Comment by somat
1 day 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.
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?
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
Total Annihilation infamously used additive balancing, where they would add a new unit to "balance" things. I don't think it worked very well but it was fun getting a new unit every week or two.
>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).
It's highly ironic that you've chosen to take this position about starcraft, one of the best playing games of all time.
Like, no, cutscenes have nothing do with improving gameplay, but they don't detract from it either.
The game itself is the epitome of responding to a user's inputs precisely the way they would expect them to.
There's certainly some design decisions you can dislike, (some of which were basically technical limitations) like some of the hot keys and workers not rallying, but those are pretty minor compared to the sheer perfection that is the rest of the game.
You can prefer a different type of game, one where you give high level orders to units or start with an army instead of building it, but that's clearly a very different genre of game and not one that TA and its children are trying to be.
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> Not that Starcraft plays bad, but none of the fluff contributes to gameplay. And that gameplay takes a lot more micromanagement than it needs to(some people like this. me, not so much)
As the gen Zs would say: Skill Issue.
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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.
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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
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.
I really like the vibe of TA campaign - there's no complex plot but it's quite tasteful: "What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machine, escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. ..." CORE is uploaded minds, ARM is cyborgs with human flesh in them. Epic fight, epic music...
People are working on BAR campaign, but it's like space war between different empires. I don't care for that kind of stuff, there's already too much content of this kind.
BAR scenarios are quite interesting, indeed...