For what its worth, the Total Annihilation derived project with the most attention currently is is BAR https://www.beyondallreason.info/ They decided to make it legally distinct, but it was the balanced annihilation project which was total annihilation rebalanced for better pvp. I don't play too many RTS so this is not authoritative, but BAR plays better than any other rts I have tried, They really care about the fine details of user experience there.
In fact, I consider Chris Taylor(Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander) to be one of if not the greatest RTS designers. His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft) but he gets the control design better than anyone else I have seen.
To whoever put it together, thank you.
What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?
As the gen Zs would say: Skill Issue.
By the time my crowd had reliable enough connections for multiplayer, the number of people who knew and liked Starcraft from that campaign was much higher than the number who'd either gotten to love TA from the campaign or from vs-computer matches.
With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be addressed. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)
I think I'm close to a like for like version.
And of course the performance is leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!
and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.
and of course higher player v player battles
You can see that all here and in the replies https://forum.faforever.com/topic/10451/supcom-moho-engine-r...
It makes me dislike whatever they're trying to "sell" (literally or metaphorically). I wish people who wanted to be "creative" would you know... be creative, not just "push button, machine go brrr" which is what half this stuff spits out. Template, generic, no individuality. Hyper "professional" looking (but just "cool" enough to not be completely corporate).
On the other hand some of these look better and are more responsive than older sites that were definitely fuglier, klunky and less responsive. It feels like there's a middle ground, which I think is where good designer comes into play.
I have built a few better sites after AI generates the shell. The colors and styling need about a dozen human interactions to get something passable as human created.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihila...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation
More than just a spiritual successor, imo.
Some of the (open source) games on that engine (https://beyondallreason.info/ and https://zero-k.info/) have similar feeling with the original TA, with quite different play styles. I do prefer Zero-K over Beyond All Reason, but I would recommend anyone interested in the genre to try both and decide for themselves.
The lead Dev's "Cold takes" blog series are dripping with the sort of insights you only get from years of hard won iteration and if you like RTS games are a joy to read : https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
I think Beyond all Reason has had some 50v50s or close that are a bit ridiculous to watch.
I love the idea of having some reinforcement learning approach that keeps generating new AI versions that play each other indefinitely.
I spent so much time in the game playing the story, then playing skirmishes, building massive bases. "Hacking" the game to increase the max-unit-count to numbers my computer could barely manage.
Then I discovered HEAT.NET and started playing in a competitive clan. Then... life happened, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it now, but not enough time.
The first would be great, but probably very difficult technically. The second would probably cause a holy war in the community, as multiplayer RTS enjoyers glorify fighting against the genre's jank as an expression of skill (admittedly it would completely change all micro).
https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...
With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be address. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)
I think I'm close to a like for like version.
And of course the performance its leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, in the replies a few down, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!
and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.
and of course higher player v player battles
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/10451/supcom-moho-engine-r...
"Punchy phrase. No X." "An open engine. Room to make it your own. "Same scene. Same instant. The same explosion. A different atmosphere." "A few things to know. The short answers."
Why is it always the same? What awful post-training, or synthetic data training pipeline, or RLHF gone wrong, produced this homogenised, low variety slop style? And it's totally possible for LLMs to write actually decent or at least varied prose and I would think Anthropic (or OpenAI) has the resources to fix the issue, they just choose not to.
Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me.
It was, or at least the most popular sites used it. LLMs just amplified it.
Like when you were a kid goofing around with some art supplies and you tried to mix every color of crayons, markers, watercolors, and/or colored pencils together to be both anything and everything all at the same time: It's just a sea of homogeneous brown yuck.
That homogenized yuck might work for code that is ultimately interpreted by a machine and that performs some kind of human-described function, but in writing (and in menu boards) it's just highly-emphatic sludge.
That _is_ the problem: ostensibly serious writing laced with marketing / clickbaity patterns is off-putting.
A) I was hit by a multiple _second_ load time (on a 1Gbps pipe btw)
B) The in game cursor was _visibly_ lagging
C) The gameplay itself was stuttery (and I am almost certain there is a hard one frame delay between most actions)
Then I thought, alright it could be Firefox, so I loaded it up in a fresh chromium image, and somehow it's worse. Then finally I looked at the source and it's very obvious why the performance is atrocious (the guy didn't really bother to tell his agent, "hey man, let's benchmark this and keep performance in check, maybe don't spam a billion draw calls everywhere y'know, maybe
Values below are medians across runs, including the median of each run's maximum tick time. Each pair reads *Go 1.25.0 → Go 1.27.1*; timings are ms.
| Mode | Process CPU/tick | Wall p50 | Wall p95 | Run maximum | Allocated bytes/tick |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Modern | 1.877 → 1.812 | 1.744 → 1.665 | 2.765 → 2.705 | 8.934 → 8.740 | 86,428 → 86,428 |
| Strict 3.1 | 1.210 → 1.101 | 1.144 → 1.041 | 1.577 → 1.498 | 4.555 → 4.594 | 19,871 → 19,871 |
| Community 3.9 | 1.591 → 1.447 | 1.433 → 1.290 | 2.407 → 2.299 | 9.323 → 9.310 | 16,721 → 16,721 |
fix this y'know ")
I would be surprised if that stood up in court but I doubt anyone cares for TA at this point anyway.
Come on ChatGPT/Claude, you're smart enough to know the original wasn't an isometric perspective. It was directly top-down, no camera rotation. 3D over 2D terrain with a heightmap.
It refers to how the viewport is not like a camera above 3D terrain. Instead, you see each point below as though directly above. In other words, you can only ever see the top of an object regardless of whether it is centered or on the edge.
If it wasn’t isometric, you would see more of the sides of objects that are near the edges.
Are you possibly thinking of "orthographic"?
Heh. I did my own game engine rewrite project recently, and once it reached parity I started thinking "ok so how can I make it look better?". I also added bloom, and on some level it did look kinda cool but ultimately I decided it was tacky. No offense to OP but I think the graphical "enhancements" here are also pretty tacky (but I totally understand the urge to add them!)
How is anyone meant to understand this Claude bullshit
As with most forms of theft and laundering, it's not really that clever.
>> This document records behavior established from static analysis of the retail TotalA.exe. It is a clean-room behavioral contract, not a source translation. It deliberately omits executable addresses, data-image offsets, and raw decompiler names. The phrases established, supported inference, and unknown distinguish what the analysis proves from what remains a useful but unverified interpretation.
The evidence is the executable's own control and data flow, its PE import table, and its embedded string vocabulary. Nothing here is taken from another engine, a capture, or a reimplementation.
Step 1: Ask an LLM to decompile a binary, wash it into a "clean" description of the binary in its own format (a bunch of .MD files, one might suppose) and then build a new binary from that description.
Step 2: Nothing.
Is this really going to hold up in court?
I hope it gets booted off Microsoft-owned Github for blatant copyright infringement. Total Annihilation ain't abandonware, and Xbox division don't need legal boycotts from third party publishers.
150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
Maybe I'll give it another look.
It's very much a game of team coordination where the power curve is exponential but also can have huge turnarounds since buildings are fragile but drive the economy entirely
So naturally you have to know how to play your specific role or it can throw the game for everyone else
It's not casual like Command and Conquer or something, but nor is it incredibly sweaty like StarCraft or DOTA
I feel like whether a game is considered sweaty or casual is more dependent on the game mode (e.g. ranked vs normal, UMS vs ladder etc).
unfortunately that is a totally fair assessment. its a deep and detailed game with lots of units, commands, mechanics and a few maps that have extremely developed meta.
this is only a problem if you think you can drop into multiplayer on literal day 1 without even doing any of the local/non ai learning options the game provides and expect your team to just deal with you not even knowing the basics.
And even then if you start in "noob" lobbies people are pretty helpful, to the extent that they are trying to play the game and give you tips and can only do/type so much.
so its simple... 1. play the scenerios/vs to learn the basics. also watch some yt basics guides 2. join noob lobbies. 3. when people try to help you and they sound mad/terse/short it helps to assume they are just busy with their own match and are doing their best to play and help you learn. if they give you advice try to take it. 4. do your best and ping out when things are going bad in your lane.
the community on there really is very much "nicer" to noobs that many games, especially ones that are co-op team based. but you do need to have realistic expectations. people will get upset if you mess up their games bc you havent at least tried to learn how to play at all.
You are way out on the edge of the bell curve. You only want to play with similar people. That's fine. But own up to it and don't pretend it's friendly to newbies.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
There's a popular Starcraft 2 commentary-and-gameplay streamer, Winter, who spent some time posting commentated BAR games. Videos from this period include direct pleas to his audience to take more of an interest because it's a better game with a better development model.
Then he took BAR off of his main youtube channel because that didn't work. He now seems to operate a separate variety channel with some BAR content.
I think about what this says about the role that marketing plays in people-in-general's choice of pastimes.