Command & Conquer: Generals/Unused Content in the Original

This is a sub-page of Command & Conquer: Generals.

Sub-Pages

Missions and Maps The original plans for various missions and maps.

Unused Animations Unused animations, mostly of Infantry units.

Unused Graphics The GLA attempted to liberate the world, but these graphics were left in the dark.

Unused Sounds POW logic-related stuff, introductions, Force Move and other sound files that were cut from the final game.

Unused Text Unused text strings for various cut functions.

POW logic

You were at one time intended to collect POWs (prisoners of war) in this game. However, it was removed, probably due to time constraints.

All three factions have individual POW trucks designed for this purpose. Normally, only the American POW truck can be seen in the game, in the third USA mission where you have to protect the escaping forces. All three also have selection pictures and a full voice set.

You were able to capture all infantry units. All three EVAs have quotes for when the three heroes are captured. Most of the units have unused surrender animations, including the unplayable American and Chinese officers as well as voices for surrendering. However, surrender animations for the heroes are not found in the original game. Each faction had their own way of capturing infantry:

• America used the flashbangs to collect prisoners of war. Some removed voices for the Ranger directly reference this. The POW truck took them to the Detention Camp, where they powered up the CIA Intelligence special power.
• China used stun bullets to collect prisoners of war, which were removed from the final game. The POW truck took them to the Propaganda Center, where they powered up the Defector special power. This special power, still available in the code, converted enemy units to your side.
• The GLA used tranquilizer darts to collect prisoners of war, which were removed from the final game. The POW truck took them to the Prison, a building which was completely removed from the final game. There, it powered up the Demoralize special power, which made enemy units fire at only one fourth their normal rate.

Some leftovers of the old POW logic are still in the game:

• The Defector is still functional, and has a hook in the American Command Center (likely for testing purposes). If you add it to the game, it works as intended - select a unit and it will be converted to your side, after which you have a short period of time before it is considered an enemy unit by the opponent.
• The models of the Chinese and GLA POW Trucks, and the GLA Prison, have been removed from the original game, however they can be found in the expansion pack files, albeit unused.
• There's an unused weapon bonus named, appropriately, DEMORALIZED_OBSOLETE. Despite the "OBSOLETE" in it's name it still works and some mods make use of it.
• The CIA Intelligence has some leftover coding which makes it have a longer duration if you capture prisoners, from the original 30 seconds up to four minutes. Since there are no prisoners in the game anymore, the code does not have an effect any longer.
• In the intro of the second USA mission, the pilot that bails out of his crashing Comanche plays his surrendering animation when cornered by GLA forces.

Force Move

You were supposed to be able to tell a vehicle to crush enemy infantry, rather than engaging them with its weapon, with a dedicated command button. It was scrapped for some reason. Most vehicles have a full voice set for the Force Move function, some of which became attack voice lines that don't make sense (e.g. Inferno cannon saying "No fire needed here" when attacking by its cannon, which lobs flaming shells)

All voice lines for crushing infantry are correctly assigned, but because there is no way to actually trigger those voice lines they go unused.

Unused Units

Units that do not appear anywhere in the game, some of them don't have models. Thus, they cannot be selected when added to a map.

Agent

This is a cut Chinese unit. It's actually an old relic from the prototype, it's not even used in the game and even one of the developers (In an annotation) wonders if it's used for anything. Its model and textures, alongside full unique working animations can only be found in Zero Hour and the Sneak Peak. Judging from what little remains of his code, plus his model, this unit would've been able to use wire cutters, perhaps for sabotage, and bribe units.

American Farmer

An unused civilian unit with an object ID of AmericanFarmer01. It uses the CIEFMR1_SKN model, which is missing from the game files.

Boats

Two unused boats, BoatFishingTrowler and BoatTugboat. Their models are found only in Zero Hour.

Cargo Crane

WIP

Double Decker Tour Bus

A red double decker tour bus is coded in the game, but it's not placed in any map. Also, its model is missing and only found in Zero Hour.

Euro Van

There are three vans in the game, a white van and a SWAT van. The third variant is missing its model and is not placed in any map.

Horse Drawn Cart

The Horse Drawn Cart, as the name implies, is a cart drawn by a horse. Its model is CVHRSE_SKN but it's missing from the game and only found in Zero Hour alongside its unique animations. However, some of the animations are bugged and do not work as intended.

Most of data seems to be copied from a car unit since it is referred to as such in its code. Strangely, the Horse Drawn Cart uses selection icons from the terrorist.

Militia Tank

The Militia Tank is an unused civilian unit that uses the missing CVTank model, which be found in Zero Hour. It uses its own unique weapon, MilitiaTankGun, that deals 35 points of damage. The Militia Tank uses the TankArmor as its normal armor set and UpgradedTankArmor as its upgraded set, which cannot be triggered in anyway. It costs 500 and takes 12 seconds to train and requires an American Warfactory. It doesn't have any voice lines but commented out entries suggest it was meant to have voice lines like that of a playable unit.

More than likely it was created to go alongside the Militia infantry unit, possibly to be used as hireable units in Skirmish or the Campaign.

Moat

A leftover Chinese building from the prototype, It's unknown how it functioned but perhaps it did just like real life moats used throughout medieval history. Most of its coding seems to be just placeholder, it's invisible but has a model in the expansion pack, however it's just a placeholder model of a large box with the word "Moat" written on it.

Partisans

These three unused infantry units are categorized as civilian units in the Worldeditor but their missing models found in Zero Hour suggest they're GLA units. Because the models they use are missing, they can't be selected when placed in a map. They don't have weapon sets and no selection images.

Rickshaw

WIP

Scooter

WIP

Scorpion Tank

Internally, the Scorpion Tank is called LiteTank. For some reason, there's a duplicate Scorpion Tank with an object ID of ScorpionTank. It's unknown what purpose this partially implemented clone served. Perhaps the internally-named Lite Tank was a separate unit and that the unused Scorpion Tank model found in Zero Hour is for the real Scorpion Tank.

Secret Police

Again, a Chinese leftover from the prototype. It uses a hacker model as placeholder but other than it, there isn't much to it. What role it originally played is left for speculation.

Trucks

WIP

Walls

Walls were planned for this game, just like in the first Command and Conquer game. They are fully coded and can still be placed in the World Editor but are invisible because their models are missing (With the exception of the GLA Wall) and only found in the Expansion pack. Presumably they were removed because they needlessly slowed down an otherwise fast-paced game.

There are various straight and corner pieces for walls for all factions, as well as selection pictures and tooltips. Presumably you would build the walls using the removed line build feature, which allowed you to build buildings along a straight line. Each faction got a specific wall; according to the tooltips which are left in the game, they were as follows:

• America got a security fence. It blocks vehicles from passing and triggers an alarm if enemy infantry tries to pass it.
• China got a concrete wall, which just plainly blocks troops from progressing.
• GLA got a burning barricade. This one does not really block anything, but the fire damages units passing by.

Unused Units Behavior

Bridges

Damaged and destroyed bridges in-game.

Bridges were meant to be destroyable and repairable at some point of game development. If you change the bridge object and make it able to be damaged, you will indeed be able to damage bridges and most of them even have proper textures for being damaged. As for the repairing part, you were most likely supposed to repair bridges using the bridge towers. They still show up in the map editor but do not appear in the game anymore.

It's uncertain why it was removed, but the most likely reason was to prevent frustration on maps where bridges are the only object connecting two landmasses. Even though it is officially discouraged and no official maps do that, it's easily possible to create such a map with the map editor.

Crate

In the final game, only the GLA gets crates for destroying enemy vehicles, which they can use to either upgrade the salvager's weapon, if possible, or get a level up or money. But originally, it was intended that every faction gets a crate for destroying elite or heroic enemy units. Destroying elite units would give either $1,000 or a level up to all surrounding units. Destroying heroic units would give either $2,500, a level up to all surrounding units, or instantly spawn two American Crusader tanks at the crate's position.

This was removed because it was imbalanced and also because it did not make much sense for China and GLA to get American tanks.

Crusader

The Crusader Tank was intended to have a machine gun for use against infantry. The reason for that is, quite simply, that the tanks can damage each other if infantry walk beside them. It was removed due to a design change though.

The Crusader Tank was also supposed to have an upgraded armor set. It is commented out in the code but even if uncommented, it will not work since it is supposed to be triggered from an upgrade module. This seems to be an old leftover from when the game had a USA Tank General, whose upgrades would likely effect his Crusaders.

GLA Hole

To do: This is actually from ZH, not the base game. It'll stay here for the time being.

The GLA Hole has an unused animation of the door opening, so the worker can go through and rebuild the building. Due to a programming error, this animation never actually plays, therefore the worker goes through the closed door.

Ranger

The Ranger has unused weapon bonuses in his weapon set that cannot be triggered in any way. Originally, the Scout Drone was a Ranger upgrade, and buying one for a Ranger was supposed to give him these bonuses. The Scout Drone would've provided the Ranger with double range, rate of fire, and damage.

The Ranger also was to benefited from two removed upgrades, The "Timed Grenades" and "Smart Grenades". These upgrades can be seen in some E3 game previews, It's unknown how they functioned but may have evolved into the Flashbangs in the final game.

Red Guard

The Red Guard was planned to have a bayonet to stab other infantry. The feature is fully finished, and it seems it got inadvertently removed while weeding out the POW logic.

Supply Docks

Similarly to bridges, the supply docks (as well as the supply warehouse) were also supposed to be able to be damaged. They all have proper models for the damaged states, and still have coding for healing themselves after a while. This would have also caused frustration if your supply dock was destroyed by the enemy and you would be left with no supplies.

• 

  Damaged condition

• 

  Very Damaged condition

• 

  Damaged condition

• 

  Very Damaged condition

Terrorist

The Terrorist has an unused attack animation, it is defined in the W3D module and theoretically should play but it does not. A possible explanation for this is as follows:

Normally, attack animations play out when damage is dealt to a target, but because of how the Terrorist weapon actually deals self damage that kills the terrorist and then an explosion is triggered from a separate module, we never get to see it play out since the engine doesn't seem to support self-attack animations.

Unused GUI Elements

Replay Control

Replay control was meant as a way to control replays. You could make the replay play faster or slower, pause the replay, or enable frame advance mode. It was removed from the game though, leaving you with no way to control the replay, but in the Expansion Pack a fast forward mode was introduced as a makeshift replacement.

Main Menu

The Main Menu, viewed in a game editor.

The Main Menu also offers some interesting hidden leftovers.

• Apparently, it was planned that map packs would be regularly released which you could then download from the game. A hidden button "Download Map Pack" exists in the Main Menu and would presumably be used for this purpose. There's also an entry in the Windows registry called MapPackVersion which is presumably associated with it. It is always set to 10000, though.
• Similarly, updates were also planned to be downloaded from the Main Menu, as hinted by another hidden button "Get Update". But since updates cannot be installed anyway while the game is running, it was moved to the autorun menu.
• A clock was also intended to be visible in the Main Menu, as a small gimmick.

Options Menu

The options menu is surprisingly full of unused stuff.

• A hidden drop-down box would have allowed you to change the anti-aliasing. This is not possible in the final version.
• Apparently, the way you moved the camera was saved in replays and then reflected when the replay is run. This would have been useful for example for analyzing the player's navigation, but it has been removed from the final game.
• There is an option to disable the language filter! Anyone who has ever played an online game knows how annoying these are. This was presumably only intended for the game developers, and normal users probably were never intended to be able to switch it off.
• There is a button that reads "Keyboard Options". You may have been able to change the keyboard layout in this special menu. This would also explain the large amount of unused text relating to keyboard commands in the game, and also why the CommandMap.ini file, which controls the keyboard commands, is not saved in the game's data files, but instead extracted in one of the game's subfolders to be easily editable. The reason why it was removed may be to prevent keyboard commands from conflicting with the in-game button hotkeys, which cannot be edited this way.
• One hidden option in the advanced options menu disables the frame limiter, which normally limits the game speed to 30 FPS (or whatever you have it set to in the battle's options). The description says it is mainly intended for benchmarks and not for actual gameplay, because it does not just change the frame rate but also speeds up/slows down the game.
• There is a hidden text string that reads "Mouse Type". It's possible it was intended to allow you to use the fourth and fifth mouse buttons in the game (if you have them), but ultimately its purpose is uncertain.
• There are two hidden options "Draw scroll anchor" and "Move scroll anchor". The effects of these options are unknown.

Unused Special Powers

These special powers are relics of the old generals logic of the prototype, After the generals were removed, the developer team did not consider these worth keeping. Most of these are fully functional in the Sneak Peak.

Black Market Nuke

The Black Market Nuke was intended for GLA and would drop a nuke by plane. The nuke itself is not particularly strong, but the radiation field it leaves behind destroys most units in the area.

Terror Cell

Terror Cell works similar to Rebel Ambush, but it spawns terrorists instead of rebels. This has a great destruction power, and may have been too powerful.

Crate Drop

Crate Drop does nothing more than drop $2,000 worth of money. This seems like the most useless of the unused special powers, if only because America has much faster ways of resource gathering.

Unused Coding

To do: Old Generals (China Red Army, GLA Warlord etc.) leftovers in game.dat file

The entire game code is formatted with tabs and empty newlines and also contains developer's annotations and comments. Actually, there is a program available to the developers which strips all of these, they just weren't able to use it because they ran out of time.

There is also a file which defines several debug keyboard combinations, like instantly building all buildings, turning off the fog of war, and others. It is unknown whether these debug commands can be re-enabled.

There are also some old leftovers which are only evidenced in the game code:

 MultipleFactory = 0.9

An undocumented feature of the code allows for a multiple factory bonus. It makes units be produced faster if you have multiple factories of the same type. The problem with this is that once you get enough factories, the build time becomes almost zero. This may have been the reason for its removal.

 CommandCenterHealRange = 500.0 ; command center heals your/ally stuff this close to the command center
 CommandCenterHealAmount = 0.01 ; command center heals close by stuff this amount per logic frame

Apparently, the command center used to heal all friendly objects around it. This would have made defending a base very easy (especially with that high range, which outranges artillery easily), perhaps too easy, which may have slowed down this game unnecessarily.

   ;***NOTE***
   ;A little history -- the MissileDefender now uses the assets of the TankHunter. 
   ;The TH uses assets of the GLA tunnel defender, and the TD uses assets of the NEW
   ;MD. It was a design/art/code decision because the new missile defender animations
   ;don't suit that of a mobile/offensive unit with packing and unpacking.

According to this note left by a developer, the Missile Defender was given model of the Tank Hunter and that Tank Hunter took the model of the Tunnel defender, the latter was given the new Missile Defender model. This could explain why the Missile Defender model is prefixed with "N", which is used for Chinese units.

Lock On mechanisms

The game engine can allow for Jet units to act like actual stealth fighters, that is avoid being targeted by enemy units for a set time limit, after which enemy units can attack the aircraft normally. No unit makes use of such behavior in the game but it's fully functional if added to any Jet unit. Specifically, this block of code, part of the JetAIUpdate module, handles this.

   LockonTime                    = [integer, milliseconds]
   LockonCursor                  = [object name]
   LockonInitialDist             = [integer]
   LockonFreq                    = [real number]
   LockonAngleSpin               = [real number]
   LockonBlinky                  = [Yes/No]

It's very possible that the developers intended for the USA Stealth Fighter to make use of this code, thus behave like the actual F-117 Nighthawk on which it's based off.

ProneUpdate Module

The ProneUpdate Module is a partially scrapped Module in the game's code. It's supposed to trigger the PRONE condition state in an object but it doesn't work and is not used by anything in the game. It seems the developers may have intended to bring back the Infantry prone mechanism from past Command & Conquer games to Generals and this module was probably meant to go alongside it. The Pathfinder has a number of prone animations, which were probably made for this prone mechanic.

  ProneUpdate
   DamageToFramesRatio = [real number]
  End

Voice Commands

There's a number of voice commands not used by anything in the game. These were created for very specific circumstances but for whatever reason, the developers left them unused. Some of these were used in the expansion pack.

• VoiceSelectElite : Plays when an object, with elite veterancy, is selected.
• VoiceMeetEnemy : Plays when an object encounters an enemy unit.
• VoiceTaskUnable : Plays when an object is unable to perform its given task.
• VoiceDefect : Plays when an object defects to another player. This was likely tied to the cut Defector ability.
• SoundMoveLoopDamaged : Plays while an object is moving while damaged.
• SoundCreated : Plays when an object is created from a factory, this differs from VoiceCreate which is used by game.
• SoundPromotedVeteran : Plays when an object is promoted to veteran.
• SoundPromotedElite : Plays when an object is promoted to elite.
• SoundPromotedHero : Plays when an object is promoted to heroic.
• SoundOnDamaged : Plays when an object's health bar reaches the yellow zone.
• SoundOnReallyDamaged : Plays when an object's health bar reaches the red zone.
• SoundAmbientDamaged : Plays as long as the object exists while damaged.
• SoundAmbientReallyDamaged : Plays as long as the object exists while really damaged.
• VoiceTertiaryWeaponMode : Plays when an object switches to its tertiary weapon. This isn't used by anything because, outside of mods, there aren't any units with more than two weapons.

Unused Battle Honors

The Officers Club Honor is an honor that was given for pre-ordering Generals, and can no longer be obtained.

Name	Description
Challenge Honor	Player has defeated a Hard computer opponent
China Loyalty Honor	Player has played 20+ games in a row as China
GLA Loyalty Honor	Player has played 20+ games in a row as GLA
USA Loyalty Honor	Player has played 20+ games in a row as USA
Officers Club Honor	Player is a founding member of the Generals community
Streak Honor(5)	Player has won 5 solo or multiplayer online games in a row
Streak Honor(20)	Player has won 20 solo or multiplayer online games in a row