Dune Dynasty

About

(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.

Note: The original Dune II game data files are required to run Dune Dynasty.

Dune Dynasty features these modern enhancements for Dune II:

Runs natively on modern machines (OpenGL or Direct3D):
- Windows (32bit, 64bit and ARM64)
- macOS (Intel x86_64 and Apple Silicon M1 ARM64)
- Linux (x86_64 and ARM64)
Graphics Enhancements:
- High-resolution widescreen graphics
- Separate customizable scaling of menubar, sidebar and map/viewport for HiDPI displays
- Aspect-ratio correction
- Smoother unit animation (optional)
- High-res overlay (optional)
Control Enhancements (Command & Conquer style):
- Build/order units and structures in scrollable sidepanel
- Queue building of multiple items
- Select and command multiple units by drawing a rectangle
- Select all units of same type in viewport via double-click (or CTRL-LMB)
- Save/load unit control groups via keyboard hotkeys
- Set rally points for buildings
- Show target lines of selected units like in Tibarian Sun (optional)
- Pan viewport by keeping RMB pressed
- Zoom in/out viewport via mousewheel
- Windows Touchscreen Support
Skirmish and Multiplayer:
- With 3 additional factions: Fremen, Sardaukar and Mercenaries
- For up to 6 human or AI players
- Fully custom alliances with up to 6 teams
- Random generated maps (or enter fixed map seed)
- Settings for starting credits, amount of spice fields, worm count and lose condition (structures/units)
Sound and Music Enhancements:
- Emulated AdLib sound and music playback
- MIDI playback via the system's MIDI output or via FluidSynth (supporting SoundFonts)
- Support for external music sets:
  - Recorded AdLib, MT-32, SC-55 and PC speaker versions of the original soundtrack
  - SCDB's excellent 5-Device Mix
  - Sega Mega Drive soundtrack (mostly different songs, but also very good!)
  - Amiga soundtrack
  - Dune 2000 game soundtrack
  - Emperor: Battle for Dune game soundtrack
  - Dune (1992) game by Cryo (an excellent, award winning, much more chill soundtrack of Dune II's predecessor in three different flavours)
  - Dune (1984) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
  - Dune: Part One (2021) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack and "The Dune Sketchbook" soundtrack
  - Dune: Part Two (2024) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
  - ...with many options for randomly combining them during gameplay
  - ...all playable in in-game jukebox
- Multiple sound channels
Gameplay Enhancements (optional):
- Health bars
- Fog of war
- Brutal AI mode
- Infantry squad corpses
- Raise structure and unit limits
- Start level selection
- Consistent directional damage
- Instant wall construction
- Extend light vehicle sight range
- Extend spice sensor range
Support for Custom campaigns:
Various bug fixes

Development History

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 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.

Screenshots

Alternatives

Here are some alternatives for enjoying Dune II on modern systems:

OpenDUNE: Reverse-engineered source port of Dune II, upon which Dune Dynasty is based on. It's goal is to keep it as close to the original as possible and thus has significantly less features and modernizations than Dune Dynasty. OpenDUNE and Dune Dynasty can both read original file formats (e.g. save games).
Dune Legacy: A Dune II clone / engine recreation / remake with a similar feature-set as Dune Dynasty, but deviating more from the original's look and feel. Has multiplayer support and map editor.
Dune II - The Maker: Another Dune II remake with modern features and upscaled graphics. Also deviates quite a bit from the original's look and feel.
There is also a Dune II mod for OpenRA, an open source engine for the early Command & Conquer games.
A unique and amazing take on the game is UnDUNE II - a de-make re-created from scratch in PICO-8.
Dune II is also perfectly playable using DOSBox.

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.

Changes

You can find the list of changes between versions in the file CHANGES.txt.

Download

The most current Windows, macOS and Linux binaries and source code can be downloaded from the Github release page:

Installation

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.

The location to put the files depends on the OS / release bundle (see below).

Installation on Windows

The recommended place is the directory named data next to the dunedynasty executable.

As an alternative, you can also use the personal data directory, which depends on the 64bit or 32bit version:

64bit: C:\users\<your user>\AppData\Roaming\Dune Dynasty\data
32bit: C:\users\<your user>\Application Data\Dune Dynasty\data

Installation on macOS

Using the macOS app-bundle, the data folder is located inside the app package under the following folder:
Dune Dynasty.app/Contents/Resources/data

You have to right click on the Dune Dynasty app and click Show Package Contents in the context menu to be able to

Dunedynasty

Install / Use

README