Niceee! I recently started using this mod, and its been a QoL feature the Remaster should have had from the get-go. Thanks for the new update!

A big huge thank you to you, Chthon! You have kept working on this game years after it came out, and I am incredibly grateful for all that you have put into it.

Big thank you for the updated test build, will be embarking on some gameplay right away.

I've been thinking lately about the civilian issue and I've come to the conclusion that perhaps, instead of giving them sight range in singleplayer and breaking things, a better option would be to have a toggle to simply stop them from being spawned from destroyed buildings or vehicles altogether and/or replace their spawn with a unit of light infantry. This way, you'd be given an actual useful, albeit barely, unit. Thoughts?

Edit: just wanted to report some strangeness, I was doing GDI 99 Special Ops M2 and an enemy harvester passed one of my sandbags, as soon as he did, the sandbag flipped ownership. Happened a few times during the mission, is this intended behavior? I play with building gap and wall building length both at 6, so I tend to use them to extend map control.

Edit 2: During Nod 99 Special Ops M2, I encountered this white square cell and have no idea what this is or what causes it. I'm running no other mods except the test build right now.
https://imgur.com/a/SvuhCj8

@Tayo:

1. The civilian crew are *supposed* to be worthless. That's the design intent.

2. The wall flipping at the same time the harvester goes past is coincidence. The wall probably is flipping in response to the AI constructing a building, and it flips to them because it's closer to their base than yours. The whole wall-flipping concept isn't really compatible with "sandbagging" tactics. If you want to sandbag, turn that feature off.

3. The white square is a missing art asset. This is probably a vanilla issue, since the mod only adds a few art assets, and it would be super obvious if I accidentally left one out of the zip file. If you look in <C&C Install Directory\log\ one of the log files should tell you what it tried to load, but couldn't.

@Tayo: I took a deeper look at the white box. It's supposed to be a "crashed orca" tile. (See https://web.archive.org/web/20210102225211/http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cncstuff/mappics/special-n64-nod/scb41ea.png) However, as best I can tell, the desert version of the "crashed orca" tile only existed in this console version, and Petroglyph forgot to make high-res art for it. I will try to figure out how to fix it.

1. I understand that they're supposed to be useless, but just as other options in the mod change the design intent, I figured this change would've been a nice minor addition. Especially given the fact that the amount of units that exit a sold/destroyed building is random and you might or might not get a civilian. If civies were supposed to be a balancing factor for the amount of units you get, it wouldn't have been random if you got one or not, as it stands there's just no point to them other than at best "flavor".

And at worst, it's especially frustrating when they take the spot of an engineer spawn when you sell a ConYard which if you ask me, should be guaranteed to spawn, and perhaps another option in your mod. I can think of a one or two missions when you have to sell your ConYard and not getting an engineer out of it basically means reloading the game.

I liken this change with the safe demolition option for the Commando. Without it, you just get randomly screwed by the game with an infantry spawn that shoots up your Commando while he can't retaliate. Getting civies out of buildings is pretty much the same random screwing at a much smaller scale.

2. Unfortunately this wasn't the case. The wall-flipping behavior occurred in one of the console missions where the AI never rebuilds destroyed buildings.

3. I am almost positive I saw a desert tileset crashed orca art asset while running the campaigns, most likely during Nod's or Nod's Covert Ops since those contain a lot of desert. I'll go look for it and report which mission has it, maybe a simple edit to the mission to point it towards the asset can fix it.

Edit: In search of the desert crashed orca asset, I was playing Nod Covert Ops Hostile Takeover, and now a mammoth tank ran by a sandbag and flipped its ownership.
Here's a save file: https://ufile.io/ndrou34u . Notice how the sandbag is 1 or 2 cells closer to my base than the enemy's and yet...

Edit 2: In Nod 11 A, the gunboat still attacks the walls of the south-western base, even though most of the buildings aside from the Con Yard are the AI's. In Nod 7 B, AI still attacks its walls with units at the start of the mission. In Nod 61 / Nod '97 Special Ops 02 the AI still attacks its chain fences around its Chinooks with grenadiers.

Probably unrelated but in Nod 30 / Eviction Notice (Covert Ops), one of the civilians in the village that must be destroyed is allied with the player instead of the AI like the 30 other villagers. Strange.

I generally try to stick to the original design intent (which is sometimes different than how the original game turned out, due to bugs and design/hardware constraints), unless a change is a dramatic improvement. I don't view the occasional worthless civilian crew as a big enough annoyance to justify going against the clear design intent that they be useless.

I think I will see about guaranteeing an Engineer when selling a non-captured MCV. If you can't finish a mission when you fail the roll, that's a good reason for a change.

Vehicles driving by have nothing to do with walls flipping. It's simply not possible. I wrote all of that code myself, and it's only called in 5 places, all in methods of BuildingClass.

The wall flipping decision is based on the sum of weights from *all* nearby buildings. If you have the single nearest building, but the enemy has multiple buildings almost as close, then they win. Ultimately there's just no way to make wall flipping and sandbagging work together. The basic idea of wall flipping is that you own the walls that are close to your base. And the basic idea of sandbagging is building in/near someone else's base. If you like sandbagging tactics, then you'll just have to turn off wall flipping.

I did figure out a way to override that missing tile texture with an arbitrary texture. I need to do more digging to figure out why it's missing in the first place. The tile number in the map file on arsaneus-design corresponds to a rock in the original PC version, and that rock does have high-res art. So why isn't GlyphX finding it? Also, it looks like Nyerguds made a more recent conversion (?) of the N64 files, which now has a (different?) rock in that spot. (http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cncstuff/mappics/specops-n64-nod/scb22eb.png) I may need to get a pirate copy of the N64 port and see if I can find a cheat code to get to that mission and see what's really there.

Might be a good idea, I could install an N64 emulator and help you out if you're short on time, I've enabled the shroud remover and looked at literally every mission in the game twice and it appears the desert crashed orca was all in my head, which is confusing me to no end, I could've sworn I saw it.

Out of curiosity what's the radius of the wall flip check?

The wall flipping formula is:
- current owner starts with a score of 540 (halved if it's HOUSE_NONE)
- Each building is worth 576 - distance^2, or zero if that's negative.

C&C uses an inaccurate distance formula (for performance reasons on mid-90s consumer PCs), so the "fall to zero point" is 24 cells, or a diagonal of 16x16, which is 1/4 of the (original size) map diagonally. (Note that the squaring of distance means that scores quickly fall to numbers much smaller than the current-owner bonus.)

I thought of a potential revision to wall flipping last night. I think I'll change it so that (outside of the start-of-game procedure) walls can only flip towards the house gaining a building or away from the house losing a building.

I did grab the N64 rom and was pleased to discover that mission is available from the main menu. It's a crashed orca. (Well, actually it's a crashed UFO because the people doing the N64 port didn't know that blob of pixels was *supposed* to be an orca.)

Alrighty, I got to the bottom of the white box: It looks like someone changed the icon number in the map file to avoid having the rock appear (desert, P04, 0 -> desert, P04, 1), but then the art team never made a high-res tile for the crashed orca. I broke out GIMP, made a decent-looking tile, added the XML for it, and it works fine in game. Next test build will be out as soon as I have time to zip and upload it.

When you say you made a decent looking tile, did you actually make a desert crashed orca tile by modifying the grasslands crashed orca or just a desert stone?

Also, I've been meaning to ask, how difficult is it to separate helipads as individual buildings per faction so that when a player captures the enemy MCV he can build the second one to have both aircraft without having to actually capture and depend on keeping the captured enemy helipad to keep the unit?

Also, interesting discovery, I was playing last night with the shroud remover on and ordered a few apaches to attack a target in the enemy base on the other side of the map, they just denied to comply until I sent ground units over to "scout" the area, so it appears there's some conflict there which prevents them from considered the map revealed with the shroud remover on.

It's a crashed orca: https://ibb.co/PMYDzWM

Separating the helipad into two building types is probably somewhere between really, really ugly and downright impossible. It might *maybe* be feasible to make helipads that are built when you have dual MCVs able to build both types of helicopters. But you wouldn't get a choice which type of helicopter they came with.

Since the shroud remover is just a map-making tool, I'm not too concerned about this.

Dang. I think I just figured out how fake two kinds of helipads. Maybe... Stay tuned.

Yes! "Build either side's helipad if you have a captured MCV" is working. Feeling really clever right now. Needs some cleanup and tweaking for dino missions. Then I'll try to pull the same trick with MCVs.

That is amazing! This will add lots of flavor to SP! Can you also enable building the other side's superweapon building in missions with the appropriate tech level? For some reason those buildings are omitted when you capture enemy MCVs.