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Alpine Faction

Alpine Faction website: alpinefaction.com

About

Alpine Faction is a patch/modification for the 2001 FPS game Red Faction which resolves numerous bugs in the original game while also providing a plethora of new and improved features for singleplayer, multiplayer, and level/mod development. While Alpine Faction is not a source port, its goals and features are similar to what you might expect from one.

Alpine Faction is a fork of and uses Rafalh's incredible Dash Faction project as its foundation.

Alpine Faction project goals:

  • Fix bugs and security vulnerabilities in the original game
  • Improve compatibility with modern hardware and operating systems
  • Modernize the Red Faction experience by adding features typically expected in modern games
  • Enhance engine performance and graphical quality
  • Restore valuable functionality that was cut from the original game
  • Empower players with extensive control over their gameplay experience
  • Offer server operators enhanced flexibility to customize their servers as desired
  • Equip level and mod designers with a robust set of tools so they can create awesome stuff

Alpine Faction requires:

  • Windows 7 or newer (or you can use Wine)
  • Any official distribution of Red Faction (Steam, GoG, retail, etc.)
    • All official localizations are supported (English, French, German)
    • Many other localizations are supported via mods

Key Features

Most important:

  • Fixes for critical security vulnerabilities
  • Direct3D 11 renderer with GPU accelerated realtime per-pixel lighting and full mesh shadows
  • Brand new King of the Hill, Damage Control, Revolt, Escalation, and Run multiplayer game types
  • Advanced multiplayer bots system with headless bot clients, profile customization, and a fully integrated waypoint grid editor (with autogeneration for custom maps)
  • Multiplayer level auto-downloader (using API at https://autodl.factionfiles.com)
  • Fix for infamous submarine explosion bug (and other FPS-related issues)
  • Checkpoint autosaves at the start of each level
  • Fully integrated in-game achievements system
  • Optional account linking with FactionFiles.com to support achievement tracking and in-game level rating
  • Access to Install with Alpine Faction on FactionFiles.com to streamline custom level and mod installation
  • Enemies explode into gibs when killed by explosives
  • Player headlamp (flashlight)
  • Support for any resolution and aspect ratio
  • Fullscreen, windowed, borderless window modes
  • Enhanced mouse input with selectable sensitivity scaling
  • Ability to skip cutscenes
  • Restored water/lava rising functionality in Geothermal Plant
  • Enhanced graphics options such as anti-aliasing, full color range lighting, and colorblind mode
  • High resolution HUD and vector fonts
  • Speedometer HUD widget
  • Many performance and graphical improvements

Multiplayer:

  • Increased (and configurable) tick rate
  • TOML-based ADS dedicated server configuration with per-level rules, on-demand reloading, rule presets, and on-the-fly game type switching
  • "GunGame" game mode
  • Competitive match framework including "ready up" system and overtime
  • Improved gaussian distribution method for bullet spread
  • Damage feedback system including hit sounds, kill sounds, and visual damage number indicators
  • Radio messages and taunts
  • Visual indicators and nameplates in the world for objectives and teammates
  • Player outlines with per-team and enemy colors, plus optional team X-ray
  • Enemy and teammate footstep audio
  • Location pinging visible to teammates
  • Random critical hits (configurable)
  • First person and free camera spectate
  • Improved scoreboard with splittable categories for spectators, bots, browsers, and idle players
  • Voting system for kicking players, changing levels, and changing game types
  • Server-configurable gibbing, weapon loadouts, spawn delays, delayed item spawns, etc.
  • Cheating prevention
  • Many server fixes, performance improvements, and customizable features
  • rf:// protocol handler for joining servers

Community development:

  • 60+ new event scripting objects for crafting advanced logic systems in maps, including events for gas regions, respawn points, capture points, mesh animation, fullscreen images, and gameplay rules
  • Support for gas regions
  • Support for dynamic lights in maps
  • Support for using dynamic lights, particle emitters, and push regions with movers
  • Enhanced and more immersive skyboxes, including support for movers, meshes, and mesh pixel lighting in skyboxes
  • Expanded destruction system with Brush-based geomod (RF2-style) and breakable detail brushes with dynamic debris generation
  • New Mesh, Corona, and Note object types
  • Removed legacy PS2 compatibility measures that resulted in decreased map performance
  • Access for many hardcoded settings to be customized in mods
  • Support for custom HUDs and translation packs as clientside mods
  • Ability to use custom meshes in multiplayer
  • Teleporters that can be used safely without negative side effects
  • Enhanced trigger options for multiplayer
  • Fixed support for events in multiplayer (removed requirement to use hacky workarounds)
  • Full color range lightmaps (removed lightmap clamping)
  • DDS texture support
  • 8-bit greyscale TGA support in both editor and game
  • OGG audio support
  • Support for custom BIK videos and bluebeard.bty in mods
  • Advanced debugging features for developing maps and mods
  • Many engine geometry and object limits raised or removed
  • Many level editor bug fixes, performance, and workflow improvements, including:
    • Mirror tool for brushes and groups
    • Delete, Delete Ext., Split, and Flip Normal face-mode tools
    • Delete and Bridge vertex-mode tools
    • To Mesh tool for converting brushes directly to .v3m static meshes
    • Custom texture subdirectories
    • Improved packfile creation that includes used meshes, animations, and textures

See the CHANGELOG file for a detailed list of all features.

Compatibility

Alpine Faction is directly compatible only with Red Faction 1.20 North America (retail).

If you have another official distribution, Alpine Faction will attempt to apply the patches required:

  • For 1.00 or 1.10 NA, the installer will apply the 1.20 official patch.
  • For other retail localizations (French/German), the installer will patch your game executable as needed and maintain your localization.
  • For digital distributions (Steam, GoG, etc.), the installer will patch your game executable as needed.

If you are somehow using an unsupported game executable, the installer and launcher will prompt you to obtain the correct one when you try to launch the game.

In order to fully support current features and enable future expansion, Alpine Faction uses its own unique file for storing player settings (alpine_settings.ini)

When you first launch Alpine, if you have a legacy player settings file (players.cfg) from any other Red Faction client, Alpine Faction will import those settings for you automatically.

Usage

  1. Install with the installer. Note that Alpine Faction does NOT have to be installed to your Red Faction folder.

  2. Run AlpineFactionLauncher.exe.

  3. Click the gear icon (next to "Play") to adjust options as desired.

  4. Click the "Play" button to start playing.

Advanced usage

Alpine Faction adds many new console commands, command line options, and dedicated server configuration settings. You can find full documentation on the RF Wiki:

NOTE: To use Red Faction or RED command line options with Alpine Faction, use them with AlpineFactionLauncher.exe. They will be forwarded to the launched process.

Alpine Faction also adds many new features for level designers and mod developers. You can find full documentation on the RF Wiki:

Problems

If your antivirus software detects Alpine Faction as malicious, you may need to explicitly allow it to run. While Alpine Faction is safe to use, many antivirus vendors wrongfully flag new programs as malicious/suspicious. If you do not trust officially provided Alpine Faction distributions, you can review the code and compile it yourself.

If you run into any problems or have questions, please ask in the Faction Files Discord server: https://discord.gg/factionfiles

Building

See docs/BUILDING.md for information about building Alpine Faction from source.

License

Alpine Faction's source code is licensed under Mozilla Public License 2.0. See LICENSE.txt.

Alpine Faction includes contributions from several authors. See resources/licensing-info.txt for more information

Alpine Faction is a fork of Dash Faction, which is developed by rafalh. Licensing information for Dash Faction is available here: https://github.com/rafalh/dashfaction?tab=readme-ov-file#license