VERA20k

Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge, rebuilt in Rust. Faithful to the original game, with a goal of 30 players and 20,000 units.

VERA20k is an open-source reimplementation of the Yuri's Revenge engine (gamemd.exe). It plays from your own copy of the game and ports the original's behavior one mechanism at a time. Unlike OpenRA, which recreates the classic games on its own engine, VERA20k aims to reproduce Yuri's Revenge itself.

You need the original game. VERA20k contains no game files. EA sells Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge in Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection, on Steam and from EA.

Status

Pre-alpha (September 2026). A local skirmish on retail maps is playable on Windows against a placeholder AI.

Works	Partial or in progress	Not yet
Retail and random maps, original menus and sidebar	Aircraft attack runs and Carrier Hornets	Multiplayer (lockstep exists, no network)
Building, power, tech tree, selling and repair	Mind control	The original AI (a placeholder for now)
War, Chrono and Slave Miners	Crate pickup	Campaign and most map triggers
Infantry, vehicle, naval and base-defense combat	Death effects (ship sinking and a few others missing)	Chrono Legionnaire, Crazy Ivan, Magnetron and other special weapons
Attack dogs and Terror Drones	Bridge damage and repair	Gattling spin-up, Prism chaining, Tesla charging
Garrisons, transports, engineers and cloaking		Nuke, Chronosphere, Psychic Dominator, Spy Plane
Lightning Storm, Iron Curtain and other support powers		Movies and credits
Save and load		30 players / 20,000 units (not demonstrated yet)

Quick start

You need Rust 1.88 or newer, a GPU with Vulkan, DirectX 12 or Metal, and the game installed. It has been played on Windows, Linux and macOS, and CI builds and tests all three.

git clone https://github.com/YuriPlanet/vera20k.git
cd vera20k
cp config.toml.example config.toml   # then set ra2_dir to your game folder
cargo run --release --bin vera20k    # always --release: debug builds are too slow to play

cargo test -p vera20k --lib runs the tests, no game needed. More setup details are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

How it's built

The original gamemd.exe is the reference. Newer gameplay code cites the original function it was ported from, and native harnesses run the original code to check the Rust results. Most code is written by AI coding assistants that the maintainer directs, following the rules in AGENTS.md.

Contributing

Help is welcome, and you don't need reverse-engineering experience. Compare VERA20k with the original and report differences, try it on Linux or macOS, or pick a good first issue. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, or say hi on Discord.

Learn more: architecture overview · native oracle · research notes

Credits and legal

Thanks to OpenRA, XCC Mixer, the ModEnc wiki, Project Perfect Mod, EA's GPL source release of Command & Conquer and Red Alert, World-Altering Editor, Final Alert, YRpp, Ares, Phobos and many others.

Licensed under the GPLv3. This repository contains no game files. Command & Conquer and Red Alert are trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc., and screenshots show game art owned by Electronic Arts. VERA20k is not affiliated with or endorsed by Electronic Arts.