Posted by PunkPun on

Playtest 20221223

⚠ Update 2022-12-24: A hotfix version with a critical fix for singleplayer missions as well as a fix for Macs with notches is now available from the download page.

Just in time for the holiday season, we are releasing Playtest 20221223 with several important fixes and minor features:

  • Fixed several pathfinder-related crashes
  • Added macOS universal binaries for Apple Silicon
  • Dropped support for macOS 10.9 and 10.10
  • Updated macOS packaging, linux and macOS dependencies
  • Fixed the victory condition in a few of the Red Alert missions
  • Fixed carryalls in rare cases destroying their cargo
  • Added carryalls to the Dune 2000 spectator economy statistics
  • Added new maps to the Dune 2000 map pool
  • Other minor fixes

We expect this will be our final playtest before a full release, so we highly encourage everybody to play some games and missions and let us know if you find any issues in the comments below, on our forum, Community Discord, or on GitHub.

The original playtest-20221203 announcement is included below:


Welcome back, Commanders! After more than a year and a half the OpenRA team proudly presents Playtest 20221203. It is finally here!

There have been tons of massive changes under the hood, and with reduced contributor activity it took us a very long time to catch and squash all those pesky bugs. With the help of our third party mods and people testing the devtest builds we believe we have finally got a stable release on our hands. We are incredibly excited to showcase a number of new features and improvements that have been built up over the last year and a half:

  • One highlight feature is the new hierarchical pathfinder, which massively increases performance on large or more complex maps.
HPF helps units better predict obstacles ahead of them
HPF helps units to better predict obstacles ahead of them.

  • Our new netcode brings major improvements to multiplayer. Your games should feel much smoother and units more responsive in both low and high latency settings.
  • We have added transient text notifications matching speech notifications. Now you can play without sound!
  • The fairly recent Dune film has brought many players to Dune 2000 and a decently sized multiplayer community was born. With the feedback from the community Dune 2000 has received a number of balance and polish changes.
  • Tiberian Sun was not forgotten either. Although still not ready for a release, it has also received its fair share of features and bug fixes. This time around the highlight is tilting on slopes.
OpenRA now supports tilting on slopes!


Some of the more visible new features and improvements include:

  • Measures against sound / notification overlap. No more u-u-u-u-unit lost
  • Measures against spamming the multiplayer lobby and in-game chat
  • The ability to mute players
  • Support for disabling the chat in replays
  • An ingame encyclopedia in Dune 2000
  • New Red Alert missions
  • Community balance changes for all mods

Notable changes for mappers and modders include:

  • Automatic map reloading in the background
  • A change to the way speed is calculated for ground units
  • A new map format which includes the map preview (minimap) in the map versioning (map hash)
  • Loaders for more audio formats (e.g., mp3 and ogg), and formats used by the remasters
  • Many linting and documentation updates

As well as some other changes worth mentioning:

  • Toolchain and changes to support the .NET 6 runtime
  • A massive amount of upgrades to both ingame and client UI
  • Many more hotkeys became rebindable
  • Substantial progress towards localisation

All in all, 615 pull requests were merged since last release and 552 issues were closed bringing the total number of open tickets down by 141.


This post covered just a small subset of all the changes and improvements added since the last release. We encourage anybody interested in finding out more to read the full changelog. Head on over to the download page to install the new playtest and let us know what you think in the comments below, on our forum, community Discord server or on GitHub. Happy playtesting!