Birbla

Discussion summary

A port of Command and Conquer Generals was achieved for macOS, iPhone, and iPad using Fable, with contributions from the community including EA releasing source code under GPL v3. The project involved native builds and integration with Vulkan SDK, with ongoing maintenance and development efforts.

What the discussion says

  • Community members discuss porting and maintaining the game across platforms.
  • Some mention the use of Fable for native integration and updates.
  • Debate on whether the port will maintain itself or require ongoing effort.
  • Users share related projects like reviving old software and other game remakes.
“EA released the Generals source under GPL v3, and it runs on macOS/Linux, with native iOS and iPadOS builds.”
— asronline
“Fable was able to do the direct integration, why wouldn't it maintain itself at some level?”
— fnordpiglet

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  • Hacker News
  • Title is click bait.

    This started back in February and looking at commits, Fable did only a small part of the latest commits. 19 commits out of 2000:

    https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/commits...

    And maybe it wasn't even Fable, they might have downgraded to Opus.

    This is the kind of frequent misinformation that makes me skeptical of Anthropic LLM claims. Whenever I compare them to GPT 5.5 on my web dev workflows, they seem to trade blows, even Fable, which I started testing since it was re-enabled.

    Also I bet any decent LLM could have done such port. Think GLM 5.2 or similar which would probably work better because it doesn't constantly try to guess if I'm a terrorist trying to hack goverments or develop some biological weapon.

    People just don't have the resources to compare LLMs and imply whatever they used is the best thing ever and unlocked some new workflow.

    I have seen little improvement since Opus 4.6.

    by bel8
  • This project is a fork and all it does is add iOS support. Commits by the repo fork owner begin 19 hours ago, so very plausible those are done with Fable. But I agree it's very unclear to me if adding iOS support was some task only Fable could accomplish over prior models.
    by varenc
  • > rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal

    Am I reading that right? It makes API calls that go through 5 different layers before actually getting rendered? That's kind of crazy. I'm surprised it works, although I guess the underlying libraries are solid enough that it shouldn't be unexpected.

    by Reubend
  • Technically there're just 3 layers: DXVK over MoltenVK over Metal. D3D8 and Vulkan here are just the APIs implemented by those adapter layers.

    There're some D3D implementations over Metal that could skip the Vulkan layer but none implement the old D3D8 so you'd still need another layer that implements e.g. D3D8 over D3D9-11. Also, DXVK and MoltenVK have got a lot of traction and fixes on their own, so they're probably the most accurate pipeline for D3D on Metal.

    by debugnik
  • Apple never released a driver that supports Vulkan out of the box, therefore MoltenVK was born, which translates Vulkan IR to Metal source then recompiles to Metal shaders.

    This was the pipeline in Proton for macOS (I'm not sure if it's still is the case, been quite a while since I checked).

    by etra0
  • For any fellow idiot following behind, the below error means you haven't paid for the game in Steam.

    > "ERROR! Failed to install app '2732960' (No subscription)"

    This is of course mentioned in the read me.

    by lostlogin
  • no way fable did this. It would have stopped after the words "command and conquer" and nerfed you to opus (while also landing you on some nsa watch list)
    by siva7
  • lol, I'd expect that as it starts reading of sections of code dealing with the chinese and terrorist factions.
    by cogman10
  • I’ve been using it to use Ghidra to do reverse engineering for modding Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Pre-ban it would flag immediately, post-ban it _rarely_ flagged anything and when it did I realized I could just make a memory telling it to convert reverse engineering speech into game development speech, not mentioning pointers, memory, addresses and decompiling. Then the flags mostly went away.

    You can sidestep flags by just compacting and then changing the model back at any rate.

    by throwaway314155
  • TL;DR: nothing to see here, HN title is extremely misleading

    > rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan → MoltenVK → Metal.

    Ok, *this* is a bit weird. Why create such a jenga tower of indirections instead of directly letting the LLM port the rendering code from D3D8 to Metal either through a D3D8-to-Metal shim or even better by creating a new Metal-based render layer beneath the higher level game specific rendering code? I would expect that the LLM can 'see through' all those redundant shims and collapse them into the equivalent Metal code.

    Also the readme says 'no emulation', but then goes on to describe the rendering layer as emulating D3D8 on top of Vulkan on top of Metal ;)

    (also why are both Meson and CMake required)

    PS: after reading more, it can be explained by what this project does (and it's not what the HN title says): it's not a port from the original C&C Generals code release to macOS/iOS, instead all the heavy lifting (of making the original code base portable, and providing example ports to Linux and macOS) was all already done by an existing project (https://github.com/fbraz3/GeneralsX), all that this project did was slightly enhance the existing macOS version so that it also runs on iOS.

    Suddenly this is much less impressive and could probably have been done just as well with older and simpler models (or tbh, a few hours or at most a few evenings of manual coding - macOS and iOS code is nearly identical for this type of application).

    by flohofwoe
  • The title is contradicted by the README:

    > Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes)

    It’s cool that someone took the extra steps to run it on iPad and iOS, but if the README is correct then it was already ported to macOS? Going from Mac to iPad isn’t trivial, but it’s a much smaller jump than porting into the Apple world the first time.

    by Aurornis
  • I wanna know if these techniques would be useful for Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001). It's the first 3D RTS by Westwood Studios, predating C&C Generals by just a couple years. It's popularity was hampered by intellectual property disputes and a introduction of a new faction that diverged from the book series lore. The gameplay, soundtrack, and campaign missions were awesome.
    by evanjrowley
  • I loved this game. First RTS I ever played :)
    by kriro
  • Emperor was a great game. My only real complaint was the five sub-factions seemed to be imbalanced. I’d like to revisit to see if the was missing something.
    by 1123581321
  • This is not Dune 2000 ? https://www.openra.net/download/#linux
    by SubiculumCode
  • Let me give it a go :)
    by asronline
  • I remember that game! Cinematics! and some units had dune realistic shields so when hit with laser, both attacker and defender died. I don't think i've finished it, ending had some worm timer mission i couldn't get to in time.
    by rudcodex
  • This was one of the best RTS of the era. Still holds up today. The music was also very good.
    by farseer
  • Try it before July 7 when Fable disappears from Claude Code subscription pricing.
    by satvikpendem
  • clickbait, right? it did not port it to macos, that was already done. all fable did (and it might've been opus for all we know) is adding the last few commits for ios/ipados support after all of the heavy lifting was done

    still cool but the title makes it sound like it was done from scratch

    by lazy_moderator1
  • Diff of the changes Fable added to the parent fork (which does not appear to have used AI): https://github.com/ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad/compare... for those curious.
    by didibus
  • That is really not a lot. A human could have easily done this. How much did it cost / how many tokens were spent?
    by tomalbrc
  • > Built on EA's GPL v3 source release via fbraz3/GeneralsX (which did the heavy lifting of the macOS/Linux port — this fork adds the iOS/iPadOS port and a set of engine fixes).
    by namuol
  • This needs a backport to Winx64 since this game runs like crap on modern windows
    by hypercube33
  • I have a Renegade one going that does all of this from scratch (different engine) so it's def more than capable!
    by asronline
  • Right? All Fable did was a ported an already cross platform project to ios. Does not look like any sort of heavy lifting there, opus 4.6 would do just fine
    by risyachka
  • > (tap-select, drag-box, long-press deselect, two-finger scroll, pinch zoom)

    This is another "AI-ism" I noticed, mostly in coding agents - they seem to be very fond of making up new "compound nouns" (and occasionally verbs) to sum up relatively complex and specific concepts into single noun phrases. I wasn't sure if it's to save tokens or if the AI uses this to get a concise "identifier" for a concept that it can refer back to later, but I found it very noticeable.

    I find the resulting sentences hard to read, though it does get better if you're aware of that tendency and make a conscious effort to parse the noun phrases. But I guess since it's just intermediate output from coding agents and not text for essays or blog posts, it's fine.

    by xg15
  • That and finishing a statement with an em dash — that’s what AI does.
    by mikeryan
  • That, and also the very long comma-separated lists with sometimes 10+ items.
    by rossant
  • That’s… about how I might have written that.
    by topgrain2