It is here; after many months of development and with additional help from Rozmy, Paul, Ripps and Mira and others…

In a nutshell, this release brings:

  • Graphical improvements
    • Sharpened some structures
    • Smoother animations: flag, refinery pad, heavy factory, etc
    • Mountains are proportionally better than before
    • Transparent shadows of units and structures
    • Units smoke on top when damaged < 50%
    • Clicking unit/structure gives info at top bar
  • Gameplay improvements
    • Sandworms in skirmish games
    • Teams in skirmish games
    • Spice blooms in skirmish games
    • Rocket Turrets shoot normal bullets when low power (togglable in settings.ini)
    • Turrets keep firing when low power (togglable in settings.ini)
    • Respects Dune 2 campaign win conditions (WinFlags and LoseFlags)
    • Rewritten mouse & keyboard controls
  • Other features:
    • Revamped old skirmish maps & introduced new ones
    • Mission Select screen
    • Options menu (where you can pause game, select mission or go back to main menu)
    • Added Credits screen
    • Introduced a settings.ini file where you can control camera speed, enable/disable borders moving camera as well as toggle some “Dune 2 behavior”
  • Bug fixes:
    • Units & turrets now face correctly their target
    • Mission 3 Ordos can be won now (no longer invincible structure present)
    • Super weapons no longer start draining money
    • Carryall pick-up/drops fixed
    • Quad/Trike’s can no longer damage terrain
    • Worms no longer squish infantry
    • 4SLAB placement works now as expected when not perfectly placed
  • Balancing:
    • Reduce repair speed of structures
    • Reduce troopers range
    • Make Rocket Launchers less accurate
    • Troopers fire normal gun when enemy is close
    • Skirmish AI is a bit more aggressive
    • AI will defend Harvesters under attack
    • AI responds when enemy threatens it
    • Units who can fire 2 projectiles, fire only 1 when < 50% damaged
    • Units guard behavior will no longer automatically chase enemies around the map

Apart from these many other (technical) achievements have been made; one of them being able to compile and run under Linux (although it does not seem to be stable yet, hence no binaries for that).

The full changelog can be found here.

Download

You can grab version 0.7.0 (d2tm.zip file) from here. Unpack, and execute. Be sure to read the wikipage so you know some of the hotkeys (like repairing, etc). If you want to change the screen resolution, run in full screen mode or anything you can change the settings.ini file OR you can run d2tm.exe from command line using several switches. Start with d2tm.exe --help for a full list of flags you can use.

Special thanks

I want to thank the Ripps for his active role at Discord (playtesting and providing general feedback). Also for providing the revamped & new skirmish maps. Without your help I wouldn’t have got this far. Thanks!

I also want to thank Rozmy for his awesome work on improving the graphics. And there is still a lot more we have in mind how we can improve the look and feel, while not getting too far away from Dune 2’s intent.

Finally, I’d like to thank Paul for his major contributions on the codebase. Without his help it would not have been possible to compile this under Linux; nor it wouldn’t be possible to get rid of Allegro and prepare for the future by migrating to SDL2.

Same goes for Mira who took effort for the Linux part but also making sure it is easier to read things from a settings file and taking first steps making it possible to create “mod”‘s for D2TM.

Feedback

If you want to provide feedback, you can email me, use Twitter (handle @dune2themaker), our Discord or post your feedback at the forums. Another way is creating a Github ticket (if you’re able).

What does it look like?

If you want to see some action first, you can take a peek here:

Finally

After releasing 0.6.0 I wanted to improve a lot right away. I wanted to make it a smaller release and get it out before the end of 2021. However, D2TM received quite some attention since 0.6.0. This meant people wanted to chip in to help out (which is great!). I wanted to include many changes and effort that was given by others.

However, it really took a lot more energy from me than expected. Instead of just coding, I also had to do more managing. I noticed that my energy level dipped twice in the past months because of the amount of energy I put into this (long nights again indeed).

All in all, I am very proud of how much got into this version.

I won’t promise when a next release will come, or how “big” it will be. Just know I keep working on it!

On to the next version! 🙂

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