Game Content

Automatic installation (recommended)

OpenRA will prompt you to install the original game content the first time that you launch a mod. This process occurs automatically from inside the game: the game client can download a minimal set of game files from the internet, or copy the full game content (including music and movies) from an original install CD.

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On the first run the game will ask whether you want to download a stripped down version automatically as both the full motion video and music soundtrack are optional. For the full experience you should install the complete asset set from the original game CD. Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn have been released by EA Games as freeware. You can download the CD-Images:

• CNCNZ.com: Freeware Classic Command & Conquer Games

• EA.com: Download Red Alert for free!

• ppmsite.com RA95 mirror

• ModDB.com: C&C: Gold Full Game

• Baxxster's C&C Gold Mirror (NOD and GDI)

• ppmsite.com C&C Gold mirror

Please keep in mind that the CD extracting algorithm is hard-coded to those CD-Images. Localized installation CDs and expansion packs will not work. The BitLocker drive encryption feature has been reported to cause issues with the CD detection, so try removing any encrypted external drives if you encounter problems. OpenRA can also copy the assets from the games installed via EA's Origin client.

Game media within Linux Flatpak installation

By default the OpenRA Flatpak has no access to files on your system; it is sandboxed. When trying to add the original game content from a game CD or .ISO image this poses a problem: OpenRA cannot find those files. This can be solved by allowing the OpenRA Flatpak access to a path on your system where you make the game content available.

After extracting the downloaded archives you end up with .ISO CD image files. These can be mounted to make the files available. There are multiple way to do this, one of the most simple is right-clicking the .ISO file in your file manager and selecting "Open with Disk Image Mounter". The disc image is now mounted and made available in your system's file tree. On Fedora this is usually somewhere within /run/media and on Ubuntu usually within /media.

Now you can allow the OpenRA Flatpak access to this path by opening a terminal, checking where the files are and typing a single instruction for the Flatpak's permission system. Let's see where the files of the RA Allied CD are made available on my Fedora system:

$ mount | grep iso9660 | cut -d' ' -f3
/run/media/<username>/CD1

This can be multiple paths when you mounted multiple images at once. The important part is the path they all share: /run/media in my case. Let's instruct Flatpak to allow OpenRA access to that path:

$ sudo flatpak override --filesystem=/run/media net.openra.OpenRA

I (re)started OpenRA after this and it was now able to automatically find and install the game content files.

Manual installation (not recommended)

An unofficial guide to installing the files by hand can be found here.