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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, BAR is a technical marvel. I haven't been in a 150 player match, but I recently hopped in a 40 vs 40 match, and the engine just handles it, it feels the same, except there's 80 teams on the map. The game doesn't even have unit caps, practically speaking.
One of my favorite moments was in this 40 vs 40 match, and I pressed pause and typed "door" in chat. People started to complain, but nobody unpaused it. A few seconds later I said "j/k" and unpaused myself--but for a brief moment, I felt the joy of having _79_ people waiting on me to go answer the door. I guess I'm just a troll at heart, the absurdity of it is funny to me.
I also love the lack of sophistication in the game that would allow a single player to pause a 40 vs 40 game. Anyone can pause, and anyone can unpause, and yet somehow the community is respectful enough to make that work.
The lack of sophistication doesn't mean the game is broken and crashes, it just means there's technical oddities which I appreciate as a programmer and old school gamer. There's even opportunities to script the game, add new widgets, and share them with others. It's an open-source game after all.
I have been in 50 v 50 .. and that is mervelous .. none of the AAA Game company can do a RTS SMOOTH as butter at 140 FPS while whole map is filled with 100 player explosions.
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.
They can't, they do not own the copyright to the engine code, and are bound by the terms of the open-source license. They cannot legally distribute the game as closed source.
What they are going to do is develop a single player "mod" that runs in the same engine, and they are using their money to help develop the game in the process.
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.
Yeah, I (noob) was able to win 3v3 with bots on both sides, but 1v1 with a bot was insane and from what I've seen people need some meta strategies specifically for that, so imo not viable for casual play. Bigger battles with bots also kind of feel all the same (and boring). I think you+friends vs bots would be fun
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
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.
I play BAR a few hours every week. Online games are really good and smooth. BAR is by far the best RTS out there today. It only misses an awesome single player, but its coming now.
Some of the elements in BAR is really awesome, radar, anti-radar, radar killing rockets, EMP on anti-nuke. The strategic depth and complexity is really at DOTA level.
It's by far the greatest RTS to play for the next 10+ years. And its free.
"Implement a fix to desync issues across the different platforms, using VMs and simulated networking as a starting point for validation. Make no mistakes"
What's wrong with that? Yes you can less around with strictmath and fixed-point and all that stuff, and if you have cross-platform determinism needs then you kind of have to.
But it's much easier and makes the game faster to just not bother, compile the windows version and let people play under Proton/Crossover :)
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.
The Spring Engine also has a modern re-implementation of TA called Tech Annihilation[1]. This version seems more focused on a faithful reimplementation, which I think the general TA community abandoned long ago because the actual OG TA is not a very well balanced game.
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).
It sort of does, they are not arranged in a campaign but there is a campaigns worth of single player scenarios included in BAR.
And this may be wrong, that is, I don't know how to confirm it, But I heard someone was working on a campaign, Which would be neat if true.
I quite like BAR but don't much enjoy PvP (I don't have the temperament or speed of thought for it, I like to pause and think too much). So I watch PvP games, and play AI skirmishes and scenarios.
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.
This is supremely exciting, thank you for working on this. I also immediately thought of Iroh for networking (nit: though I do think you could include the port in the copy-pastable player id).
Using Lua files for AI does not seem like a great idea if you have control over the game source, though you can likely run run one lua thread per AI player.
I wonder how much your project is an attempt at a faithful reverse-engineered version vs an improved one, though given that you improved on networking, I would guess the latter? There are many features I would love to see added in, such as multi-monitor (multi-window & multi view) support. My concern is: as you diverge more and more by adding features, you risk making it harder to compare to the original for accuracy.
Anyway, as I failed to install FAF in my Flatpaked Steam install a few years ago [1], I would really appreciate a native Linux build for this (though I guess I could try the .exe under Steam/Proton).
I also played a bit of Supreme Commander on my Steam Deck, and while it was playable, I would appreciate better controller integration (at least Steam Input to simplify UI overlay creation).
All of that, and more, would be doable with a decompiled port.
[1] It would have been possible, I needed to shoehorn a java runtime in there, but it didn't sound fun anymore and only had a few hours to play with friends
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
sup com is legitimately incredible I can't believe 20 years later and nothing has managed to match it yet. planetary annihilation was cool and did some interesting things but never felt as good. sanctuary shattered sun looks like it might be pretty good but it's still early and progress has been slow hopefully that can deliver.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I did really like PA, and still play it more often than SC/SC2/TA, but the UI was completely broken under Linux for a while (after a few years, it started running with software rendering, now the community more or less fixed it). To their credit though, they did have a Linux build.
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.
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.
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
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.
Tried to use it and the error messages and documentation were overwhelmingly unhelpful. Spent about an hour on it.
Maybe it will get better though, good luck!
I noticed that. I'm kinda surprised they cant get it working these days on Apple Silicon. I was excited to try it on my Neo but they noted OpenGL and a dependency is the hangup. Somewhat surprised this isnt on Vulkan or something (I think there is a Vulkan - Metal translation layer available)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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.
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.
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).
PvE vs. AI on maps larger than 10x10 slows down to a crawl after ~40minutes. It's not FPS (which remains perfectly smooth), though: it's the simulation speed, influenced by pathfinding, trajectories of every single projectile, managing construction, managing units' scripted movement, and all the AI decision-making. Plus the performance penalty of using Lua (and its GC) for parts of game logic. Apparently, all of that is crammed into a single thread, and by the time you have 1k units, simulating 1 second of in-game time can take 3-4 seconds (or more, obviously, depending on the CPU; but single-core performance stopped improving drastically at some point). It's been a few years since I last checked, but I'd be surprised if anything beyond 20x20 maps would be playable against the AI, even today. And since it's a matter of codebase architecture, fixing it would require a rewrite (someone in this thread is actually attempting it, which could be fun).
I played some TA in my time and recently stumbled upon replays on youtube. There is some way to play the single-player experience online already though a bit shady on the copyright it seems.
The original game got a lot of things right, I saw videos of Beyond All Reason and while I didn't play it it didn't quite _feel_ like it would give the same feedback while playing.
I was considering doing exactly that in my spare time, so thank you nanolathe I'll definitely check it out.
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
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.
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.
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.
> A patent has always told everybody exactly how to re-create your magic.
This is the theory, yes. Have you ever tried to actually do this? They are never written by engineers, and are much more focused on being as vague and broad as possible to be as useful a legal weapon as they can.
Patents are rarely even useful in reverse engineering, let alone enough on their own
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)
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
People in the comments are misundertsanding the difference between a faithful remake and a "spritual successor" with completely different units, gameplay, and content.
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
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".
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!)
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.
Yeah I'd be surprised. Law has a certain amount of common sense and if there's a new technique that just lets you easily clone any software they aren't going to say "aha good loophole you win".
Plus I think clean room process needs two separate teams and this is just one guy.
I did find this post from actual lawyers about it, but basically it's a grey area that hasn't been decided yet.
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.
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.
If they had sent the machine code through a modem, out a speaker, into a microphone and back into a modem, that would've been illegal. So what you're talking about, really, is just a legal exemption that's been carved out for humans who do work from scratch themselves. There's nothing about cloning a BIOS with a team of people rebuilding it that is necessarily not IP theft, or legally sacred either. It's just that there's an even stronger case to be made that having an LLM do it is fundamentally not clean, because the LLM is itself just a massive decompiler / compiler. A bunch of humans performing the same action are somewhat exempt by custom.
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
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.
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.
Don't assume your readers know anything at all. Work out your assumptions and always state them.
I was curious, but not enough to do more than a cursory search. Apparently it's some game I've never heard of and am not curious enough about to read an entire article on it to learn what it can't run on and why porting it was worth it.
State your axioms. That means, step 1, work out what your axioms are, and specify them.
I am pretty sure their first axiom is "this is only interesting to people who know TA already" and, as you suggest, that's probably correct. There's no reason to annoy your primary audience in trying to make your hobby project accessible to people who are not interested in it.
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/
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.
First time seeing the words bot bash but instantly recognized it as a synonym to comp stomp :).
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.
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.
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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.
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
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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.
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As someone who has played BAR, it's hard to read this as not being maximally sarcastic.
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Yeah, BAR is a technical marvel. I haven't been in a 150 player match, but I recently hopped in a 40 vs 40 match, and the engine just handles it, it feels the same, except there's 80 teams on the map. The game doesn't even have unit caps, practically speaking.
One of my favorite moments was in this 40 vs 40 match, and I pressed pause and typed "door" in chat. People started to complain, but nobody unpaused it. A few seconds later I said "j/k" and unpaused myself--but for a brief moment, I felt the joy of having _79_ people waiting on me to go answer the door. I guess I'm just a troll at heart, the absurdity of it is funny to me.
I also love the lack of sophistication in the game that would allow a single player to pause a 40 vs 40 game. Anyone can pause, and anyone can unpause, and yet somehow the community is respectful enough to make that work.
The lack of sophistication doesn't mean the game is broken and crashes, it just means there's technical oddities which I appreciate as a programmer and old school gamer. There's even opportunities to script the game, add new widgets, and share them with others. It's an open-source game after all.
I have been in 50 v 50 .. and that is mervelous .. none of the AAA Game company can do a RTS SMOOTH as butter at 140 FPS while whole map is filled with 100 player explosions.
Unexpected Winter, but a welcomed one.
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.
This is a great game, I will note however that I'm not sure what the future of the project will look like with the dark horse publisher getting signed
I worry that they may be looking to take it closed source
They can't, they do not own the copyright to the engine code, and are bound by the terms of the open-source license. They cannot legally distribute the game as closed source.
What they are going to do is develop a single player "mod" that runs in the same engine, and they are using their money to help develop the game in the process.
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.
Yeah, I (noob) was able to win 3v3 with bots on both sides, but 1v1 with a bot was insane and from what I've seen people need some meta strategies specifically for that, so imo not viable for casual play. Bigger battles with bots also kind of feel all the same (and boring). I think you+friends vs bots would be fun
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.
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
What's the difference? Looks the same to me.
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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.
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.
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. ;)
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Also bunch of vids by a guy called drongo. Haven't seen any recently (7 months) though
Can confirm, BAR is what you want...
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.
This seems trivial to prompt in with Claude, especially considering it's open source.
I keep meaning to try this game when I see it mentioned. It looks fun!
i both love and hate seeing this here, knowing it will grow BAR's noticeability.
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.
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.
I play BAR a few hours every week. Online games are really good and smooth. BAR is by far the best RTS out there today. It only misses an awesome single player, but its coming now.
Some of the elements in BAR is really awesome, radar, anti-radar, radar killing rockets, EMP on anti-nuke. The strategic depth and complexity is really at DOTA level.
It's by far the greatest RTS to play for the next 10+ years. And its free.
floats in a deterministic lockstep engine... oh dear me!!
It has to be possible to use fixed point arithmetic?
"Implement a fix to desync issues across the different platforms, using VMs and simulated networking as a starting point for validation. Make no mistakes"
What's wrong with that? Yes you can less around with strictmath and fixed-point and all that stuff, and if you have cross-platform determinism needs then you kind of have to.
But it's much easier and makes the game faster to just not bother, compile the windows version and let people play under Proton/Crossover :)
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.
Isn't this just the ebitengine doing all the work, with someone having used AI to vibe code TA functionality on top of it?
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The Spring Engine also has a modern re-implementation of TA called Tech Annihilation[1]. This version seems more focused on a faithful reimplementation, which I think the general TA community abandoned long ago because the actual OG TA is not a very well balanced game.
[1] https://github.com/techannihilation/TA
>His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft)
What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?
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).
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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
It sort of does, they are not arranged in a campaign but there is a campaigns worth of single player scenarios included in BAR.
And this may be wrong, that is, I don't know how to confirm it, But I heard someone was working on a campaign, Which would be neat if true.
I quite like BAR but don't much enjoy PvP (I don't have the temperament or speed of thought for it, I like to pause and think too much). So I watch PvP games, and play AI skirmishes and scenarios.
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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...
This is supremely exciting, thank you for working on this. I also immediately thought of Iroh for networking (nit: though I do think you could include the port in the copy-pastable player id).
Using Lua files for AI does not seem like a great idea if you have control over the game source, though you can likely run run one lua thread per AI player.
I wonder how much your project is an attempt at a faithful reverse-engineered version vs an improved one, though given that you improved on networking, I would guess the latter? There are many features I would love to see added in, such as multi-monitor (multi-window & multi view) support. My concern is: as you diverge more and more by adding features, you risk making it harder to compare to the original for accuracy.
Anyway, as I failed to install FAF in my Flatpaked Steam install a few years ago [1], I would really appreciate a native Linux build for this (though I guess I could try the .exe under Steam/Proton).
I also played a bit of Supreme Commander on my Steam Deck, and while it was playable, I would appreciate better controller integration (at least Steam Input to simplify UI overlay creation).
All of that, and more, would be doable with a decompiled port.
[1] It would have been possible, I needed to shoehorn a java runtime in there, but it didn't sound fun anymore and only had a few hours to play with friends
looks great. can it run gap without someone dropping at minute 4?
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?
This is super exciting! Also would love to see the code when you share it
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
sup com is legitimately incredible I can't believe 20 years later and nothing has managed to match it yet. planetary annihilation was cool and did some interesting things but never felt as good. sanctuary shattered sun looks like it might be pretty good but it's still early and progress has been slow hopefully that can deliver.
Is there a repo?
so cool! Loved sup com
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.
I have observed how all these AI generated websites look similar, but it bothers me so much less than AI generated writing does.
Like these sites simply look good, and if they had been built before AI people would have loved them.
Also this pattern of every point being presented in two phrases saying the same thing always makes me take the points less seriously.
plus the ad nauseum repetition of details that no one cares about.
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.
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.
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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.
And the eyebrows have eyebrows
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I did really like PA, and still play it more often than SC/SC2/TA, but the UI was completely broken under Linux for a while (after a few years, it started running with software rendering, now the community more or less fixed it). To their credit though, they did have a Linux build.
I love the idea but multiple planets is too much mental overhead for me. I feel exhausted after playing
I bought an entire new PC in 2014 mainly for PA and it was incredibly disappointing. It was inferior in almost every way to supcom FA.
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.
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.
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
It's really unfortunate that it's as good as it is because awful players (racists, cheaters, tactical pausers) really ruined the community.
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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.
Tried to use it and the error messages and documentation were overwhelmingly unhelpful. Spent about an hour on it. Maybe it will get better though, good luck!
I wish the useful improvements would be ported to https://github.com/open-annihilation/open-annihilation which seems a better open source project.
Spiritual successor already exists: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason
Sort of. Back in the day I could play TA on my Mac.
I noticed that. I'm kinda surprised they cant get it working these days on Apple Silicon. I was excited to try it on my Neo but they noted OpenGL and a dependency is the hangup. Somewhat surprised this isnt on Vulkan or something (I think there is a Vulkan - Metal translation layer available)
After digging I found this - https://github.com/benbreen/RecoilEngine-AppleSilicon Looks like someone has ported and successfully gotten some or all of it working.
Yep I played via “Classic mode” until Apple removed support
I like how they documented the original game's data formats: https://nanolathe.gg/docs/
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.
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.
As a kid I loved waiting the computer to do this and send that "nuclear" missile that blew pretty much everything
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.
I made AIs (the new kind) create AIs (the classic kind) to battle in old games. That was a serious experiment! http://replicated.live/blog/games
Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?
I found it very tiring to read, actually.
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.
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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.
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.
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> "high converting UX patterns"
That _is_ the problem: ostensibly serious writing laced with marketing / clickbaity patterns is off-putting.
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.
The homogenization of the internet. The worst corporate speak PR pages are now what gets generated for every pet project
Haven't they also been trained on badly converting UI patterns?
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.
People that generate slop tend to lack in good taste. It's tautologic, really.
Honestly, it's the last type of people that I want to touch creative products such as video games.
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 ")
I've been playing it with the beta client and it runs at 4K without a hiccup
It's great. But I just play Beyond All Reason now.
Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.
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...
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.
I've played the LOUD mod for years, seems to solve a bunch of performance problems.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...
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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).
man i played so much supcom every time we played at like 2fps in the end haha
The game still looks great, what's stopping you from playing it?
PvE vs. AI on maps larger than 10x10 slows down to a crawl after ~40minutes. It's not FPS (which remains perfectly smooth), though: it's the simulation speed, influenced by pathfinding, trajectories of every single projectile, managing construction, managing units' scripted movement, and all the AI decision-making. Plus the performance penalty of using Lua (and its GC) for parts of game logic. Apparently, all of that is crammed into a single thread, and by the time you have 1k units, simulating 1 second of in-game time can take 3-4 seconds (or more, obviously, depending on the CPU; but single-core performance stopped improving drastically at some point). It's been a few years since I last checked, but I'd be surprised if anything beyond 20x20 maps would be playable against the AI, even today. And since it's a matter of codebase architecture, fixing it would require a rewrite (someone in this thread is actually attempting it, which could be fun).
It has some major technical flaws which hold it back even on modern hardware. Something I’m sure a model can fix.
I played some TA in my time and recently stumbled upon replays on youtube. There is some way to play the single-player experience online already though a bit shady on the copyright it seems.
The original game got a lot of things right, I saw videos of Beyond All Reason and while I didn't play it it didn't quite _feel_ like it would give the same feedback while playing.
I was considering doing exactly that in my spare time, so thank you nanolathe I'll definitely check it out.
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
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.
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.
Dang there's been twice as much time between SupCom and now as there was between TA and SupCom.
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.
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.
Man I love this game, so glad to see it again
AI;DR
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.
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.
> A patent has always told everybody exactly how to re-create your magic.
This is the theory, yes. Have you ever tried to actually do this? They are never written by engineers, and are much more focused on being as vague and broad as possible to be as useful a legal weapon as they can.
Patents are rarely even useful in reverse engineering, let alone enough on their own
[flagged]
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)
I'm not really sure what this means?
Dude stop bringing politics into everything. Cover yourself in mud if you like that stuff, stop spraying it around though.
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.
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.
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Aside that its created by AI, I find the choise to implement it in Go interesting. go.mod lists Ebiten and it is amazing to see how well it works.
I played these games really long time ago, did they solve the busy cpu0 problem? How's the multicore support now?
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"
Even though it was done with software rendering and a locked camera, the original TA engine is actually 3d, not isometric.
I know i am pedantic, sorry.
The engine was more like a hybrid 2d/3d. Units were 3d, everything else brilliantly faked.
I mean, i played it on really weak machine (high end 486 or a cheap pentium), and it worked like charm, no gpu involved.
after seeing this, i couldnt help but create https://games.zabaca.com/games/metal-front/
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.
That damn voiceover was amazing from the original TA
Super interesting. Was the creation of these four rules agentic?
https://github.com/nanolathe-gg/nanolathe/blob/main/AGENTS.m...
Feels like a person directed them to prevent parallel agents stepping on each other's toes.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"?
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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.
True, you can see the sides of buildings etc a little. I'll stick with my main point though that it's not isometric.
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!!
>Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers
Isn't that what AI is?
Beyond all reason is much balanced alternative and much much better , something AAA Stuidios cannot even dream of building .
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.
Agreed. The original software renderer has better visibility and crisper graphics, but I'm sure that can be improved in this port.
People in the comments are misundertsanding the difference between a faithful remake and a "spritual successor" with completely different units, gameplay, and content.
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
Why this if there's ZeroK?
Guess this is going to be the norm and we will soon run out of games to decompile.
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".
Cool, but also, BAR is better mechanically, and content wise though
"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!)
> Same scene. Same instant.
closes tab.
Yep. The instant I pick up even a hint of Claudespeak the tab is closed.
a golang game engine, you love to see it. well done!
Cool! I wonder if Total Annihilation: Kingdoms would be supported!
2026 – The year of the Rennaissance
The Modern resolution is higher, but I find the explosions looked better in the Classic style.
Eat your heart out, Spring Engine
When the page/text is a pile of slop, why would I have faith that more care was taken in the code?
The non slop version would be Zero-K
Or Beyond All Reason Or balanced annihilation
that's so cool, thanks for bringing those vibes back to life!
> 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
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.
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)
Yeah I'd be surprised. Law has a certain amount of common sense and if there's a new technique that just lets you easily clone any software they aren't going to say "aha good loophole you win".
Plus I think clean room process needs two separate teams and this is just one guy.
I did find this post from actual lawyers about it, but basically it's a grey area that hasn't been decided yet.
https://www.beankinney.com/news-and-insights/blogs/512000-li...
So sick and tired of AI websites
Sorry, but I'm not interested in AI slop. I care about stuff humans make, not stuff a machine makes.
Now do Jagged Alliance 2.
JA2 is already open source. Great game, but the community isnt as big now a days.
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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?
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.
If they had sent the machine code through a modem, out a speaker, into a microphone and back into a modem, that would've been illegal. So what you're talking about, really, is just a legal exemption that's been carved out for humans who do work from scratch themselves. There's nothing about cloning a BIOS with a team of people rebuilding it that is necessarily not IP theft, or legally sacred either. It's just that there's an even stronger case to be made that having an LLM do it is fundamentally not clean, because the LLM is itself just a massive decompiler / compiler. A bunch of humans performing the same action are somewhat exempt by custom.
Are you using the word "theft" colloquially or literally?
I'm just curious, people consider this theft?
Yeah? If I print out a pdf and then scan it back in, it doesn't matter what process was followed to end up with an identical end product.
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
Copyright protects expression. Good luck with a technology that can morph to a hundred equivalent expressions.
I mean, they’ll probably train a law LLM to find a way to attack it.
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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
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.
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
Fails at the first step, for me. WTF is "Total Annihilation"?
There's a sort of motto in technical writing: every page is page 1.
https://everypageispageone.com/
Don't assume your readers know anything at all. Work out your assumptions and always state them.
I was curious, but not enough to do more than a cursory search. Apparently it's some game I've never heard of and am not curious enough about to read an entire article on it to learn what it can't run on and why porting it was worth it.
State your axioms. That means, step 1, work out what your axioms are, and specify them.
I am pretty sure their first axiom is "this is only interesting to people who know TA already" and, as you suggest, that's probably correct. There's no reason to annoy your primary audience in trying to make your hobby project accessible to people who are not interested in it.
"Everything you need to know should be on the first page"
"I didn't read the first page"
It states right there up front that it's a game and even shows a demo of it playing...