NATIVE PORTSTRATEGY / RTSANDROIDBETA

GeneralsZH Android Port

Command & Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour

TechnologyNative C/C++ port (engine reimplementation)

Available forAndroid

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About the project

Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour es un videojuego de estrategia publicado por Electronic Arts en 2003.

Official project information

Author's original READMEOpen on GitHub ↗

Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour — Android

This is an unofficial, community-made fan port. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by Electronic Arts, Westwood Studios, or any other rights holder, and it is not an official Google Play / App Store release. It's a fork maintained by volunteers (see Lineage & credits) built from EA's own GPL v3 source release. If you saw this described anywhere as an "official" release, that's wrong — please don't spread it further.

Generals — the front line just went mobile.

You thought this war was over? That the GLA was finished, the Particle Cannon had fallen silent and the last SCUD Storm had burned out? Think again. The war has gone global — and commanding it from a bunker, chained to a desk behind a stationary PC, is no longer enough. The front needs a new breed of officer: forward commanders who deploy their HQ anywhere and lead the charge on the move. The world needs more Generals. Your time has come, Mobile Generals.

Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour launches a full-scale invasion of Android, and nine Generals are waiting for your orders. Rule the skies with General Granger's air power, burn through the enemy with General Alexander's lasers, or unleash General Townes' Particle Cannon for the USA. Steamroll the line with General Kwai's Overlords, bring down General Tao's nuclear fire, or bury the enemy under General Fai's endless infantry for China. Or fight the GLA way — poison the battlefield with Dr. Thrax's toxins, rig it to blow with General Juhziz, and strike unseen with Prince Kassad's stealth.

Build your Command Center, secure your supply lines and wipe the enemy off the map — straight from your touchscreen — and take it online against other commanders on Android.

General, the uplink is ready. Target coordinates received — engage!

Zero Hour running natively on Android — campaign, skirmish, Generals Challenge, and full online multiplayer (GeneralsOnline: lobby, custom match, quickmatch, persona/stats, friends & social), with touch controls built for RTS (tap-select, drag-box, long-press deselect, two-finger pan, pinch/anchor zoom). No emulation: this is the real 2003 engine compiled for ARM64, rendering DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan native — no translation layer beyond DXVK itself, since Android speaks Vulkan directly.

There is a second, independent renderer: DirectX 8 → OpenGL ES 3.0, through a native translation layer written for this port (optionally routed through ANGLE), with no DXVK and no Vulkan involved at all. It started as the way to run on phones whose Vulkan driver can't carry DXVK and is now the default, because it has worked on every device tested so far; Vulkan remains one tap away in the launcher.

Built on EA's GPL v3 source release, standing on a chain of community work — TheSuperHackers, Fighter19's original Unix port, and fbraz3/GeneralsX — this fork is the Android port: native touch controls, the in-app launcher, GeneralsOnline multiplayer, and language packs. See Lineage & credits for who built what, and the story of the port for how it went. The macOS and iOS/iPadOS builds inherited from the original project are not maintained here; their notes are in docs/port/APPLE_PLATFORMS.md.

No game assets are included or distributed. You need your own copy (Steam, ~$5 on sale).

Status

Feature	Status
Campaign / Skirmish / Generals Challenge	✅ Working
Rendering — OpenGL ES (DirectX 8 → GLES 3.0, no DXVK)	✅ Working — the default. A native backend written for this port; it works on every device tested so far, including ones whose Vulkan driver renders corrupted graphics.
Rendering — Vulkan (DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan)	✅ Working — selectable in Setup. Native Vulkan 1.3 (Adreno 7xx/8xx), adaptive Vulkan 1.1 fallback (Mali-G76/G57). Faster where the driver handles it; unusable on some (PowerVR BXM, Samsung Xclipse — see Known issues).
Audio	✅ Working (OpenAL, OpenSL/AAudio backends)
Video / cutscenes	✅ Working (FFmpeg)
Touch controls	✅ Working — native touch, not mouse emulation (see Touch controls)
Online multiplayer (GeneralsOnline)	✅ Working — real matches between real players, P2P transport
Cross-play with PC (Windows) GeneralsOnline players	⛔ Turned off — since 18/10/2026, for an indefinite time, at the request of the GeneralsOnline developers. Online games between Android players are not affected
LAN games between phones	✅ Working — on the same Wi-Fi network
Game text languages	✅ English plus 12 packs: Russian, Ukrainian, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Interslavic, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Persian — right-to-left layout and CJK glyphs included. Add yours
Updates without a new APK	✅ Signed engine builds and network settings straight from this repository (Home → Updates)
Simulation rate	✅ 30 Hz (retail) or 60 Hz, chosen in the launcher — the APK carries both engines
Upscaling (OpenGL ES)	✅ The 3D scene rendered below screen resolution and sharpened back (Snapdragon GSR), interface at full resolution — Launcher → Graphics
Interface size	✅ Larger menus, command bar and HUD for small screens — Launcher → Interface
Text input	✅ Chat, lobby names and passwords in an Android text field: cursor, selection, copy and paste
Performance on Vulkan-1.1-only GPUs (Mali)	⚠️ Playable, but CPU-bound — expect lower FPS and occasional freezes on weaker/older phones

Android: primary target. Grab a prebuilt APK from Releases — no toolchain needed. Campaign, skirmish, and Generals Challenge run natively. Online multiplayer works, including actual matches — and, since 1.3.0, against PC players: GeneralsOnline (the community service by the GeneralsOnline Development Team that replaced the long-dead GameSpy servers; this port brings its client to Android) drives account login, the multiplayer lobby, Custom Match (create/browse/join, live room + player lists, chat), Quickmatch, My Persona (stats/rank), and Communicator (friends/social) — and matches now actually start and play: a P2P transport (Valve's GameNetworkingSockets, built from source for Android with native ICE/STUN/TURN, no external WebRTC dependency) replaces the legacy transport that internet games never had a real implementation for. This has been shaken out against real players and real devices, including bug reports from outside testers via this repo's issue tracker — see docs/port/ANDROID_PORT.md for the device/driver matrix and the full bring-up log.

Touch controls

Battlefield input is native: a finger is not turned into a mouse. Taps, double taps, long presses, the two-finger cancel and ability targeting are resolved directly against the engine's own decision-making — pick what is under the finger, project it into the world, ask the engine what order that means. The orders produced are identical to the ones the mouse path produces, so multiplayer and replays are unaffected.

Taps on the control bar and menus are still ordinary clicks, deliberately: a tap on a button is a click, and the window manager's handling of it is correct. The window manager also gets first refusal on every battlefield tap, so a tap on a panel never falls through to the map underneath.

Gesture	Action
Tap on the map	Select what is under your finger, or — with units selected — give them the order that point implies (move, attack, enter, repair …)
Tap a unit you own	Select it. If the engine says your current selection has a specific interaction with it (get in, repair), that happens instead
Double-tap	Select every unit of that type on screen
Press and hold, then drag	Selection box
Drag	Pan the camera (direct, no mouse involved)
Two fingers	Pan and zoom together
Long press on the map (~0.6s, no movement)	Cancel an armed ability or a pending building; otherwise clear the selection
Two-finger tap	The same cancel
Tap on the minimap	As on a PC, a left click: with units selected it sends them there; with nothing selected it moves the camera there
Press and hold on the minimap (~0.6s), then release	Move the camera there even with units selected (the PC's right click)
Tap a UI button	Press it
Hold a UI button	Read its description, without pressing it
With an ability armed: touch the map, drag, release	Aim it — the radius circle follows your finger; release fires it where you let go; a second finger cancels
With a building picked: tap where it goes	Place it. The ghost appears under your finger, not before you point
Drag inside a list (games, players, chat, maps)	Scroll it
Arrow button, bottom right of a builder's command bar	Flip to the second page of structures
Force-attack / waypoint buttons on the command bar	The touch equivalents of Ctrl-click and Alt-click

More on how gestures are classified, why screen-edge scrolling is off on touch, the Touch input overlay for reporting control problems, and how to add a gesture: docs/port/TOUCH_CONTROLS.md.

Quick start — Android

DirectX 8 → DXVK → Vulkan native, or the OpenGL ES renderer below. DXVK's own minimum was lowered from Vulkan 1.3 to Vulkan 1.1, with an adaptive feature/extension fallback path, so it now runs on a much wider range of hardware: Snapdragon with Adreno 7xx/8xx (native 1.3), older Adreno below 1.3 (via an optional bundled Mesa Turnip fallback driver), and Vulkan-1.1-only Arm Mali GPUs (Mali-G76, Mali-G57, and similar Bifrost/Valhall chips — e.g. the Redmi Note 8 Pro) are all supported. A device with no usable Vulkan driver at all still gets a clear on-screen message instead of silently closing. Frame rate on Vulkan-1.1-only / older-CPU devices is CPU-bound, not GPU-bound — expect lower FPS and occasional freezes on weaker phones; see the doc for the full device/driver matrix and driver-replacement options.

If Vulkan doesn't work on your phone, there is a second renderer. The Setup app has a Render Backend picker with three options: Vulkan (DXVK), OpenGL ES (the default) and OpenGL ES + ANGLE. The GLES options do not use DXVK or Vulkan at all — they run DirectX 8 through a translation layer written for this port (Core/Libraries/Source/d3d8gles/) straight onto OpenGL ES 3.0, which every Android GPU speaks. That covers devices whose Vulkan driver exists but can't carry DXVK, which previously had nothing to fall back on. Switching backends needs no rebuild: change it in Setup and restart the game. GLES is the default because it works on every device tested so far; Vulkan can be faster where the driver handles DXVK well.

Simplest option — no build, no CI: grab a prebuilt APK from the Releases page and sideload it.

Every build is signed with the same committed key, so a newer APK installs over an older one without uninstalling. A fork can also build in GitHub Actions (Actions tab → Build Android → Run workflow, manual only), though that workflow ships the 30 Hz engine only.

No adb needed, for setup or logs: the game's icon opens a launcher with an in-app folder picker (point it at wherever you copied your own game files — Downloads, an SD card, anywhere), a log viewer with Clear/Share buttons, the GeneralsOnline account and network data, language packs and updates. See docs/port/ANDROID_PORT.md §4 for the full first-run walkthrough. A default log is small and readable — if a bug report needs more (frame-timing breakdown, full trace, DXVK HUD counters, Vulkan validation), see Diagnostic marker files for which plain-text file to drop into the game folder and what it turns on.

Building locally instead needs the Android NDK (r26+), vcpkg, meson/ninja:

cd GeneralsX
git submodule update --init references/fbraz3-dxvk
export ANDROID_NDK_HOME=~/Android/Sdk/ndk/<version>
./scripts/build/android/build-dual-hz.sh           # both engines (30 Hz + 60 Hz) and the APK

→ The full guide (device/driver matrix, storage layout, multiplayer architecture, bring-up log): docs/port/ANDROID_PORT.md

Where things are

Path	What it is
`docs/port/ANDROID_PORT.md`	The Android port: architecture, GeneralsOnline multiplayer backend, device/driver matrix, build + bring-up log
`docs/port/PORT_STORY.md`	How the port went: GameSpy's death, async callbacks, storage, the allocator hunt
`docs/port/TOUCH_CONTROLS.md`	How touch gestures are recognised, and the input overlay for bug reports
`languages/`	Game-text language packs, and how to add one
`docs/port/APPLE_PLATFORMS.md`	The macOS / iOS / iPadOS builds inherited from the original project — not maintained here
`docs/port/RELEASE_CHECKLIST.md`	Gate for public release
`scripts/get-assets.sh`	Steam asset fetcher (your own copy; app 2732960)
`scripts/build/android/`	Android build and packaging
`android/`	Gradle shell app (SDLActivity) that packages `libmain.so` + DXVK into an APK, plus the Setup/FolderPicker/LogViewer/GeneralsOnline-account activities
`GeneralsMD/Code/GameEngine/Source/GameNetwork/GeneralsOnline/`	The GeneralsOnline multiplayer client: auth, lobby, rooms, stats, matchmaking, social — talks to a REST + WebSocket backend, not GameSpy
`Core/Libraries/Source/d3d8gles/`	The DirectX 8 → OpenGL ES 3.0 renderer: device/state emulation, fixed-function-to-GLSL shader generation, texture upload (including a software BC1-3 decoder for GPUs without S3TC)
`Patches/dxvk-android.patch`	DXVK changes the Android d3d8/d3d9 `.so` builds are built from

Known issues

Android on Vulkan-1.1-only GPUs (Mali-G76, Mali-G57, and similar) is CPU-bound: expect lower frame rates and occasional freezes on weaker/older phones, especially during map/mission loading, and please share logs if you hit something worse than that — see docs/port/ANDROID_PORT.md §2 for the device/driver matrix.
Vulkan renders corrupted graphics on some GPU drivers, and no setting in Setup can fix it — the corruption is below the game. Magenta patches, distorted geometry and duplicated/overlapping menu elements have been reported on PowerVR BXM and Samsung Xclipse. This is why OpenGL ES is the default; if Vulkan looks wrong on your device, switch back to it in Setup → Render Backend, which also now shows your GPU's own name.
Magenta textures are usually a game-files problem rather than a renderer one, and the build says which: [gxmiss] magenta substituted (<reason>): <file> names the file and why (no thumbnail, archive missing, unreadable), and [d3d8gles] MAGENTA: names an unsupported texture format. Zero Hour is an expansion — if base Generals archives (Terrain.big, Textures.big, W3D.big) are absent, most of the artwork has nowhere to come from. Setup lists any missing archive by name and can be pointed at a separate base-game folder.
One GeneralsOnline account per device: the service keeps one active sign-in per account, so signing in on a second phone (or on the PC) with the same account signs the first one out, and its game then asks you to sign in again. Use a separate account on each device.
Cross-play with PC players is turned off at the GeneralsOnline developers' request: Android clients cannot join PC games, and PC clients cannot join Android games. Online play between Android players works as before.

Support the project

This port is developed with Claude Code (Anthropic's Claude), and the subscription is paid out of pocket. If the port is useful to you and you'd like to help keep it going, donations are welcome — they go to that subscription.

Boosty (a Patreon-like platform; sending a tip needs a Boosty account) takes a bank card, from Russia and from abroad (the amount is shown in your currency and converted automatically). Or send USDT:

Currency and network	Address
USDT — TRON (TRC20)	`TAQHCF733ovKpvBjUgvkE6wHxkntnKZ6br`
USDT — BSC (BEP20)	`0x52c05c81485d68367385ff389cf19a453f036310`
USDT — TON (no memo needed)	`UQAOdBpFSPhlgbvUIJ2O2w2NuwWashaNjFWDsOirDqH9kGbR`

Send USDT only, and only over the network written next to the address — any other token, or USDT over a different network, will be lost. Donations support development only: the game and every build stay free, and nothing is unlocked by donating. Command & Conquer is a trademark of Electronic Arts; this is an unofficial fan project.

Boosty keeps about $0.25 of a donation when it is paid out, so a tip of that size or smaller does not reach the subscription.

Heroes of the project

Everyone who has supported the port, month by month (amounts in US dollars, approximate where the donation was in another currency). The launcher shows the current month only; at the end of every month its heroes move here. Thank you!

November 2026 — $0 of the $20 monthly subscription so far

October 2026 — $18.73 of the $20 monthly subscription

Hero	Amount
Diaa Abu Jazar	$2 · Boosty
hein htetsan	$0.19 · Boosty
[UA]Den^	$4.79 · Boosty
Zhask Dominator	$6.21 · Boosty
Mukhiddin (WaruEdition)	$2.81 · Boosty
Shahre Masore	$0.47 · Boosty
MAD ATOM	$1.88 · Boosty
Unknown General	$0.38 · USDT

Popularity

Lineage & credits

This port is the newest link in a long chain, and the earlier links did foundational work that this repo inherits everywhere:

Westwood / EA Pacific — the game; EA — the GPL v3 source release
TheSuperHackers/GeneralsGameCode — the community mainline: build modernization, VC6→modern toolchain, and much of the cross-platform groundwork, including the FFmpeg video backend authored by feliwir (of OpenSAGE), who also authored the OpenAL audio device work this port's audio stack builds on
Fighter19/CnC_Generals_Zero_Hour — the original Unix/64-bit port: SDL3 platform management, C++17 filesystem/threading, Freetype/Fontconfig text rendering, and the DXVK approach this renderer path descends from
fbraz3/GeneralsX — the macOS/Linux port, integrating and extending the above
ammaarreshi/Generals-Mac-iOS-iPad — the macOS / iOS / iPadOS port this repository was forked from (arm64-ios cross-build, DXVK on iOS, touch controls, app lifecycle, packaging)
GeneralsOnline Development Team — GeneralsOnline, the online service and PC client whose client this port brings to Android, and whose community data patch and maps the launcher downloads
This fork — the Android port (the GeneralsOnline client on Android, touch controls, in-app launcher, language packs, device bring-up), plus engine fixes throughout, offered upstream
DXVK, SDL, OpenAL Soft, FFmpeg, GameNetworkingSockets, Liberation Fonts — the load-bearing walls

Not part of that chain: tarek369/GeneralsZH-Android is a separate, independent Android port — this one is not built on it. Problems its users report are checked against this port too, and fixed here when they turn out to exist here as well; a couple of bugs (a duplicate-symbol build break, an INI-parsing gap) were traced faster thanks to its published engineering log.

Engine code GPL v3 (EA's source release → the chain above → this fork). Game assets: not included, not licensed here.

Read official guide