189 pointsby jttnr3 hours ago35 comments
  • modeless2 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/

    • Lucasoato2 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.

      • nylonstrung6 minutes 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

      • techjamie2 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.

      • thebluegecko2 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.
      • searealistan hour ago
        As someone who has played BAR, it's hard to read this as not being maximally sarcastic.
        • Lucasoato15 minutes ago
          Man, I got flamed hard even for losing against one of the game developers, the community is cooked.
        • dgently725 minutes 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.

    • reactordevan hour ago
      Can confirm, BAR is what you want...
    • thaumasiotesan hour 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.

      • Havoc18 minutes ago
        Also bunch of vids by a guy called drongo. Haven't seen any recently (7 months) though
    • lloydatkinson29 minutes ago
      I keep meaning to try this game when I see it mentioned. It looks fun!
  • mmh0000a few seconds 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.

  • somat2 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.

    • ThrowawayR2an hour 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.

      • Quothlingan hour 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?
    • PorciiVorbescan hour ago
      >His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft)

      What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?

      • somatan hour 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).
        • philipovan hour 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.
          • IsTom26 minutes 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.
          • samplifieran hour ago
            So: money, gambling, ego bloating, greed, eye candy, narcotics?
        • rvba25 minutes 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

  • slightlygrilledan hour 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...

    • mscbuckan hour 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
  • philipov2 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.

    • detritus18 minutes 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.
    • jaggederest2 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.
    • ffsm82 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
      • philipov2 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.
  • samstress2 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.
    • wormiusan hour 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.

      • pizzafeelsrightan hour 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.

  • wobblywobbegong2 hours ago
    Spiritual successor already exists: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason
  • Waterluvian2 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.

    • nubinetworkan hour 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.
      • Waterluvianan hour 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.

  • arikrahman2 hours ago
    Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.
    • revolvingthrow2 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).

    • maqp2 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.
    • slightlygrilledan hour 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...

    • lysecret2 hours ago
      man i played so much supcom every time we played at like 2fps in the end haha
    • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs2 hours ago
      The game still looks great, what's stopping you from playing it?
      • ls6122 hours ago
        It has some major technical flaws which hold it back even on modern hardware. Something I’m sure a model can fix.
  • avhception2 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.
  • haunter2 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.
    • ErneX28 minutes 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.
  • amiantos2 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_roberts2 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.
    • 12h4atr2 hours ago
      Did you attend the Roy Cohn school of ethics like Trump?
      • RugnirViking33 minutes ago
        Why the random swipes? This is a really interesting topic that doesn't deserve this kinda treatment. Reasonable people disagree on the concept of intellectual property (though most agree the west's current iteration has serious problems)
      • amiantos42 minutes ago
        I'm not really sure what this means?
      • cregy13 minutes ago
        Dude stop bringing politics into everything. Cover yourself in mud if you like that stuff, stop spraying it around though.
  • dgently72 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"
  • foolfoolz2 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
    • apitman31 minutes ago
      Dang there's been twice as much time between SupCom and now as there was between TA and SupCom.
    • rcxdude2 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.
      • chainingsolid40 minutes 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.
  • Rabbit50403020136 minutes 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.

  • forrestthewoods23 minutes 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".
  • talloaktreesan hour ago
    People in the comments are misundertsanding the difference between a faithful remake and a "spritual successor" with completely different units, gameplay, and content.
  • nirav722 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.
  • 2 hours ago
    undefined
  • AlexErrant2 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.
  • DaveChurchill2 hours ago
    Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?
    • ygra2 hours ago
      I found it very tiring to read, actually.
      • joefourier2 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.

    • jasondigitized2 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.
      • ThrowawayR2an hour ago
        > "high converting UX patterns"

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

      • DaveChurchill2 hours ago
        The homogenization of the internet. The worst corporate speak PR pages are now what gets generated for every pet project
    • rfgplk2 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 ")

  • Nition2 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.

    • ses1984an hour 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.

    • 34 minutes ago
      undefined
  • bigstrat20033 minutes ago
    Sorry, but I'm not interested in AI slop. I care about stuff humans make, not stuff a machine makes.
  • markus_zhang2 hours ago
    Guess this is going to be the norm and we will soon run out of games to decompile.
  • pdntspa2 hours ago
    Eat your heart out, Spring Engine
  • someotherperson2 hours ago
    Cool! I wonder if Total Annihilation: Kingdoms would be supported!
  • dwroberts2 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
  • Retr0id2 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!)

  • nprateem14 minutes 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

  • drowntoge30 minutes ago
    Now do Jagged Alliance 2.
  • rvz2 hours ago
    > Same scene. Same instant.

    closes tab.

  • Jabrov2 hours ago
    So sick and tired of AI websites
  • monster_truckan hour ago
    The non slop version would be Zero-K
  • totallymike23 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • noduerme2 hours ago
    [dead]