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
  • 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
  • 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
  • > 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
  • > (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
  • IMHO, this is an actual good use of what sounds like a person guiding a model to do a mass conversion. Although, I wish the porting docs were a little wordsmithed by a human, the AI generated text style is grating.

    The stakes are low, it’s mostly for fun and you can iterate on it. Compare this with Bun which was just like, “hey we converted everything to Bun to Rust from Zig, of course it works, what could possibly go wrong, I’ll totally write up a blogpost (that still doesn’t exist) explaining what we did, you can put this into your production environment soon!”

    by Eufrat

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