The lobby color validator will no longer complain as much as it used to.
• Walls now reliably stop bullets.
• Husks blocking refineries can now be targeted and destroyed.

We have also added the much-requested feature to restart missions and skirmish games, but this does not yet extend to multi-player games. Furthermore, the minimap radar will now also make use of team colors if those are enabled. Health bars can be set to only appear when the unit is damaged. Finally, the “Fragile Diplomacy” option has been removed.

UI-wise, issues with the left-click orders have been fixed. Additionally, it is now possible to zoom using Ctrl/Cmd+Scrollwheel (the spectator view and map editor offer two additional zoom levels). Two new modifier keys allow disabling line-building of walls (hold Shift during placement) and canceling an entire build queue (hold Ctrl when clicking).

But besides all of that, the biggest changes have been under the hood of OpenRA. We already addressed these topics in the playtest news posts [1] [2], and wiki pages covering them have been updated or written from scratch, but to summarize them again:

1. The dedicated server is now a stand-alone executable, and dedicated servers no longer need to synchronize maps with the resource center. See the dedicated server wiki page for details.

2. The map format has been updated, and the way that the game handles map upgrades has been changed. A wiki page has been created to describe the current map format.

3. In order to allow for packaging mods into single “.oramod” files, it was necessary to introduce a number of changes to the mod.yaml metadata file. These changes, and the layout of the mod.yaml file in general, are now documented on the wiki as well.

If you are interested, the wiki also has the full changelog which lists all of the changes included in this release.

You can find the installer for your operating system on our download page.

We hope you will enjoy this latest installment of OpenRA!