Command and Conquer as an HTML5 game?

This is amazing:

I used to switch between playing the original Tiberian Dawn in a Wine window on my Mac and my JS version on the browser to make sure my version looked EXACTLY like the original. I spent a LOT of time going through C&C forums to understand how to reverse engineer the Tiberium Dawn files to extract the building/unit sprites and audio and reading up on unit specs to figure out how to make the units behave exactly like the original.

Every little thing took time – things like selecting single units, multiple units, being able to select by drawing the box from left to right or from right to left; making sure the panning was smooth; Figuring out a decent fog of war implementation; Allowing for building construction, dependencies (Power Plant needed for Refinery, which is needed for Factory), building placement (buildings cannot be constructed on top of other buildings); Depth sorting when drawing so units could move behind buildings and trees.

The next big headache was smooth unit movement. I wanted to do better than the original game, and spent a lot of time going through Starcraft 2 videos to see if I could get a smoother movement closer to the way SC2 handles it. Pathfinding using A* can do some of the work, but gives a clunky movement and causes units to take behave badly/take longer routes when going through bottle necks. I decided to mix A* with a repelling force/steering behavior to improve it. It still has some bugs I need to work out.

I had to fine tune the way units behaved (during patrolling, guarding, attacking). Even the fact that a MCV couldn’t attack and turned into buildings.

Harvesting was a whole different pain in the ass since my collision detection and steering code meant my harvester was initially afraid to return to the refinery .

Among the other conclusions one can draw: Flash is truly finished. Considering the position that Flash held circa 2004, I find this a little bit incredible.