EA have restored and released the full source code for several antique Command & Conquer games under the GPL license, in a red letter day for series modders. The games in question are the original Command & Conquer (aka Tiberian Dawn), Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Command & Conquer Renegade and Command & Conquer Generals, plus the latter’s Zero Hour expansion. That’s a lot of refurbishable strategy game to get your head around.
All this is reportedly the result of EA commissioning one particular modder, community figure Luke “CCHyper” Feenan, to restore the old C&C source codes, as described at fearful length on Reddit. If you’re not familiar with him, he was involved in bringing the C&C Ultimate Collection to Steam back in March 2024. RPS Tank Driver-For-Hire Steve Hogarty called that “the treatment these genre-defining games deserve”.
You can find the source code for Tiberian Dawn on this Github page. The Red Alert code is over here, while Renegade is here, and Generals/Zero Hour is thisaway.
They’re also throwing custom mapmakers a bag of bones by adding Steam Workshop support for Renegade, Generals, and Zero Hour, together with Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars, Kane’s Wrath, Red Alert 3 – plus the Uprising expansion – and Command & Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight. All of the mission editor and world builder tools for these games have been updated so you can publish maps directly to the Workshop.
“When you subscribe to an item on the Steam Workshop (via the Client or webpage), the games will now pull that content down when you next launch the game and the maps will be displayed in the singleplayer/multiplayer map selection menus,” explains Feenan in the Reddit post.
Finally, EA have released a C&C Modding Support pack, containing the source Xml, Schema, Script, Shader and Map files for all the games that use original series developer Westwood’s old SAGE engine.
This feels like a fine time to revisit Field Marshall At Large Jeremy Peel’s piece on the creation of the first Command & Conquer, featuring chinwags with co-creator Joe Bostic.
