Well, it's been over two years since I last made a post in my mod's news forum. Two years is far too long.

In two years, the community has undergone many changes - old mods have withered away, new mods have appeared; old network sites have fallen off the radar, new upstarts have rose to take their place; C&C itself has seen the Tiberium saga concluded, and the Red Alert series take a (debatable) new turn.

Personally, I've gone from being CNC3.net's division leader to running the whole Guild; my real-life workload has increased exponentially, and this mod was left to drift into quiet obscurity.

In the modding arena, RockPatch was superseded (not without protest) by NPatch as the tool to use for extending modding possibilities. However, now Ares is in the process of getting that title back from NPatch. With the new options opened up by Ares, how could I not have a go at the mod again?

As you can see, I've completely remade the website. Gone are the years-old pages detailing silly additions that had no real basis in a YR extension mod. Instead, I've redesigned the mod itself. Some things have remained from the previous versions, but there are some new additions entirely.

TVTropes has a definition entitled "Darker and Edgier", and that's what I've been aiming towards here. There's less campy sci-fi stuff thrown in for no reason, with things taking a more realistic turn, and I've made an effort to have a story explanation for every addition. You can see the progress made in each section of mod additions at the top of the respective page. Yes, there's little to look at for now, mostly because I am not an artist, and doing anything in that field beyond cameos is incredibly difficult for me, but things should begin to happen.

Anyway, that's enough rambling. Keep your eyes open here every now and then, I should have some things to post up from time to time. If you're interested in getting involved, I wouldn't mind assistance from anyone with SHP and/or voxelling capabilities, and I'm always open to hiring beta testers.

Time to get to work.

~Nighthawk.

It's been quite some time since I've had a news post here. Work has been slowly continuing behind the scenes on the campaign missions. However, I've decided to put the mod on temporary hiatus. This is because, although the mod currently runs under RockPatch 1.10, I plan on moving it over to RockPatch 2 once it is released.

Now, RP2 may or may not have all the features of 1.10, so I've halted development so that the mod can be planned and redesigned in light of the new feature set. I mean, what's the point in developing more stuff that may not be doable with RP2.

This is not the end of the mod. Depending on what RP2 offers, you could see vast improvements. But either way, it's paused until RP2's eventual release.

~Nighthawk.

Beta 2 is finally up on the server for download. It's been almost a year late, but now you can play it. However, the key thing is that it is a beta version, so there will most likely be bugs that myself and the testers haven't yet ironed out. If you do come across any bugs, please contact me in some form or another, preferably not email, as I have a habit of deleting emails from people I don't know.

The mod is in three parts like the last one, so it's not all in a massive file. You can download the mod from the new Downloads page, or from the following links:
Zip 1: Core Files (Mixes)
Zip 2: Audio Files (bag/idx)
Zip 3: Music Files (optional)

To play it, just unzip the files from these mixes into the RA2 directory. I have not yet tested the mod in a LAN or online situation yet, so you may expect Reconnection Errors. You will also notice that some of the Skirmish Modes are not yet finished, that is intentional, as I wasn't planning to put them in this beta. Naval War Extreme is functional, but suffers from the NCO Bug. Space War has the terrain, but still all the ground units and structures. The Future Forces AI is rather small at the minute, partly because I have to edit the triggers by hand to make the game think they're the Fourth Side, otherwise AI Editor reverts them to Allies.

To play this you'll need RPCE Revision #0050 or later, and v2.0a of the Terrain Expansion.
The music zip is still uploading at the time of writing, so you may get a 404 if you try to download it immediately.

Thanks for your time.
Nighthawk.

Commander. A recent storm of a Yuri staging area in the East Pacific has yielded a wealth of data on his new Legions. You can view the data on this page.
We will update our database with the unit information shortly.

Edit: Unit Lists updated

Urgent Battlefield Report - Eyes Only
From: 'Nighthawk', Agent, Allied Intelligence
To: , Commander, Allied Defense Forces
Commander, while we've been pre-occupied trying to get as much information on the Future Forces as possible, we seem to have neglected the other threat to our peace, Yuri. We originally thought he did not pose as much of a threat as he seems to have been holed up in Antarctica all this time doing God knows what, but he appears to have re-organised his forces entirely. Today at approximately 0200 hours, Yuri troops under the name of the 'Atlantic Legion' have seized the Russian city of Novgorod. The Soviets, who only had a small garrison in the city, were forced to retreat. The city is now in Yuri's hands. One of the Soviet soldiers stationed in the garrison, a Mladshiy Leytenant Rovodinsky, managed to snap a sizable view of one of the Yuri occupation zones as he retreated from the city in a MiG bomber using the bomber's black box. Here is that picture, unfortunately with most of Novgorod's power grid in chaos there are very few light posts running in that area of the city, and Yuri's "mood lighting" doesn't help much either, so we have lightened some of the areas so you can get a clear view of the area.
.
It seems that this 'Atlantic Legion' uses different vehicular units to those normally used by Yuri, we can see several heavy-tank like vehicles driving down the main road, and one rather large double barreled unit in the centre, which was unfortunately the poorest lit of all. The Soviets believe it to be an improvisation on their Apocalypse tank, but we are unsure of its armament. We have a glimpse of one of Yuri's new Sniper Turrets. These are basically the British Sniper in turret form, though we've seen them use various types of ammo before. We can also see several civilians being kept in the base, most likely for use in Yuri's Bio Reactors, and we can also see that they are being closely guarded by one of Yuri's rumoured Special Operations infantry, a Savant. Be careful of those Commander, they are armed with high-energy railgun weapons, though until now they have been largely unseen.

More information will be brought in on this incident as we can get it Commander, but for now, Novgorod is a no-go area without clearance from Command, but the Soviets seem keen to send in a strike force to retake the city, Command's not going to risk arguing with them, but you are not to intervene until ordered.

Agent Nighthawk, Allied Intelligence
==Report Ends==

Out-of-character note: I thought I'd go back to the 'in-character' news posts again, they seemed to get the story across better than normal posts .