Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

428 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by jttnr
(nanolathe.gg)

180 Comments

modeless

11 hours ago

I recently discovered Beyond All Reason, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. There have been several of these, but I think BAR is by far the best. It's open source, but looks nice and is polished. It has amazing quality-of-life features I haven't seen in any other RTS. And it supports insanely huge battles with hundreds of players and tens of thousands of units.

150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

beefsack

7 hours ago

BAR has quietly become the best RTS to release in years and is a huge amount of fun. It really feels like the version of TA that my nostalgia remembers even though the game and units are a bit different.

My group don't play competitively, we hop on for a bot bash once a week and the AI is a lot of fun to play against. I'm excited for them to finally release on Steam because that will lower the barrier to entry and increase exposure because the game definitely deserves success.

bitxbitxbitcoin

6 hours ago

First time seeing the words bot bash but instantly recognized it as a synonym to comp stomp :).

Lucasoato

11 hours ago

Yeah, let me add that it’s a wonderful community. They won’t flame you for failing the frontline because your opponent has been playing the game since day 1.

If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.

techjamie

10 hours ago

That's pretty good to hear. I've taken interest in it from time to time, and downloaded it at one point to spectate matches. It seemed really intimidating to my extremely casual RTS playing self with how much is happening.

Maybe I'll give it another look.

nylonstrung

9 hours ago

The sarcasm isn't warranted

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

daymanstep

8 hours ago

Is command and conquer considered casual?

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).

torginus

3 hours ago

I think very much so.

I have a few friends who used to really get into C&C games, and factional balance is basically nonexistent (with the resident 'good guy' faction being the best), and usually the winning strategy is to just mass produce whatever bang for buck unit that faction has (basic tanks most likely).

edg5000

2 hours ago

Zero Hour is played quite a lot competitively, but the scale is tiny versus SC2. It is quite balanced actually.

MasterBel2

6 hours ago

Highly depends on the mood of the day tbh, but you will see this positivity from lot of players (the Academy on Discord is a great place to find these guys). You’ll also get flamed by others.

We have allsorts. If you can put up with the occasional misery there’s a lot of fun to be had.

thebluegecko

10 hours ago

This experience might uh, might not be universal. I found the 8v8 community unhappy when I accidentally threw games while trying to learn. I will say the 1v1 community is very relaxed though. Starting 1v1s or vs bots might lead to a better experience.

searealist

10 hours ago

As someone who has played BAR, it's hard to read this as not being maximally sarcastic.

Lucasoato

9 hours ago

Man, I got flamed hard even for losing against one of the game developers, the community is cooked.

rand846633

6 hours ago

I find small team games to be non toxic. Just find others with same skill level..

dgently7

9 hours ago

ya, this drips with the common noob complaint that people flame you for being a noob.

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.

handoflixue

8 hours ago

"It's simple" followed by an on-boarding routine more complex than some paying jobs I've had.

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.

dgently7

16 minutes ago

Sorry you got me wrong, i want new players to have a great experience and games with mixed levels of players can be more fun. Im not saying you have to have done xyz before you should be allowed to play online.

however, installing the game and jumping into multiplayer and selecting the first open lobby is just not a good experience for anyone.

It is still a game with a learning curve and tons ways to climb it. For as steep as that curve is I might suggest that bar is one of the more newb friendly player bases.

Its like if you showed up in cod and literally didn't know how to move your character and somehow naded your team to cause them to lose. Do you think those players would be like "good on ya try harder next time, maybe use the joystick if you wanna move around"... no way.. But i see something like the bar version of that in noob lobbies all the time.

Still, it's a competitive online game, people can get frustrated with you if you literally don't know how to play. You will get frustrated with them trying to help you but not being especially nice about it. and it will be a bad experience.

It's a legit criticism that bar doesn't have a lot of guardrails to help you in the first days. in that sense its absolutely not noob friendly, nobody says it is. If a game has to be candy crush level simple to be "noob friendly" then bar is far to complex for that either, its just not that style of game.

follow my (probably still a bar noob) advice or not, im just trying to help you have a good experience in your first weeks in the game.

... and if suggesting that before you go into competitive play you literally just play the tutorial or vs ai is "complex" then bar is probably not the game for you, but if you ever end up in a lobby with me id still try to help you anyway.

itishappy

4 hours ago

It's simple...

    1. do the tutorial, maybe watch a guide
    2. follow the dedicated onboarding track
    3. give people around you the benefit of the doubt
    4. point things out even if you don't know how to deal with them
Pretty reasonable advice for interacting with others in any capacity. If your jobs haven't provided stuff like this, maybe that reflects more on them.

AuthAuth

7 hours ago

Thats if you're sensitive to being flamed. I jumped in after playing against bots for 30s no previous TA experience and I was a complete terrorist for 5-10 games. Then I started just being a "bad" player and going unnoticed.

handoflixue

2 hours ago

The operative word was "friendly" and I feel like "getting flamed" is generally understood to be the opposite of friendly.

That's fine! But. Again. Own it instead of pretending it's something it's not

arjie

5 hours ago

Every time I played one of these SpringRTS games, the AIs would over-micro to dodge projectiles. Does this game have one of those properties? I'm sure there's people who are expert Starcraft etc. players who do enjoy that style of play but I didn't.

chrysoprace

8 hours ago

It's better in just about every way, and if you have a copy of TA (such as from GOG), you can load the soundtrack from TA into BAR's music folder and it'll change the soundtrack to the TA soundtrack.

iamnothere

7 hours ago

This is often recommended here, but I find BAR to have too much of an “arcade” feel compared to many other RTSes. It seems to be competing with modern Starcraft, not the rest of the TA lineage.

I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.

killerstorm

5 hours ago

I disagree, it feels like TA to me.

You might be missing an important detail: every shot counts. In early game, at least.

Late game is kinda janky tbh

wredcoll

7 hours ago

What's the difference? Looks the same to me.

iamnothere

7 hours ago

FAF in particular has a slower, more gradual pace, and is grander in scale, although this latter complaint may just be the smaller scale of the FAF units on the map. BAR also feels “cartoonish” somehow, the units have exaggerated animations (like Starcraft) and when they explode the physics feel off. Finally I just prefer FAF’s mechanic of a commander death ending the game for that player, it raises the stakes for protecting that unit and adds interesting strategic options.

BAR feels to me like someone took the various noob complaints about FAF (commander sniping, complex tech trees, slow pace) and applied them all to reduce the scope of the game.

People who compare BAR to FAF don’t seem to understand that. Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games, it’s players of fast-paced lobby RTSes.

thaumasiotes

10 hours ago

I was struck by something else about Beyond All Reason.

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.

wredcoll

7 hours ago

I think this says more about how the youtube algorithm works and how people want it to work.

I can't speak for everyone but at somepoint I find myself wanting to watch a sc2 game so I "turn on" wintersc's channel. Because I want starcraft. It doesn't really matter how good BAR is if I'm looking for sc2. I might want to watch BAR at some other moment, but that's a different behaviour mechanism, if you see what I mean.

majormajor

7 hours ago

Starcraft 2 is a 16 year old game that's a sequel to a 28 year old game. In my limited exposure that's a crowd of people who know what they like and want to stick to what they know, not a crowd of people looking for new things. Probably one of the most now-marketing-resistant groups you'll find. Marketing in 1998 may have been able to change it, though. ;)

thaumasiotes

5 hours ago

> Starcraft 2 is a 16 year old game that's a sequel to a 28 year old game. In my limited exposure that's a crowd of people who know what they like and want to stick to what they know, not a crowd of people looking for new things.

So, in your opinion, Beyond All Reason is getting more new players than Starcraft 2 is?

Havoc

9 hours ago

Also bunch of vids by a guy called drongo. Haven't seen any recently (7 months) though

reactordev

10 hours ago

Can confirm, BAR is what you want...

jansan

8 hours ago

I have a very strong opinion about everything not having the 2.5D viewing mode as TA cannot be a worthy successor for TA. The 2.5D mode was part of the fun.

modeless

2 hours ago

This seems trivial to prompt in with Claude, especially considering it's open source.

lloydatkinson

9 hours ago

I keep meaning to try this game when I see it mentioned. It looks fun!

fizzbuzzbarbazz

4 hours ago

i both love and hate seeing this here, knowing it will grow BAR's noticeability.

somat

10 hours ago

Fair enough, but is there an advantage over the spring engine? Another clean room implementation that understands total annihilation data-structures, a project started 20 years ago.

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.

TkTech

5 hours ago

I don't know if they've finally resolved it, but BARs biggest issue last time I looked at it (which has been a bit!) was that they (spring) implemented the game with deterministic, lockstep multiplayer (good!) but used native floats, compiler fastmath flags, and stdlib math functions throughout. So you'd desync instantly playing against anyone whose game was built with different compiler flags, or Windows x86 vs ARM OS X, or different versions of libc, etc, etc.

That said, BAR was great fun when I tried it and very well done. Even has a rapidly growing youtube community.

doctorpangloss

4 hours ago

"Implement a fix to desync issues across the different platforms, using VMs and simulated networking as a starting point for validation. Make no mistakes"

ThrowawayR2

10 hours ago

The advantage presumably is that a player gets to experience Total Annihilation's gameplay as it was originally released, without any rebalancing. It's interesting historically as the root of its own lineage of RTS games, it's interesting from a nostalgia perspective, and it's a great, if dated, game in its own right; the campaign, music, and narration still hold up nearly thirty years later.

To whoever put it together, thank you.

Quothling

9 hours ago

Isn't this just the ebitengine doing all the work, with someone having used AI to vibe code TA functionality on top of it?

PorciiVorbesc

10 hours ago

>His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft)

What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?

somat

10 hours ago

Gratuitous cutscenes, annoying barks everywhere, huge useless animated portraits. It is basically the blizzard polish, looks better than it plays. Not that Starcraft plays bad, but none of the fluff contributes to gameplay. And that gameplay takes a lot more micromanagement than it needs to(some people like this. me, not so much).

wredcoll

7 hours ago

It's highly ironic that you've chosen to take this position about starcraft, one of the best playing games of all time.

Like, no, cutscenes have nothing do with improving gameplay, but they don't detract from it either.

The game itself is the epitome of responding to a user's inputs precisely the way they would expect them to.

There's certainly some design decisions you can dislike, (some of which were basically technical limitations) like some of the hot keys and workers not rallying, but those are pretty minor compared to the sheer perfection that is the rest of the game.

You can prefer a different type of game, one where you give high level orders to units or start with an army instead of building it, but that's clearly a very different genre of game and not one that TA and its children are trying to be.

MrMetric

6 hours ago

Could you say more on this? I've tried StarCraft a few times over the years, thanks to a lucky thrift store find as a teen. Got a Battle Chest for $10 and the key hadn't even been registered! Never got close to beating it, though. Been a while since last time, but my lingering impression says it was always a confusing sequence of disconnected events taking an agonizingly long time to play out, and the controls were hella clunky and fiddly. I kept trying anyway because something about it feels real appealing, but I don't quite get it. But I feel like I want to get it, y'know?

wredcoll

2 hours ago

I'd love to say more but I'm not sure where to start.

Your experience of the game is going to change dramatically depending on when you first played it and how much experience you have with the genre in general. For all my gushing adoration for the game, it is well over a quarter-century old at this point and even then it assumed a fair amount of knowledge and understanding about how the genre works.

When you say "close to beating it" I assume you're talking about the single player campaign, as opposed to the multiplayer death matches?

It's impossible for me to separate my current opinion from the decades of memories I have bound up in the game, but I think the campaign still holds up today, especially in the remastered version. It tells an interesting story with missions that are still fun to play, assuming you enjoy the basic rts build base make units attack enemy.

Like I said, it's hard to tell exactly what part of it you're having problems with, the fundamental gameplay loop is start with a small base, build workers, gather more resources, build bigger base, use bigger base to build army, use army to secure more resource areas to build even bigger base, use biggerer base to build biggest army, win map.

If you're having trouble actually beating the campaigns, 90% of the time the problem is people aren't building enough workers, the exact math gets a little complicated but as a very general rule of thumb you should probably have 25-26 workers for every set of minerals you have a base at, and you should be prioritizing building these workers above basically everything else.

Once you reach something like 8 workers mining minerals you can afford to both constantly build workers and build other units, then once you hit 26 or so you can stop building workers and focus on maxing out your army. Generally speaking the campaign AI is pretty forgiving, concentrating on defense for the first 10 minutes and then pushing out with a maxed out army works on like 90% of the maps.

Beyond that, I don't know what to say about clunky and slow. If the game is too slow, you can actually change what speed it plays at in the options menu, it actually defaults to a medium speed that nobody actually plays the game at, everyone plays at fastest setting, so dunno, maybe that's it. Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less, that's the nature of this type of game, you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.

MrMetric

an hour ago

Wow, thanks for replying! Thought I was pissing into the wind with that one.

I've never once touched the multiplayer mode. I don't recall seeing the option for it. I mean, I'm sure it's there, but I don't remember it, which means I've never clicked on it. So, yes, single player campaign only. A decent amount of the original, and then about half a level of Brood War when I skipped forward one time.

Wow, that sounds like a hella lotta workers. I vaguely recall trying that in a mission or two where I had severe resource problems, but then I didn't have enough offensive units and ran out of minerals by mining them too fast. Hmm... I remember getting frustration-curiosity a couple times and checking YouTube videos of how people beat missions I was completely stuck on, and being very unsatisfied because what I saw worked when I tried it myself but I didn't understand it (I can tell I didn't understand it because I don't remember it).

I didn't know there's a speed setting. That could make missions less of a long-ass slog, although, uh, controlling every unit at once? That sounds like a massive amount of busywork and I'm not confident I could pull it off (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean). What I meant by "slow" is the missions can drag on for a reeeaaaally long time, and by "clunky and fiddly", I mean it was hard to make things happen because of all the... not sure how to describe it. I guess I'd want to change the speed lower, but then everything would take too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And if by "the genre" you mean real-time strategy games, StarCraft is the only one I have any level of familiarity with, so if it assumes you already know that stuff, then that's probably a problem. When I said it's "a confusing sequence of disconnected events", I mean I couldn't correlate most of what I did to any of what happened. It was just random stuff happening most of the time, and when I changed my approach, I couldn't predict what the outcome would be and no significant learning occurred.

Despite all that, I really do like the game (wouldn't be talkin' about it so much if I didn't). I appreciate your advice, too. I'll have to see if I can get the thing running again.

ai_critic

an hour ago

> you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.

I think that's the core of a big criticism of Starcraft. After a certain point, it almost becomes a rhythm game.

The actual depth of the units was also smaller, compared to the fairly rich dynamics of TA.

This doesn't make it a worse game, but it is distinctly different.

noodletheworld

5 hours ago

The controls are a finely tuned machine in starcraft, as evidenced by the competitive scene with crazy apm.

If you dislike the micro required, thats fine, but just because it doesnt suite your preference doesn't mean its bad or clunky.

Just say “I dont like it”.

Thats fine.

If you want to “get” it, devote a few days to playing online multiplayer.

MrMetric

3 hours ago

Huh? I specifically said "my lingering impression". What I described is how the game felt to play, to me. I'm not talking about preferences and I'm not asserting some absolute universal state.

SgtBastard

7 hours ago

> Not that Starcraft plays bad, but none of the fluff contributes to gameplay. And that gameplay takes a lot more micromanagement than it needs to(some people like this. me, not so much)

As the gen Zs would say: Skill Issue.

wredcoll

7 hours ago

It's an amusing complaint because there's nothing in the TA engine that would prevent players doing the same level of micromanagement as StarCraft, it just never developed that level of skill required to win games.

bsder

5 hours ago

As Boomers would say: Mayfly Attention Span.

Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.

Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.

And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.

philipov

10 hours ago

None of that has anything to do with why starcraft is popular, though. Starcraft has a long history of organized professional competition, and that's responsible for sustaining interest in the game.

IsTom

9 hours ago

At first people played Starcraft for the campaign, internet access in late 90s wasn't common enough for a game to thrive on mostly online multiplayer. And it was popular back then. And playing on LAN was more of "20 mins no rush" thing.

wredcoll

7 hours ago

Starcraft came with battle.net and a mapeditor.

Quake3 was released a year(ish) later and effectively had no single player and it was a major success (by the standards of the day)

Being online was a major, major factor.

majormajor

7 hours ago

Yeah, the TA campaign was... not very compelling.

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.

ThrowawayR2

2 hours ago

I beg to differ, I loved the TA campaign. Going from one lone commander with their side on the brink of defeat to orchestrating a final titanic clash of armies as you conquer the homeworld of your opposition was epic. SC never clicked with me in either gameplay or story.

samplifier

9 hours ago

So: money, gambling, ego bloating, greed, eye candy, narcotics?

rvba

9 hours ago

sound (and lack of it) is something that gives aa lot of balance to the game

in brood war you get info when units are made and sounds wben they die. unless an invisible dark templar one shots your units, then no sound

also brood war is the better game

killerstorm

5 hours ago

BAR doesn't have a single-player campaign.

I find TA campaign quite enjoyable, but, sadly, controls are quite lacking. If nanolathe adds BAR-style controls to TA that would be interesting

slightlygrilled

9 hours ago

I have been working on this for supreme commander!

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...

daveidol

2 hours ago

This is super exciting! Also would love to see the code when you share it

willis936

4 hours ago

In your experience have you noticed that multi hour games on the largest maps have a tendency to crash? Is this fixed in your project?

mscbuck

9 hours ago

Dude.....I need this. SupCom is one of my favorite games of all time (especially the "World" custom map, so many games played on that one). Super excited

lysecret

8 hours ago

so cool! Loved sup com

samstress

10 hours ago

Random meta comment - but have you noticed that especially Codex generated websites tend to have these 01, 02, 03 numbers as part of card layouts? (see the section just below the header). It's almost the em-dash equivalent for AI built website detection.

coolius

7 hours ago

Also this pattern of every point being presented in two phrases saying the same thing always makes me take the points less seriously.

rubikscube09

2 hours ago

plus the ad nauseum repetition of details that no one cares about.

wormius

10 hours ago

I really despise these AI generated websites, they often look so samey. IDK about the numbering, but the overuse of cards everywhere, and abusing my favorite color schemes (tokyo-night, dracula style), really irritates me (esp, the color schemes, way to ruin even colors, guys).

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.

userbinator

8 hours ago

I don't think that's unique to AI --- many sites always had the same bland style, especially corporate ones, and I remember all the complaints about bootstrap.css when that was the trend many years ago.

JDups

3 hours ago

Websites for what were ostensibly hobby projects didn't use to have a bland corporate look to them.

And it really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.

pizzafeelsright

9 hours ago

I witness a large amount of AI generated pages at work and in the wild. Creative control belongs to the human because without it you get a scientifically accurate model without the stargazing factor.

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.

qarl

6 hours ago

Yeah - I don't even bother judging a website by how useful it is anymore - if I see an em-dash I close it before I can read anything.

Just safer that way. You don't want to get the AI on you.

philipov

10 hours ago

Planetary Annihilation was made by some of the people who worked on Total Annihilation:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihila...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation

More than just a spiritual successor, imo.

jaggederest

10 hours ago

Unfortunately did not even come close to capturing the magic of the original or TASpring / BAR though, sadly. I wanted to like it but it suffered from a lot of sequelitis.

ffsm8

10 hours ago

That game always felt more like supreme commander then TA to me... Personally I preferred the foss games spawned out of the spring engine like eg zero-k and the previously mentioned beyond all reason over it

philipov

10 hours ago

It's true that the game director Jon Mavor, who wrote the graphics engine for TA, was also the lead programmer on SC. And he's not the only point of confluence between the two games.

detritus

9 hours ago

Yerp, sadly spherical maps just didn't work. Imho, obv, but I really did try and persevere with it, believing in it at the time.

shepherdjerred

6 hours ago

I love the idea but multiple planets is too much mental overhead for me. I feel exhausted after playing

avhception

10 hours ago

The Supreme Commander community, the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, still has an active community here: https://faforever.com/ "Forged Alliance Forever" is also a great mod, balancing changes, game lobbies and whatnot.

vladms

8 hours ago

Not sure about this one, but there is another engine that started as a Total Annihilation clone: https://recoilengine.org/

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.

Tarks

8 hours ago

Zero K is deceptively amazing, like StarCraft mixed with supreme commander.

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

chaps

7 hours ago

It's really unfortunate that it's as good as it is because awful players (racists, cheaters, tactical pausers) really ruined the community.

Waterluvian

10 hours ago

I love this so much. Something I’m a bit obsessed with lately is watching AIs (the classic kind) battling endlessly in games like this. Total Annihilation is a great fit for it because the maps are often wide open and grand scale.

I think Beyond all Reason has had some 50v50s or close that are a bit ridiculous to watch.

nubinetwork

10 hours ago

TA's ai was pretty dumb, actually... on most maps with unpassable water, they'll happily crank out kbots without building any ships or planes, until it hits the unit limit.

Waterluvian

9 hours ago

Yup. Being able to API like open broodwar creates a way to make the game an arena for AIs on a ladder. Then there’s some more interesting stuff that can go on.

I love the idea of having some reinforcement learning approach that keeps generating new AI versions that play each other indefinitely.

DaveChurchill

11 hours ago

Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?

ygra

11 hours ago

I found it very tiring to read, actually.

joefourier

10 hours ago

I can get past the AI slop design myself, but the writing style is absolutely grating, especially the short repetitive phrases.

"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.

00deadbeef

2 hours ago

It's like it's based on the sample copy of component examples from libraries like Tailwind and Bootstrap. It's as if it hasn't separated those demos from marketing copy people actually used.

userbinator

8 hours ago

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.

jasondigitized

11 hours ago

What exactly looks bad about it? These models have been trained on high converting UX patterns. They are definitely homogenous but I am not sure they look bad.

JDups

3 hours ago

I made a similar reply to another comment here but,

It really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects, things that are for-fun creative projects, and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.

ThrowawayR2

10 hours ago

> "high converting UX patterns"

That _is_ the problem: ostensibly serious writing laced with marketing / clickbaity patterns is off-putting.

00deadbeef

2 hours ago

Haven't they also been trained on badly converting UI patterns?

ssl-3

8 hours ago

It lacks in... everything.

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.

DaveChurchill

10 hours ago

The homogenization of the internet. The worst corporate speak PR pages are now what gets generated for every pet project

singingtoday

6 hours ago

Everything. It's horrible. Bad colors, cringe delivery, awkward prose.

It's quintessential ai slop.

But that's fine, because nobody forced me to read it, so I'm unbothered.

rfgplk

10 hours ago

My biggest complaint (as always) is that the performance is abysmal. I wasn't going to click on it, but after reading this comment went in and tried to play the demo.

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 ")

arikrahman

11 hours ago

Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.

slightlygrilled

10 hours ago

I have actually been working on this!

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...

maqp

11 hours ago

Definitely! Supcoms downfall was the poor threading support and IIRC the in-game AI path finding continuing for destroyed AI units which bogged the game down over time. At least one of them was never fixed properly.

revolvingthrow

10 hours ago

SupCom FaF has a very long list of changes, I'd guess some of the people behind it already have access to source code. IMO only changes that are still missing is making it multi-threaded and maybe fixing some AI deficiencies such as pathing and the like.

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).

lysecret

11 hours ago

man i played so much supcom every time we played at like 2fps in the end haha

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs

11 hours ago

The game still looks great, what's stopping you from playing it?

ls612

11 hours ago

It has some major technical flaws which hold it back even on modern hardware. Something I’m sure a model can fix.

v3ss0n

2 hours ago

Beyond all reason is much balanced alternative and much much better , something AAA Stuidios cannot even dream of building .

sucrose

4 hours ago

This is amazing! Thank you for reminding me of the one game I spent so much time playing when I was young. I remember drawing the units on paper and playing with them on the table when I didn't have access to the computer.

haunter

11 hours ago

At this point with the speed AI assisted decomps, remakes, reverse engineered ports, and homebrews come out I think GTA VI will be "released" (not by Rockstar ofc) on PC days after the PS 5 release. Especially that an early leaked dev build, compiled on PC, is already out there which helps a lot with the case.

ErneX

9 hours ago

Not sure how will they rip it in days though, it won’t be on Blu-ray and it’s going to require a new firmware.

mmh0000

9 hours ago

I have such good memories of TA. I was about 12 years old when it was released, and it was one of my first "computer games". It was my first introduction to RTS games, and in a lot of ways defined the genre of games I love today.

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.

amiantos

10 hours ago

I wonder how long it will take society to move past the idea of intellectual property being a thing you can own / control / solely exploit. It seems to me that in the future, the spoils will go to the most motivated. Which is already how it works, but money has been the dividing factor: I am thinking of the web game Pandemic 2, it came out as an ugly flash game but it was a lot of fun. Then, another guy (who was on the Shacknews forum at the time) saw it, and I guess he had some money, so he hired artists and engineers and copied the game, creating Plague Inc, a much slicker and polished version of Pandemic 2. We should all be familiar with Plague Inc, as that guy is certainly a multi-millionaire now. But all he did was put more effort into some other idea he liked. It seems to me that this Total Annihilation port, and projects like Beyond All Reason, show that in some cases, humans can appreciate the idea that intellectual property isn't really locked up if the owners aren't exploiting it themselves. We just need to move the needle a little further: if you aren't properly exploiting your intellectual property, and someone else who is more motivated can do it better, that's fair game. Isn't that how it already works in so many cases, anyway? We're all just trying to build better widgets than each other, often just the same widget in so many different variants.

declan_roberts

10 hours ago

I don't think that's likely. A patent has always told everybody exactly how to re-create your magic. The protection never came from difficulty.

loorke

3 hours ago

Why this if there's ZeroK?

AlexErrant

10 hours ago

I love the TA soundtrack. (Pity about Jeremy Soule being an alleged predator.) The old RTS games (Age of Empires, Starcraft, Red Alert) had such great soundtracks.

layoric

7 hours ago

Taking abandonware titles, and essentially doing a port/remaster that isn't byte for byte accurate but is far easier to mod I think is where the interesting work and value is here. The legal side is going to get messy though.

singingtoday

6 hours ago

Very cool! I found the different rendering to deviate too far from the original renderer, so for now I think the version on Steam is a better experience.

But this is promising! I look forward to updates!!

dgently7

11 hours ago

i never played ta, but "beyond all reason" is worth mentioning as it seems to be also a more modern (relatively) take on ta. mostly similar units but a 3d engine etc. Also open source and free to play wo any of the dark patterns that pervert most modern multiplayer online games. "battle passes" , "pay to win", gambling "crates"

Induane

4 hours ago

Even though it was done with software rendering and a locked camera, the original TA engine is actually 3d, not isometric.

foolfoolz

10 hours ago

TA is an amazing game. Forged Alliance is a better game because it was made 10 years later. The open source FAF project to mod it and keep it alive can only go so far without engine replacement. I’m hoping we can see something like this for Forged Alliance. BAR is a TA clone, missing out on the structural improvements from Forged Alliance

rcxdude

10 hours ago

Yeah, BAR is more modern but doesn't have the feel I enjoy in FA. It's a little too... small scale and cartoony for my liking.

chainingsolid

9 hours ago

For me the 3.5 teirs of units in Supcom feels better then the TA style. The simple start with teir 1, the expantion of options with teir 2, sledge hammer of teir 3, ending with the experimentals. TA and clones felt like simple straight to end game.

apitman

9 hours ago

Dang there's been twice as much time between SupCom and now as there was between TA and SupCom.

Attummm

8 hours ago

This is incredible and still one of the best RTS games available. However, the old rendering engine somehow looks more appealing a similar issue with Shogun 2.

singingtoday

6 hours ago

Agreed. The original software renderer has better visibility and crisper graphics, but I'm sure that can be improved in this port.

Nition

10 hours ago

> The original isometric view gains a new sense of scale.

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.

ses1984

10 hours ago

Top down can be isometric. Isometric means “same measurements.”

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.

Nition

8 hours ago

I've always assumed that isometric as used in describing videogames refers to the isometric projection, which is a very specific angle - or at least games that look approximately isometric. Age Of Empires, SimCity 2000, Constructor etc. Some of them were actually Dimetric or something else, but I'd never have referred to, say, SimCity 1 as an isometric game.

Are you possibly thinking of "orthographic"?

ses1984

6 hours ago

A top down view and a 3/4 view can both be isometric.

Nition

6 hours ago

I don't think that's true. Do you have a definition you can link to maybe, that matches yours? Or can someone else here back one of us up?

Dylan16807

5 hours ago

They're definitely thinking of orthographic. (Of which isometric is a tiny subset.) The opposite of perspective.

Dylan16807

5 hours ago

It was not directly top down. The camera tilts north, and if search results can be trusted the specific angle is 27 degrees off of vertical.

Nition

4 hours ago

True, you can see the sides of buildings etc a little. I'll stick with my main point though that it's not isometric.

nirav72

10 hours ago

The best thing about TA years after it was released was the mod scene. Specifically around AI and unit mods. Because of that we kept playing it well until SupCom forged alliance was released.

talloaktrees

10 hours ago

People in the comments are misundertsanding the difference between a faithful remake and a "spritual successor" with completely different units, gameplay, and content.

dwroberts

10 hours ago

Why does it have the name nanolathe attached? What is that about? You can’t just steal an entire commercial game and give it a new name and pretend it’s your own thing

Kuyawa

4 hours ago

2026 – The year of the Rennaissance

tholford

6 hours ago

a golang game engine, you love to see it. well done!

Zadak

8 hours ago

Cool, but also, BAR is better mechanically, and content wise though

elgrandemarkito

2 hours ago

that's so cool, thanks for bringing those vibes back to life!

rvz

11 hours ago

> Same scene. Same instant.

closes tab.

Tr3nton

10 hours ago

Yep. The instant I pick up even a hint of Claudespeak the tab is closed.

someotherperson

11 hours ago

Cool! I wonder if Total Annihilation: Kingdoms would be supported!

forrestthewoods

9 hours ago

There's a dead comment asking about the use of the term "clean room". I'm not sure why. I am not entirely certain that deeply analyzing super detailed traces qualifies as "clean room".

Retr0id

10 hours ago

"Dynamic lighting / Bloom / Glow"

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!)

pdntspa

11 hours ago

Eat your heart out, Spring Engine

markus_zhang

11 hours ago

Guess this is going to be the norm and we will soon run out of games to decompile.

monster_truck

10 hours ago

The non slop version would be Zero-K

singingtoday

6 hours ago

Or Beyond All Reason Or balanced annihilation

IshKebab

8 hours ago

Interesting. Looks like he has made a "clean room" clone of TA by pointing AI at it, getting it to reverse engineer it and write some docs, and then have another AI write an implementation based on those docs.

I would be surprised if that stood up in court but I doubt anyone cares for TA at this point anyway.

singingtoday

6 hours ago

As long as everything was recreated, and not one bit of the original is used, you could win with the right lawyer (I think, IANAL)

dweinus

6 hours ago

When the page/text is a pile of slop, why would I have faith that more care was taken in the code?

nprateem

9 hours ago

> See the tank catch the blast, glow spread across the scene, and grass and healthy trees gain detail

How is anyone meant to understand this Claude bullshit

Jabrov

11 hours ago

So sick and tired of AI websites

drowntoge

9 hours ago

Now do Jagged Alliance 2.

nenrnlwmmgmnw

7 hours ago

JA2 is already open source. Great game, but the community isnt as big now a days.

bigstrat2003

9 hours ago

Sorry, but I'm not interested in AI slop. I care about stuff humans make, not stuff a machine makes.

noduerme

11 hours ago

I was wondering what this "clean-room" jargon actually meant, after looking at the Adobe ripoffs being vibe coded by ArtCraft.

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?

ThrowawayR2

2 hours ago

IIRC, that's how Compaq cloned IBM's PC BIOS, with humans doing the analysis instead of an LLM, without leaving IBM any legal grounds to sue Compaq for the cloning. Being a clean room re-implementation is also why Linux was able to clone UNIX without getting sued out of existence by AT&T or SCO so we'd all jolly well better hope that it still provides legal protection.

singingtoday

6 hours ago

Are you using the word "theft" colloquially or literally?

I'm just curious, people consider this theft?

Pannoniae

8 hours ago

imo the better question is whether it will actually get to court, and the precedent on that is mostly no. so it doesn't really matter i think

gmerc

4 hours ago

Copyright protects expression. Good luck with a technology that can morph to a hundred equivalent expressions.

Apocryphon

3 hours ago

I mean, they’ll probably train a law LLM to find a way to attack it.

totallymike

9 hours ago

Hooray. I’m glad we’re building all these data centers so that folks can pretend they accomplished something by making Claude vibeslop out another decompile

Rabbit504030201

9 hours ago

Typical "piracy with way too much effort". With modern ML tools, author could at least change all the graphics; but no, generic upscale.

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.

gmerc

4 hours ago

Since none of the copyrighted expression is included in the package, you need the original assets, that’s not very likely. You can copyright ideas, just a specific expression.

You’d have to redefine copyright as “claim to a latent space region”, which the techbros would love since theyd effectively get to sell that new land.

Narrative Startup right here