First of all, I'd like to express my sincere thanks to everyone involved in the development of this new version, most notably: AlexB, the current developer of Ares DLL, Nooze, the designer of majority of the new side's visuals, World Beyond, the artist behind new side's soundtrack, Rampastring, the developer of the new client, Mevitar, ONEX, Azri_Apoc, the designers of majority of new mechanical units, Seoras, De'Lante, for voicing so many units added after 3.0 and also Toveena, Alstar, Lovalmidas, Cesare, Sandman, Esther, iForce, Martinoz, Ollerus, Nolt for designing maps, missions, various story and gameplay elements and of course lots and lots of testing. For the full list of credits please visit this section of our website. Thank you, you made it possible to take this project this far!
The new release adds an entirely new faction - the Foehn Revolt - to the previously heavily modified vanilla sides from Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 Yuri's Revenge, which were already divided into 3 subfactions each, the new one being no exception. Haihead, Wings of Coronia and the Last Bastion are the subfactions of Foehn and each comes with its unique units, buildings, support powers and heroes. There are also new additions for the Allies, the Soviets and Yuri's Epsilon, as well as new missions, skirmish maps and game modes.
What's also important is that the new release makes use of Rampastring's client, originally created for Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod, which allows us to do some interesting things. The most important thing this client has given to Mental Omega, is the possibility to use version 5 of CnCNet for multiplayer services. Since the release, there've been many players on our server with the amount of players peaking at around 150 at times. According to Rampastring, there've been 44 000 unique users of the client in a month since the release, which I think is nice for a mod.
The new Mental Omega version arrived with an updated soundtrack, to keep the tradition of giving each of the factions a unique one. The soundtrack for the Foehn Revolt is an album called "Mindshell" created by World Beyond, which is available for download on his Bandcamp page in best quality. You can also listen to it on his YouTube channel.
Now would be a good time to discuss what's ahead.
We are aware there is a group of players who can't start missions at all, this is one of the fixes that will be included in 3.3.1 in a form of an Ares DLL update. Initial 3.3 release did not contain all of Act Two missions, so there's more of those to come for sure. We have several missions more already finished, but they require additional polish and internal tests before they are included in one of the Mental Omega updates. Speaking of those, we've been following your feedback and comments in all places possible and so here's a proposed changelog for the first mod update, for which there is no date just yet. Keep in mind this is not final, discuss it here.
One thing we want to expand for sure and already in patch 3.3.1 is the Challenges mode. These are quite fast and fun to make and it seems like many people are trying their best not to lose those battles. These challenge maps are made with an uncontrolled difficulty mindset, meaning that don't expect a balanced fight getting into those. Remember that you can adjust the difficulty and handicap of challenge maps using standard skirmish settings, and like with everything else, there's three difficulty options and the additional Mental AI toggle, which replaced the Meteor Shower mode in 3.3.
New additions to the arsenals of Mental Omega factions are a possibility but not a priority right now, but if you have suggestions in regards to what you'd like to see next in the mod, let us know.
That's all for now, stay tuned for more announcements!
If you'd like to help develop Mental Omega further, write an e-mail to mental.omega.apyr@gmail.com
We always welcome additional Voxel Artists, 3D & SHP Artists, Mission Scripters and Voice Actors.
Single contributions are also welcome and will speed up the development of the mod.