(This fork is a continuation of the abandoned sourceforge project - see development history for details.)
Dune Dynasty is an enhancement of the classic real-time strategy game Dune II by Westwood Studios. It's goal is to make Dune II playable on modern systems with additional features, bugfixes and QoL-improvements. It is not a remake. It builds upon the original game engine as reverse-engineered by the OpenDUNE project.
Dune Dynasty features these modern enhancements for Dune II:
Dune Dynasty was initially developed by David Wang, with the source code hosted on SourceForge. Its last official version was v1.5.7 from 2013. After that David Wang added lots of new features (mainly multiplayer) up until 2015, but never released a new version. Later some github-repos emerged with additional fixes and improvements (by 1oom-fork and neg3ntropy), but again no new release. This fork is intended to merge these improvements, fix further bugs, add minor features, and provide new releases (v1.6.0+) with binary download-packages for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Here are some alternatives for enjoying Dune II on modern systems:
Dune Dynasty's unique selling points are probably it's faithfulness to the look and feel of the original (due to it basing on an engine re-creation of the original) combined with many control modernizations, it's support for fan-generated campaigns, various music soundtracks and multiplayer.
You can find the list of changes between versions in the file CHANGES.txt.
The most current Windows, macOS and Linux binaries and source code can be downloaded from the Github release page:
You will need the \*.PAK
data files from the EU v1.07 release of Dune II. See the file data/FILELIST.TXT for a complete list of needed files.
Place them into one of the following places:
In a directory named data
next to the dunedynasty executable.
This is the simplest option.
In your personal data directory. The location depends on your operating system:
Windows 64bit:
C:\users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Dune Dynasty\data
Windows 32bit:
C:\users\<your user>\Application Data\Dune Dynasty\data
macOS:
$HOME/Library/Application Support/dunedynasty/data
Unix:
~/.local/share/dunedynasty/data
Once the data files are in place, you may start the game by running
dunedynasty.exe
or dunedynasty
.
Due to the executable and included dylibs not being built with an Apple Developer ID, the Gatekeeper service will put them in a quarantine. A setup
script is included to lift quarantine from all files. You will have to open the script with the right- or control-click menu, then choose Open
in the warning dialog. After the script has run, you should be able to start dunedynasty
without problems. If you get a disallowed by system policy
error, your system policy does not allow to load the included libraries (mainly to happen with company macs).
On Linux you will also have to install the libraries Dune Dynasty depends on:
sudo apt install liballegro5.2 liballegro-acodec5.2 liballegro-image5.2 libenet7 libfluidsynth3 libmad0 libgl1
If libfluidsynth3
is not available on your distribution, try libfluidsynth2
instead.
Just as the data-files, the configuration file dunedynasty.cfg
will be read from one of two places:
In the same directory as the dunedynasty executable.
In a personal data directory. This is the default behaviour - meaning dunedynasty.cfg
will be created here on initial launch.
The location depends on your operating system:
Windows 64bit:
C:\users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Dune Dynasty\dunedynasty.cfg
Windows 32bit:
C:\users\<your user>\Application Data\Dune Dynasty\dunedynasty.cfg
macOS:
$HOME/Library/Application Support/dunedynasty/dunedynasty.cfg
Unix:
~/.config/dunedynasty/dunedynasty.cfg
See the sample file dunedynasty.cfg-sample
for a list of configuration
options. You can modify the existing dunedynasty.cfg
file or
replace it with dunedynasty.cfg-sample
.
If you place dunedynasty.cfg
in the same directory as the dunedynasty executable, Dune Dynasty will operate in portable mode - keeping everything (e.g. savegames) inside the install directory.
Display mode and resolution can be changed in the game's "Options and Extras" menu. The game initially launches in Fullscreen Window mode (using your Desktop-resolution).
You might want to increase or decrease the scaling factors of the menubar, sidebar and viewport. You can do this in-game in the Game Control menu.
In contrast to modern displays, old CRT-monitors had rectangular non-square pixels. All non-in-game graphics (menus, cutscenes, mentat screens, etc.) were designed with rectangular pixels in mind. The game/map/command-screen itself however seems to have been designed for square pixels (presumably due to targetting multiple platforms), meaning it always had a rather stretched look in the original DOS version - with a tile or the construction yard not being a perfect square.
Dune Dynasty allows various options to deal with aspect ratio via the "Aspect Ratio Correction" option in the Video Options (correct_aspect_ratio
in the config-file). It's value can be:
none
): No aspect ratio correction is applied, meaning all pixels will be displayed as square pixels. This means, the game will appear squashed on modern monitors. Use this setting, if you are playing on an old CRT-monitor.menu
): Non-square pixels are used for non-in-game graphics (menu, cutscenes, mentat screens, etc.) and square pixels for the game itself. This will display all graphics in the (presumably) intended aspect ratio on modern displays.full
): This will apply the aspect ratio correction on all graphics - essentially displaying everything as in the original DOS version on a CRT-monitor. It will retain the stretched look of the in-game graphics.auto
): Same as option menu
, except when the screen height is less than 800 pixels, option none
will be used for better readability.The applied correction ratio is 1.2.
The controls should be similar to most real-time strategy games.
You can finally select multiple units by dragging a rectangle, or shift clicking. You can also select all units of the same type in the current viewport via a double click or via Ctrl + LMB
.
Right click issues commands to units, and sets the rally point on buildings. You can also change this to Left Click (which is very useful for touchscreen input).
You can pan the viewport by keeping your right mouse-button pressed, and zoom in/out via the mouse-wheel.
Keyboard shortcuts are mostly just the first letter of the action.
A Attack or Harvest
H Harvest
M Move
G, S Guard (Stop)
P Place constructed structure
Ctrl-1 Assign control group 1
Ctrl-2 Assign control group 2, etc.
1-0 Select control group 1-0 (press 2 times to center in viewport)
Ctrl + LMB Select all units of the same type in current viewport
Double LMB Select all units of the same type in current viewport
Ctrl + RMB Set rally points for all similar buildings
Space Focus viewport on selected structure
Tab Select next building of the same type
Esc Pause/Cancel factory task
-, + Zoom in or out
[, ] Toggle size of menu and side bars
Alt-Enter Toggle windowed mode
F1 Mentat
F2 Options
F3 Click structure icon
F4 Select construction yard (press 2 times to center in viewport)
F5 Show current song
F6 Decrease music volume
F7 Increase music volume
F11 Toggle windowed mode
F12 Save screenshot into data directory
There are also keyboard shortcuts for constructing buildings with the construction yard. They are displayed in the build-panel.
Dune Dynasty works very well with touchscreens (e.g. like Microsoft Surface Pro), since most actions are performed using the left mouse button. You can perform a right button click via a long (ca. 1 sec.) press. Commands are issued via the right button by default, but you can change this by setting Control Style
to Left Click
in the Game Control options. Then you can quickly select and command your units via short taps with your finger. To deselect units or structures perform a long press or simply draw an empty rectangle into the sand. You can even zoom the viewport with a pinch finger-movement.
Dune Dynasty (and it's parent project OpenDUNE) feature several optional as well as always active enhancements and fixes over the original Dune II. A detailed list of can be found in the file enhancement.txt.
Here is an explanation of all optional enhancements, that can be enabled in-game in the main menu or game control options. They are disabled by default (except otherwise noted).
Skip introduction video:
Should be self explanatory.
Brutal AI:
Various AI changes to make the game tougher. Includes double production rate, half cost, flanking attacks, etc.
Fog of war:
Regrowing (Warcraft-style) shroud.
Insatiable sandworms:
In the original game, sandworms disappear after eating a set number of units. This makes them insatiable.
Raise unit cap:
Dune II has 3 types of unit caps:
This enhancement sets the scenario unit cap for all houses to 50, raises the overall cap to 322 and allows a total of 300 ground units (incl. saboteurs). This enhancement is always enabled in multiplayer/skirmish.
Raise structure cap:
Dune II limits total structures on a map to about 70. This enhancement raises that limit by 100. This enhancement is always enabled in multiplayer/skirmish.
Note: Games saved with this option enabled will throw an error, when loaded without this option enabled!
Show unit control info in outpost:
Shows info about active/standby/max units to outpost text. Standby units are either:
This will always be enabled in multiplayer/skirmish.
Instant wall construction:
Reduces build time of walls to 0.
Extend light vehicle sight range:
Increases fog uncover radius of trikes and quads from 2 to 4 tiles.
True game speed adjustment:
Dune II's game speed implementation doesn't affect scripts and other things. This enhancement takes care of that. It also fixes a bug with the range of the sonic tank.
(Enabled by default.)
Consistent directional damage:
In Dune II, attack damage is heavily dependent on the direction. Horizontal attacks make only half damage, while attacks from top or bottom make full damage. This enhancement makes attack damage consistent from all directions. It is always enabled in multiplayer.
Health bars:
Show health bars either for selected or all units.
(Enabled for selected units by default.)
Hi-res overlays:
Displays hi-res instead of pixelated overlays (e.g. selected unit overlay).
(Enabled by default.)
Smooth unit animation:
Smoother unit animations by rendering units (and bullets) as if they move every frame, and rotating top-down units to arbitrary angles.
(Enabled by default.)
Infantry squad corpses:
Display decaying infantry corpses.
(Enabled by default.)
Saved games are located in the save
directory next to dunedynasty.cfg
.
If no configuration file exists in the same directory as the executable, they will be in placed in a personal
data directory.
The location depends on your operating system:
Windows 64bit:
C:\users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Dune Dynasty\save
Windows 32bit:
C:\users\<your user>\Application Data\Dune Dynasty\save
macOS:
$HOME/Library/Application Support/dunedynasty/save
Unix:
~/.config/dunedynasty/save
Saved games from Dune II should work if placed there.
Dune Dynasty supports the following music sources:
By default, Dune Dynasty will randomly mix music from all the available sources. You can disable any sources in the game's "Options and Extras"-menu (changes require a restart).
There you will also find a Jukebox to listen to all available songs from all available sources.
Dune Dynasty can play music via the system MIDI output on Windows, macOS (Core Audio) and Linux (ALSA).
Dune II includes midi tracks for various devices (PC Speaker, Tandy 3 voices, General Midi, MT-32). By default the General Midi (SC-55) tracks are played. You can switch to a different format in the game's Music Options (e.g. if you want to play the MT-32 tracks on real hardware or via the MUNT emulator).
You can specify the MIDI device ID to use via the midi_device_id
config parameter (default is 0
). To find out the correct device ID, you can use the tool ListMIDI32.exe.
For macOS only Core Audio is supported. Core MIDI, which is required to play midi on external MIDI devices (e.g. real MT-32 hardware) is not supported at the moment. You can use the MT-32 (or any other) recorded music pack as a workaround instead (see External music sets below).
If you use [Timidity++] as an ALSA sequencer client on Linux you should start it with smaller buffer sizes to avoid the "drunk drummer" problem:
timidity -iA -B 4,8
FluidSynth allows playing music via a specified SoundFont. You will need
to set the sound_font
path in the configuration file to an
appropriate sound font (.sf2) file, e.g.
[audio]
sound_font=/usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2
Popular SoundFonts are e.g.:
Dune Dynasty can play various external music sets, e.g. recordings of the original PC or Sega Mega Drive soundtrack, music from different Dune games like Dune 2000 or Cryo's 1992 Dune, or even the motion picture soundtracks.
Each of these have their own subdirectory in the music
directory. Instructions and download/purchase links are provided below and in the respective FILELIST.TXT
files.
Here is a list of supported Music packs:
Original Dune II (PC) music:
Dune II Sega Mega Drive music
Mostly different songs from PC version, but also very good!
Dune 2000 game music
Unfortunately, this game cannot be purchased anymore at the moment.
Emperor: Battle for Dune game music
Unfortunately, this game cannot be purchased anymore at the moment.
Dune (1992) game (by Cryo) music by Stéphane Picq and Philippe Ulrich:
The excellent award-winning soundtrack for Dune II's predecessor - the 1992 Dune game by Cryo. It is very atmospheric, and makes Dune II a much more relaxing and chill experience. Three versions are supported:
Dune (1984) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Toto and Brian Eno
Seems to be only available on CD. Purchase e.g. from amazon.com or amazon.de and rip files to MP3.
Dune: Part One (2021) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer
Purchase e.g. from amazon.com or amazon.de.
Dune: Part One (2021) "The Dune Sketchbook" soundtrack by Hans Zimmer
Purchase e.g. from amazon.com or amazon.de.
Dune: Part Two (2024) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Hans Zimmer
Purchase e.g. from amazon.com or amazon.de.
After installation of a music set, you can check it's availability in the "Music" section of the game's "Options and Extras" menu. There you can also enable/disable music sets for random play.
You can also disable individual songs from music sets. You have to do this by editing your config-file though.
Example: If you want to include Dune 2000 music, but exclude "Robotix":
[music/dune2000]
ROBOTIX=0
Dune Dynasty supports various fan-made campaigns:
These should be placed in the existing subdirectories inside the campaign
directory.
Click the arrows next to the "The Building of a Dynasty" subtitle in the main menu to switch between campaigns.
You can also create your own campaigns. A campaign should consist of
a META.INI
file, a REGIONX.INI
file for each playable House, where X
is the first letter of the House name, and a complete set of scenarios
for each House, named SCENX001.INI
through SCENX022.INI
. See Stefan
Hendriks' Atreides Campaign (subfolder shac
) as a simple example.
Each campaign can also contain custom balance tweaks, specified in
PROFILE.INI
and HOUSE.INI
. Please refer to the sample files in the
campaign directory for more information.
Finally, the scenarios can either be distributed as loose INI files or
as a single PAK file. Data stored in PAK files must be listed in META.INI
.
See MrFlibble's Alternative Scenarios (subfolder mfas
) as a simple example of
scenarios stored in a PAK file.
For hosting online multiplayer matches, make sure to forward the UDP port 10700
via your NAT-router to your hosting machine's local IP address. On the multiplayer menu-screen, you can leave the default 0.0.0.0
HOST IP address in most cases, as this will listen to all your network-connections. If this is not working, try setting it to the IP address of the network card connected to the internet.
For joining an online multiplayer match, use the host's public IP address.
The binary will be placed in the dist
directory.
The steps below will build the release-version. You can change value of the DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE
parameter to build different versions, with the possible options being: Debug
, Release
, RelWithDebInfo
and MinSizeRel
.
Download and install MSYS2.
For a 64bit executable, launch MSYS2 UCRT64
from the startmenu. For 32bit, launch MSYS2 MINGW32
.
Install dependencies:
For 64bit:
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cmake
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gdb
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-allegro
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-enet
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-fluidsynth
pacman -S mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libmad
For 32bit:
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-cmake
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gcc
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gdb
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-allegro
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-enet
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-fluidsynth
pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-libmad
Perform build:
./scripts/build-windows.sh
For packaging, you have to copy all required .dll files to the dist
folder. To do this, simply call the following script:
For 64bit:
./scripts/bundle-libs-ucrt64.sh
For 32bit:
./scripts/bundle-libs-mingw32.sh
Install Homebrew package manager.
Install dependencies:
brew install cmake allegro fluid-synth mad enet
If you are building for ARM64 on a x86-64 machine, you have to make sure, all required packages and their dependencies are the arm64 variant by reinstalling them using the --bottle-tag=arm64_monterey
:
PACKAGES=(argtable sdl2 dumb libogg flac libpng freetype libvorbis ca-certificates openssl@3 opus opusfile physfs theora giflib jpeg-turbo xz lz4 zstd libtiff webp pcre2 gettext glib lame mpg123 libsndfile portaudio readline allegro fluid-synth mad enet)
for PACKAGE in "${PACKAGES[@]}"
do
brew uninstall --force --ignore-dependencies $PACKAGE
brew fetch --force --bottle-tag=arm64_monterey $PACKAGE
brew install $(brew --cache --bottle-tag=arm64_monterey $PACKAGE)
done
Perform build:
./scripts/build-macos.sh
If you are building for ARM64 on a x86-64 machine (or vice versa), you have to state the wanted architecture via the CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES
flag in the cmake command. E.g.:
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=arm64 .
To package all required dynlibs into the ./dist/libs
folder and patch the executable, call this script:
./scripts/bundle-libs-macos.sh
The script requires the brew package dylibbundler
, so install it first:
brew install dylibbundler
Due to the executable and included dylibs not being built with an Apple Developer ID, the Gatekeeper service will put them in a quarantine. A setup
script to lift quarantine on all files is included in dist-per-os/macos.
Install dependencies:
sudo apt -y install build-essential cmake liballegro5-dev libenet-dev libmad0-dev libfluidsynth-dev fluidsynth
Perform build:
./scripts/build-linux.sh
When packaging, there is the problem, that the fluidsynth-library is called libfluidsynth2
on some distributions, and libfluidsynth3
on others. To mitigate, call this script, which will copy the library-file to dist/libs
and patch the executable to use the inlcuded library instead:
./scripts/bundle-libs-linux.sh
You can display debugging info via the function GUI_DisplayText
in the status bar, or via GUI_DisplayModalMessage
as a modal message. E.g.:
GUI_DisplayText("my debug info:%u, my other debug info:%u", 2, my_value, my_other_value);
GUI_DisplayModalMessage("my debug info:%u, my other debug info:%u", 0xFFFF, my_value, my_other_value);
Thank you to:
Dune Dynasty is licensed under the GNU General Public License version
2.0. For more information, see the LICENSE.txt
file included with every
release and source download of the game.