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OpenTS Manual

Features & systems

Runtime behavior and the settings, formats, and commands that control it.

Combat & weapons

Targeting, damage, projectiles, and the superweapons and global effects that deliver them.

Combat & targeting

Threat selection, damage, veterancy, and targeting decisions.

  • Cloaking and detectionHides objects from the houses that do not own them, and lets detectors and sensor coverage bring them back into view.
  • Engineers, capture and sabotageHands a structure or a vehicle to another house, restores it, spies on it, or arms it with a demolition charge, according to the soldier that walks in.
  • Target selection and threat ratingHow objects pick targets on their own, which candidates they reject, and how per-type threat coefficients score the rest.
  • Veterancy and promotionHow experience, promotion, abilities, and elite weapons work.

Weapons, warheads & projectiles

Firing, trajectories, damage delivery, and effects.

  • Destruction and debrisWhat happens when a vehicle, structure, infantry soldier or aircraft is destroyed, and what it leaves on the ground.
  • EMP pulseImmobilizes objects inside a warhead-sized radius for a weapon-defined number of frames.
  • Firing geometry and beam weaponsWhere a shot and its firing effects appear, the order in which one shot produces them, and which effects stop the weapon firing until they end.
  • Particle systemsHow a particle system's behavior decides which settings take effect, how systems end, and which systems an object can hold at once.
  • Projectile flight and impactSteps every projectile along one of two flight models each frame and settles where, and how many times, it detonates.
  • Warheads and damageHow a blast chooses the objects it damages, how much strength each one loses, and what else the blast does to the ground.

Superweapons & special systems

Drop pods, ion storms, meteors, and special-case rules.

  • Drop podsDelivers infantry through the GDI Drop Pods superweapon or an infantry-only TeamType.
  • Ion stormsScripted global condition that grounds aircraft and hovercraft, calls lightning down on the map, and swaps the scenario to its ion lighting values.
  • SuperweaponsHow a house gains, charges and fires each declared superweapon, and what each of the seven hard-coded behaviors delivers.

Units, buildings & economy

How units move and what a base is built from, powered by, and paid for.

Units & movement

Locomotion, aircraft, infantry, vehicles, and pathfinding.

  • Aircraft operationsHow aircraft choose and recheck landing zones, finish moves, unload cargo and accept attack orders.
  • Movement and terrainWhich cells an object may enter, which destinations it can reach, and how fast it crosses each cell.
  • Route searchPlans a route across blocks of cells, then cell by cell, and prices each step by what stands in the way.
  • TransportsHow transports admit passengers, take them aboard, and let them out, and what happens to passengers when a transport is destroyed.

Buildings & economy

Placement, construction, power, production, and resources.

  • Base placement and adjacencyWhether a player may place a building at a site, based on the anchor buildings and owned wall cells near it.
  • Building animationsSteps a structure's artwork through five frame sequences and runs up to thirteen attached animations pinned to it, one per slot.
  • Buildings that produce cashPays a structure's owner a fixed sum at a fixed interval, or takes it when the sum is negative, and pays a bonus to a house that captures the structure from a neutral house.
  • Laser fences and the firestorm wallLaser fence posts energize the segment runs between them, and one charge-draining superweapon raises every firestorm wall section a house owns.
  • Power output and drainHow a house's power output and drain are totaled, and what a house short of power loses.
  • Production and factoriesHow houses order, build, pay for and release objects, and which rules limit what they can build.
  • Repair and healingRestores structures for credits, services vehicles at a depot, heals infantry at a hospital, and mends objects that repair themselves.
  • TiberiumTiberium grows and spreads across map cells, and harvesters carry it to refineries for credits.
  • Veins and veinhole monstersVeinhole monsters grow vein fields that damage objects standing in them; weeders harvest the veins to charge the chemical missile.
  • Walls, gates and wall towersA wall BuildingType becomes an overlay in its cell when placed, while gates and wall towers stay structures and join the wall runs around them.

Scenarios & AI

Scenario state, triggers, campaigns, and the computer houses that play against you.

AI & teams

AI decisions, teams, scripts, and production triggers.

  • AI base planning and buildingHow a computer house plans its base as an ordered build list, picks what to build next, and chooses where to place it.
  • AI triggers and team productionDraws one weighted AI trigger per house on a timer and turns the TeamTypes it names into recruitment and production demand.
  • Base defense responseHow damage raises one house's anger at another, what each house's threat map records, and how a computer house calls armed infantry and vehicles back to defend.
  • Difficulty settings and handicapsTurns the chosen difficulty into one slot per house and scales that house's damage, speed, armor, rate of fire, prices and build times by the figures the slot holds.
  • Team executionEach frame, every team rechecks its strength, starts or regroups, gathers its members, and works through its Script.

Maps & scenarios

Scenario state, triggers, campaigns, and map formats.

  • Campaign progression and carry-overRuns the sequence from winning a campaign mission to starting the next one, and carries the global flags, spare money, mission timer and campaign stage across.
  • CratesPlaces pickup crates on the map and gives one result to the infantry or vehicle that collects each crate.
  • Random map generationBuilds a playable map out of a map seed's twenty settings through a fixed sequence of passes.
  • Shroud, fog and the radar mapHow the shroud and the fog of war hide terrain from each house, and how the radar map draws through them.
  • Starting forcesPlaces each house's base unit and a budget of randomly chosen vehicles and infantry around its start position as a skirmish or multiplayer match begins.
  • Trigger springingWhen a trigger fires on an occurrence offered to its tag, which occurrences can satisfy its events, and whether the tag survives firing.

Interface & runtime

Player controls, presentation, and developer-facing runtime facilities.

Interface & controls

Sidebar behavior, menus, input, cursors, and player controls.

  • Band selectionDragging the left button across the tactical view selects the player's objects inside the box.
  • Sidebar and build queueLists what the player can build as two strips of cameos, shows each order's progress on its cameo, and turns clicks into production orders.
  • UI filesHolds the RmlUi documents, style sheets, dialog kit and font that draw the game's screens, in a `ui` directory beside the executable.
  • Waypoint pathsLets a player plot up to twelve numbered paths on the map, loop them, edit them, and send objects along them.

Rendering & presentation

Drawing, palettes, lighting, animations, and interface graphics.

  • Action linesDraws a selected object's orders as lines to its target, along its route and through its queued destinations, and the sighting laser of a firing vehicle.

Audio & speech

Sound effects, music, EVA speech, and playback behavior.

  • EVA speechSpeech lines wait in a queue of up to eight and play one at a time, after a one-second wait for the first line and half a second apart.
  • MusicMusic tracks fade out or crossfade when another is queued, and pause with all other game sound while the game is in the background.
  • Sound effectsHow a sound effect is put together from its SOUND.INI section, how it fades and pans with its place on screen, and how it competes for a voice.

Multiplayer & networking

Sessions, lobbies, connections, synchronization, and online services.

  • In-game chatWho an in-game message reaches, which keys start one, how a line is shown, and how the message list is drawn.
  • Leaving a matchEnds a player's part in a network game, whether they quit or fall silent, and decides whether their base is destroyed or handed to the computer.
  • Multiplayer moviesPlays a scenario's movies in a skirmish or a game against other machines when the launch file asks for them, and cuts a full-screen movie short in a match only when every machine agrees.
  • Multiplayer score screenRanks the houses that played a skirmish or network match and shows what each lost, killed, spent and scored.
  • Network packet validationRejects malformed or misattributed multiplayer traffic before it changes synchronized state.
  • Network synchronizationHow a network game adjusts its command delay and packet rate to the players' measured round trips and process times.
  • Network transport timingMeasures the round trip of each private link and paces the retries of its unacknowledged packets.
  • Observers and coach modeObservers who watch a skirmish or network game without playing, what a player given the whole map sees, and what coach mode lets a defeated player keep.
  • Out-of-sync recoveryWhat the players see when a network game goes out of sync, and how the master's choice to load a saved game or continue is carried out on every machine.
  • Reconnect dialogOpens when a network game has waited on a player's frames, shows who the game is waiting on, and drops the player furthest behind when the wait runs out unless the others vote someone out first.

Tools & diagnostics

Developer controls, diagnostics, logging, and runtime inspection.

  • Developer mode and diagnosticsThe diagnostic keys, displays, reports and codes each build configuration has, and how a Debug build arms its debug keys.