To run OpenRA, several files are needed from the original game disks. A minimal asset pack can also be downloaded and installed by the game.
The following lists per-platform dependencies required to build from source.
Compiling OpenRA requires the following dependencies:
- Windows PowerShell >= 4.0 (included by default in recent Windows 10 versions)
- .NET 5 SDK (or via Visual Studio)
To compile OpenRA, open the OpenRA.sln
solution in the main folder, build it from the command-line with dotnet
or use the Makefile analogue command make all
scripted in PowerShell syntax.
Run the game with launch-game.cmd
. It can be handed arguments that specify the exact mod one wishes to run, for example, run launch-game.cmd Game.Mod=ra
to launch Red Alert, launch-game.cmd Game.Mod=cnc
to start Tiberian dawn or launch-game.cmd Game.Mod=d2k
to launch Dune 2000.
Mono, version 6.4 or later, is required to compile OpenRA. You can add the upstream mono repository for your distro to obtain the latest version if your system packages are not sufficient.
To compile OpenRA, run make
from the command line. After this one can run the game with ./launch-game.sh
. It is also possible to specify the mod you wish to run from the command line, e.g. with ./launch-game.sh Game.Mod=ts
if you wish to try the experimental Tiberian Sun mod.
The default behaviour on the x86_64 architecture is to download several pre-compiled native libraries using the Nuget packaging manager. If you prefer to use system libraries, compile instead using make TARGETPLATFORM=unix-generic
.
If you choose to use system libraries, or your system is not x86_64, you will need to install the following using your system package manager:
Type sudo make install
for system-wide installation. Run sudo make install-linux-shortcuts
to get startup scripts, icons and desktop files. You can then run the Red Alert by executing the openra-ra
command, the Dune 2000 mod by running the openra-d2k
command and Tiberian Dawn by the openra-cnc
command. Alternatively, you can also run these mods by clicking on their desktop shortcuts if you ran sudo make install-linux-shortcuts
.
It is important to note there is an unofficial openra-git
package in the Arch User Repository (AUR) of Arch Linux. If manually compiling is the way you wish to go the build and runtime dependencies can be installed with:
sudo pacman -S mono openal libgl freetype2 sdl2 lua51 xdg-utils zenity
mono
packages in the Ubuntu < 19.04 and Debian < 10 repositories are too old to support OpenRA.
See the instructions under the Linux section above to upgrade mono
using the upstream releases if needed.
sudo apt install mono-devel libfreetype6 libopenal1 liblua5.1-0 libsdl2-2.0-0 xdg-utils zenity wget
mono
packages in the Fedora repositories are too old to support OpenRA.
See the instructions under the Linux section above to upgrade mono
using the upstream releases.
sudo dnf install "pkgconfig(mono)" SDL2 freetype "lua = 5.1" openal-soft xdg-utils zenity
sudo emerge -av dev-lang/mono dev-dotnet/libgdiplus media-libs/freetype:2 media-libs/libsdl2 media-libs/openal virtual/jpeg virtual/opengl '=dev-lang/lua-5.1.5*' x11-misc/xdg-utils gnome-extra/zenity
sudo dnf install "pkgconfig(mono)" SDL2 freetype "lib*lua5.1" "lib*freetype2" "lib*sdl2.0_0" openal-soft xdg-utils zenity
sudo zypper in mono-devel openal-soft freetype2 SDL2 lua51 xdg-utils zenity
The EPEL repository is required in order for the following command to run properly.
sudo yum install "pkgconfig(mono)" SDL2 freetype "lua = 5.1" openal-soft xdg-utils zenity
Before compiling OpenRA you must install the following dependencies:
To compile OpenRA, run make
from the command line. Run with ./launch-game.sh
.
The default behaviour is to download several pre-compiled native libraries using the Nuget packaging manager. If you prefer to use system libraries, compile instead using make TARGETPLATFORM=unix-generic
. If you choose to use system libraries you will need to install:
- SDL 2 (
brew install sdl2
) - FreeType (
brew install freetype
) - OpenAL (
brew install openal-soft
) - liblua 5.1 (
brew install [email protected]
)