A modern Qt port of the Command & Conquer: Generals — Zero Hour WorldBuilder map editor: a full MFC→Qt inversion of the original tool, keeping the classic workflow while replacing the aging MFC UI with a native Qt front end.
Grab WorldBuilderZH-Qt-*.zip from the releases page,
unzip it, and run WorldBuilderZH.exe from inside a Zero Hour install. The Qt runtime is
bundled — no separate Qt install is required to run it.
WorldBuilder loads game data from its own folder, so it must sit inside a Zero Hour install (it
SetCurrentDirectorys to its own exe folder at startup). Unzip the release into your Zero Hour
directory (or copy the exe + the bundled Qt DLLs there) and launch WorldBuilderZH.exe.
You must own the game. The C&C Ultimate Collection is available on EA App or Steam.
The Qt WorldBuilder adds a batch of Script Editor quality-of-life features — live tree search and state filters, F2 rename / Ctrl+D duplicate, a fuller right-click menu, copy/paste of conditions and actions between scripts, clickable reference links (including jump-to-entity in the 3D view), a find/replace bar for renaming parameter values across all scripts (or just the selected one), and a repair flow for maps from other mods: clickable [Missing] object references that jump to the broken condition/action, with the object picker auto-suggesting the closest existing name.
See ScriptEditor-QoL-Guide.md for how to use each of them, with a worked example.
WorldBuilder is a 32-bit app built with Visual Studio 2022 (MSVC v14x x86), Qt 5.15.2
32-bit (msvc2019), Ninja, and CMake 3.25+. The Qt build is off by default — a plain
configure gives you the classic MFC WorldBuilder; enable it with
-DRTS_ENABLE_WORLDBUILDER_QT=ON.
See QT-BUILD.md for the full step-by-step setup, the Qt install options, the
CMake preset commands, runtime deployment (windeployqt), and the optional keyboard/focus debug
facility.
The dialogs' layouts live in Qt Designer .ui files — see
qt/UI_FILES.md for how they're split from
the C++ logic, which dialogs are only partly editable in Designer and why, and the gotchas to know
before editing one.
Quick version (inside an x86 MSVC environment, vcvarsall.bat x86):
cmake --preset win32-internal ^
-DRTS_ENABLE_WORLDBUILDER_QT=ON ^
-DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:/Qt/5.15.2/msvc2019"
cmake --build --preset win32-internal --target z_worldbuilder
Output: build/win32-internal/GeneralsMD/Release/WorldBuilderZH.exe
This is a fork of the open-sourced Command & Conquer: Generals + Zero Hour source. The work here
is focused on the WorldBuilder Qt inversion under Tools/WorldBuilder; the rest of the game
engine and tools sources are carried along unchanged as the WorldBuilder's build dependencies.
Building the full game/tools from source requires several third-party SDKs (DirectX, STLport, Miles, Bink, GameSpy, ZLib, and others) that are not included in this repository. Those are only needed for a from-scratch source build — the release download is a ready-to-run binary.
This repository and its contents are licensed under the GPL v3 license, with additional terms applied. Please see LICENSE.md for details.