Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers
nanolathe.gg
nanolathe.gg
150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0
If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.
Maybe I'll give it another look.
unfortunately that is a totally fair assessment. its a deep and detailed game with lots of units, commands, mechanics and a few maps that have extremely developed meta.
this is only a problem if you think you can drop into multiplayer on literal day 1 without even doing any of the local/non ai learning options the game provides and expect your team to just deal with you not even knowing the basics.
And even then if you start in "noob" lobbies people are pretty helpful, to the extent that they are trying to play the game and give you tips and can only do/type so much.
so its simple... 1. play the scenerios/vs to learn the basics. also watch some yt basics guides 2. join noob lobbies. 3. when people try to help you and they sound mad/terse/short it helps to assume they are just busy with their own match and are doing their best to play and help you learn. if they give you advice try to take it. 4. do your best and ping out when things are going bad in your lane.
the community on there really is very much "nicer" to noobs that many games, especially ones that are co-op team based. but you do need to have realistic expectations. people will get upset if you mess up their games bc you havent at least tried to learn how to play at all.
You are way out on the edge of the bell curve. You only want to play with similar people. That's fine. But own up to it and don't pretend it's friendly to newbies.
That's fine! But. Again. Own it instead of pretending it's something it's not
And id bet they put up with it because "getting flamed" in bar is like 1000% less toxic than most online games and so i stand by 'friendly' on the relative scale of competitive online games today.
1. do the tutorial, maybe watch a guide
2. follow the dedicated onboarding track
3. give people around you the benefit of the doubt
4. point things out even if you don't know how to deal with them
however, installing the game and jumping into multiplayer and selecting the first open lobby is just not a good experience for anyone.
It is still a game with a learning curve and tons ways to climb it. For as steep as that curve is I might suggest that bar is one of the more newb friendly player bases.
Its like if you showed up in cod and literally didn't know how to move your character and somehow naded your team to cause them to lose. Do you think those players would be like "good on ya try harder next time, maybe use the joystick if you wanna move around"... no way.. But i see something like the bar version of that in noob lobbies all the time.
Still, it's a competitive online game, people can get frustrated with you if you literally don't know how to play. You will get frustrated with them trying to help you but not being especially nice about it. and it will be a bad experience.
It's a legit criticism that bar doesn't have a lot of guardrails to help you in the first days. in that sense its absolutely not noob friendly, nobody says it is. If a game has to be candy crush level simple to be "noob friendly" then bar is far to complex for that either, its just not that style of game.
follow my (probably still a bar noob) advice or not, im just trying to help you have a good experience in your first weeks in the game.
... and if suggesting that before you go into competitive play you literally just play the tutorial or vs ai is "complex" then bar is probably not the game for you, but if you ever end up in a lobby with me id still try to help you anyway.
I started multiplayer mostly with a popular mod. I think the mod was popular for a multitude of reasons, one of them being classes and some classes were easier for the newbies to play (and also easier with bad internet connection, this game is old). You wouldn't need to master everything, some classes were more about just spamming explosives, some about aim, some about movement, some about prediction etc.
Then we got into the base game. It was quite sparse and not so fun as a team game at first. But it turned out, 1on1 was great fun if your opponent was about the same level as you (and with a proper map). Only then after that it started making more sense as a team game.
I think many games would benefit from some newbie-friendly format or mod or what you call it. In an FPS a mode where you are some class and already spawn with some decent weapon etc. So then you can concentrate on that.
In an RTS, don't know what it would be, maybe just have a lot less buildings, units and game mechanisms to choose from for newbies. Like a simplified mod with no air or sea units and no special buildings.
And, you know, I'm a bit of a BAR developer myself. I added a UI widget that shows the number of active "Pinpointers", and now anyone can install it with one in-game click, if they want.
It's very much a game of team coordination where the power curve is exponential but also can have huge turnarounds since buildings are fragile but drive the economy entirely
So naturally you have to know how to play your specific role or it can throw the game for everyone else
It's not casual like Command and Conquer or something, but nor is it incredibly sweaty like StarCraft or DOTA
I feel like whether a game is considered sweaty or casual is more dependent on the game mode (e.g. ranked vs normal, UMS vs ladder etc).
I have a few friends who used to really get into C&C games, and factional balance is basically nonexistent (with the resident 'good guy' faction being the best), and usually the winning strategy is to just mass produce whatever bang for buck unit that faction has (basic tanks most likely).
We have allsorts. If you can put up with the occasional misery there’s a lot of fun to be had.
Edit: Just realised I might've fallen for the satire--thats on me.
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.
So, in your opinion, Beyond All Reason is getting more new players than Starcraft 2 is?
The Total Annihilation fans are probably even more marketing resistant than Starcraft fans.
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.
I’m sure many will like it, but if you’re expecting it to be like TA or FAF then you may be disappointed.
BAR feels to me like someone took the various noob complaints about FAF (commander sniping, complex tech trees, slow pace) and applied them all to reduce the scope of the game.
People who compare BAR to FAF don’t seem to understand that. Your target audience isn’t former FAF players who like to coordinate epic multi-hour games, it’s players of fast-paced lobby RTSes.
Multiplayer FAF games are fast, like 20 minutes, sometimes much more, but usually not too long.
Are you talking about FAF single player? Where you can noodle around for hours and the AI exists for the sole purpose of giving the player something to shoot at?
You might be missing an important detail: every shot counts. In early game, at least.
Late game is kinda janky tbh
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.
I worry that they may be looking to take it 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.
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.
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.
What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?
By the time my crowd had reliable enough connections for multiplayer, the number of people who knew and liked Starcraft from that campaign was much higher than the number who'd either gotten to love TA from the campaign or from vs-computer matches.
Quake3 was released a year(ish) later and effectively had no single player and it was a major success (by the standards of the day)
Being online was a major, major factor.
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
As the gen Zs would say: Skill Issue.
Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.
Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.
And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.
SupCom is interesting to play and boring to watch. Tier 1 rushes are map specific to your point… but then Tier 1 units are irrelevant.
Risk would be similarly boring to watch. It’s not that it’s a bad game (quite the contrary).
Blizzard has to balance the meta as the meta is so extensively studied - because it has an audience.
Starcraft came way before that was even a thing
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.
If you dislike the micro required, thats fine, but just because it doesnt suite your preference doesn't mean its bad or clunky.
Just say “I dont like it”.
Thats fine.
If you want to “get” it, devote a few days to playing online multiplayer.
Also interesting, they went with a specific kind of maps with things like nearly identical mineral lines, no islands or isolated high/low ground, map symmetry, not to big, not to small, ramps, chokes etc and then they balance the game mechanics around those maps making those choices almost permanent.
I use to download a lot of replays and there is a lot more technical fun to be had that is pretty much irrelevant in apm battles. It is also funny to see the game fall apart on maps that don't follow the standard design. Like, flying buildings should be fun not useless or the end of the world.
It's incredibly hard to divorce the map from the unit balance in a game like this and people eventually just settled on some combination of standard map features in order to balance around.
That being said, I think sc2 is considerably worse about map variety (mostly due to having more air units and more responsive/smaller collision box armies), every season bw had at least one "wacky" map pros were expected to play on, whether that involves islands or the nearly infinite number of tricks designers pulled off using minerals and gas geysers and such as ways to force certain play patterns
A couple of times they'd even design maps in such a way that one of your close expansion bases started off covered in creep, meaning zerg players could build there whenever they wantes but the other races had to destroy the creep first, with the idea being to make zerg stronger.
I think flying buildings are an interesting example of a fairly useful ability that ends up being extremely subtle, sort of like zerg healing. In almost any pro game, a terran player will lift off at least one building, frequently more (depending on how long the game lasts), but it's rarely a huge game defining moment, just a little optimization (unless they manage to lift off the barracks just when the speedlings show up...)
As you say, there's a balance between apm and "pure strategy", at one end you have chess and the other, dunno, bw I guess, and where you design for is going to involve a whole bunch of subjective factors.
Your experience of the game is going to change dramatically depending on when you first played it and how much experience you have with the genre in general. For all my gushing adoration for the game, it is well over a quarter-century old at this point and even then it assumed a fair amount of knowledge and understanding about how the genre works.
When you say "close to beating it" I assume you're talking about the single player campaign, as opposed to the multiplayer death matches?
It's impossible for me to separate my current opinion from the decades of memories I have bound up in the game, but I think the campaign still holds up today, especially in the remastered version. It tells an interesting story with missions that are still fun to play, assuming you enjoy the basic rts build base make units attack enemy.
Like I said, it's hard to tell exactly what part of it you're having problems with, the fundamental gameplay loop is start with a small base, build workers, gather more resources, build bigger base, use bigger base to build army, use army to secure more resource areas to build even bigger base, use biggerer base to build biggest army, win map.
If you're having trouble actually beating the campaigns, 90% of the time the problem is people aren't building enough workers, the exact math gets a little complicated but as a very general rule of thumb you should probably have 25-26 workers for every set of minerals you have a base at, and you should be prioritizing building these workers above basically everything else.
Once you reach something like 8 workers mining minerals you can afford to both constantly build workers and build other units, then once you hit 26 or so you can stop building workers and focus on maxing out your army. Generally speaking the campaign AI is pretty forgiving, concentrating on defense for the first 10 minutes and then pushing out with a maxed out army works on like 90% of the maps.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say about clunky and slow. If the game is too slow, you can actually change what speed it plays at in the options menu, it actually defaults to a medium speed that nobody actually plays the game at, everyone plays at fastest setting, so dunno, maybe that's it. Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less, that's the nature of this type of game, you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.
I think that's the core of a big criticism of Starcraft. After a certain point, it almost becomes a rhythm game.
The actual depth of the units was also smaller, compared to the fairly rich dynamics of TA.
This doesn't make it a worse game, but it is distinctly different.
I've never once touched the multiplayer mode. I don't recall seeing the option for it. I mean, I'm sure it's there, but I don't remember it, which means I've never clicked on it. So, yes, single player campaign only. A decent amount of the original, and then about half a level of Brood War when I skipped forward one time.
Wow, that sounds like a hella lotta workers. I vaguely recall trying that in a mission or two where I had severe resource problems, but then I didn't have enough offensive units and ran out of minerals by mining them too fast. Hmm... I remember getting frustration-curiosity a couple times and checking YouTube videos of how people beat missions I was completely stuck on, and being very unsatisfied because what I saw worked when I tried it myself but I didn't understand it (I can tell I didn't understand it because I don't remember it).
I didn't know there's a speed setting. That could make missions less of a long-ass slog, although, uh, controlling every unit at once? That sounds like a massive amount of busywork and I'm not confident I could pull it off (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean). What I meant by "slow" is the missions can drag on for a reeeaaaally long time, and by "clunky and fiddly", I mean it was hard to make things happen because of all the... not sure how to describe it. I guess I'd want to change the speed lower, but then everything would take too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if by "the genre" you mean real-time strategy games, StarCraft is the only one I have any level of familiarity with, so if it assumes you already know that stuff, then that's probably a problem. When I said it's "a confusing sequence of disconnected events", I mean I couldn't correlate most of what I did to any of what happened. It was just random stuff happening most of the time, and when I changed my approach, I couldn't predict what the outcome would be and no significant learning occurred.
Despite all that, I really do like the game (wouldn't be talkin' about it so much if I didn't). I appreciate your advice, too. I'll have to see if I can get the thing running again.
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I have to admit my experience lies mostly in Brood War, and surely "the game responds intuitively to user inputs" is not one of the ways you'd describe it? That game is notoriously clunky in how it handles user input, both in terms of selection limitations, unit path finding, etc.
Don't get me wrong. I love Brood War. It's the only competitive video game scene I've really cared about. But I love it for its clunky user experience (which requires mechanical mastery in addition to a sound tactical mind), not because it's so smooth.
That being said, at some point units being "bad" at doing certain things becomes part of the balance.
To whoever put it together, thank you.
That said, BAR was great fun when I tried it and very well done. Even has a rapidly growing youtube community.
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 :)
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.
It has to be possible to use fixed point arithmetic?
I find TA campaign quite enjoyable, but, sadly, controls are quite lacking. If nanolathe adds BAR-style controls to TA that would be interesting
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.
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...
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...
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
It makes me dislike whatever they're trying to "sell" (literally or metaphorically). I wish people who wanted to be "creative" would you know... be creative, not just "push button, machine go brrr" which is what half this stuff spits out. Template, generic, no individuality. Hyper "professional" looking (but just "cool" enough to not be completely corporate).
On the other hand some of these look better and are more responsive than older sites that were definitely fuglier, klunky and less responsive. It feels like there's a middle ground, which I think is where good designer comes into play.
I have built a few better sites after AI generates the shell. The colors and styling need about a dozen human interactions to get something passable as human created.
And it really gives me the ick when I see websites about things like game modding projects and they're full of AI linkedin-speak. I feel like if you were excited about building a mod for a game you wouldn't need AI to describe it for you, or write the announcements/reddit posts trying to reach out to the community.
Just safer that way. You don't want to get the AI on you.
Like these sites simply look good, and if they had been built before AI people would have loved them.
One-shot websites from all the LLMs over the past 12 months (at the very least GPT, claude, glm, qwen based on my own experience) always add these stupid things. All you have to do is tell it to not include 2 digit section numbers in eyebrow text, and it'll stop instantly, but the people making these low effort sites just don't care.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihila...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation
More than just a spiritual successor, imo.
Some of the (open source) games on that engine (https://beyondallreason.info/ and https://zero-k.info/) have similar feeling with the original TA, with quite different play styles. I do prefer Zero-K over Beyond All Reason, but I would recommend anyone interested in the genre to try both and decide for themselves.
The lead Dev's "Cold takes" blog series are dripping with the sort of insights you only get from years of hard won iteration and if you like RTS games are a joy to read : https://zero-k.info/mediawiki/Cold_Takes
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.
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.
I think Beyond all Reason has had some 50v50s or close that are a bit ridiculous to watch.
I love the idea of having some reinforcement learning approach that keeps generating new AI versions that play each other indefinitely.
"Punchy phrase. No X." "An open engine. Room to make it your own. "Same scene. Same instant. The same explosion. A different atmosphere." "A few things to know. The short answers."
Why is it always the same? What awful post-training, or synthetic data training pipeline, or RLHF gone wrong, produced this homogenised, low variety slop style? And it's totally possible for LLMs to write actually decent or at least varied prose and I would think Anthropic (or OpenAI) has the resources to fix the issue, they just choose not to.
Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me.
It was, or at least the most popular sites used it. LLMs just amplified it.
That _is_ the problem: ostensibly serious writing laced with marketing / clickbaity patterns is off-putting.
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.
It's quintessential ai slop.
But that's fine, because nobody forced me to read it, so I'm unbothered.
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.
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 ")
Honestly, it's the last type of people that I want to touch creative products such as video games.
I wish the useful improvements would be ported to https://github.com/open-annihilation/open-annihilation which seems a better open source project.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/loud-ai-supreme-commander-forged-...
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).
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...
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
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.
Come on ChatGPT/Claude, you're smart enough to know the original wasn't an isometric perspective. It was directly top-down, no camera rotation. 3D over 2D terrain with a heightmap.
It refers to how the viewport is not like a camera above 3D terrain. Instead, you see each point below as though directly above. In other words, you can only ever see the top of an object regardless of whether it is centered or on the edge.
If it wasn’t isometric, you would see more of the sides of objects that are near the edges.
Are you possibly thinking of "orthographic"?
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.
I would be surprised if that stood up in court but I doubt anyone cares for TA at this point anyway.
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...
https://github.com/nanolathe-gg/nanolathe/blob/main/AGENTS.m...
closes tab.
But this is promising! I look forward to updates!!
How is anyone meant to understand this Claude bullshit
Isn't that what AI is?
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!)
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.
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
As with most forms of theft and laundering, it's not really that clever.
>> This document records behavior established from static analysis of the retail TotalA.exe. It is a clean-room behavioral contract, not a source translation. It deliberately omits executable addresses, data-image offsets, and raw decompiler names. The phrases established, supported inference, and unknown distinguish what the analysis proves from what remains a useful but unverified interpretation.
The evidence is the executable's own control and data flow, its PE import table, and its embedded string vocabulary. Nothing here is taken from another engine, a capture, or a reimplementation.
Step 1: Ask an LLM to decompile a binary, wash it into a "clean" description of the binary in its own format (a bunch of .MD files, one might suppose) and then build a new binary from that description.
Step 2: Nothing.
Is this really going to hold up in court?
I'm just curious, people consider this theft?
With PDF the better analogy would be producing LaTeX file(s) that correspond to that PDF, without owning the original LaTeX file(s).
A bit tangential, but you can also try to look at this logically. The number of instructions in the binary is limited. So the probability to get "substantially similar" binaries is higher than, say, with a book (for the same architecture of course). Plus as I mentioned, the videogame is not just a binary, it's also some assets with which the binary works. And we are not touching the assets since they are mostly independent of the architecture.
This is not correct. Some types of reverse engineering are legal.
> As is emulation. Which means there should be no legal issues with getting the source code of a binary executable, and then modifying it to work on another system.
These are actually two of the exceptions. You CAN reverse engineer it to make it operative but that doesn't mean you can distribute the re-engineered binary.
They could have released a patching mechanism that used the original binary, but just releasing the re-engineered binary is illegal.
I can only judge from the cases I know about regarding videogames. The two instances where publishers decided to intervene via a cease and desist letter or DMCA takedown: fan-made Metroid 2 remake (AM2R) and reverse engineering of GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas. Both Nintendo and Take-Two were making their own remakes of those games at the time, so they probably saw it as a threat to their profits.
But a lot of decompilations and ports have been made without any intervention from the publishers (at least from my knowledge). Diablo 1 has both a decompilation (code and exe) and a port. N64's Zeldas also have both, which is interesting since Nintendo is known for issuing DMCAs, and they also have a remake of Ocarina of Time currently in the works, so there should be enough reason to take down such projects (like they did with Metroid 2). I assume they are not doing anything because it's just the binary being distributed.
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 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...
It has the word PLAY. You acidentally demonstrate my point.
I want to know what kind of game from what kind of system. Both to tell me if it's going to be an interesting story of reverse-engineering, and also whether it's something I might actually want to play.
> Nanolathe is an open-source engine for playing Total Annihilation on Windows, Mac and Linux. It loads the original maps, units and campaigns. You can try it right here with the three-mission browser demo.
> Nanolathe loads the original game data directly, including the scripts that turn turrets and open factory doors.
> It’s a new engine that runs the original game’s data.
What did it run on before?
Is this from the '80s (fun 8-bit retrocomputing pixels fun), early '90s (DOS goodness), late '90s (Cthlulhu-esque Win9x VXD horrors), noughties (early hardware 3D, now looking better than ever), teens (just needed dusting), or what?
Is it local or networked?
What kind of game is it? So I know if I should keep reading or not?
I understand that you want more specificity, but it's simply untrue that the page doesn't make clear generally what sort of project it is.
Here's some more depth in my own words. It's a real-time strategy game from Cave Dog Games in 1997. It's a precursor to Total Annihilation: Kingdoms. It's a spiritual ancestor to Spring, Supreme Commander, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Supreme Commander 2, the Forged Alliance Forever project, Planetary Alliance, and a few others. Zero-K and BAR are other updated reimplementations. It competes in the space with the original Starcraft, with Warcraft II, the earlier Command and Conquer series games, Dune 2000, and that sort. It has land, sea, and air units and dedicated construction vehicles of all three types. By default there's a commander to protect whose death causes a player to lose the game, but that can be configured to be off. There are stationary units like artillery and buildings including power generators, metal extractors, and factories that make the other units. The construction mobile units and the commander build the land units and buildings. The linked page shows the sort of graphics the original has and puts them side by side with the reimplemented version from the project.
It ran on Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP just fine. ISTM it would run on NT 4 and 2000. I think it runs on 7 from the CD and maybe 10. I don't use the discs much these days though because despite owning two or three disc copies I also got it on sale on two or three different digital storefronts.
"thing_1 is like $other_thing_2 and $other_thing_3 and it resembles $other_thing_4" assumes that one knows things 1, 2, 3, & 4.
If you've never heard of 3/4 of them then this is not helpful. It is not an explanation at all.
That's what I mean about "every page is page 1."
We all need to examine our assumptions.
Any and every page about a project or a tool needs to set the authors' assumptions aside and actually explain what it is and what it does, to people outside of the creators' context.
Or, to quote The Big Bang Theory, "I know you're trying to help, sweetie, but you really aren't."
I've heard of Starcraft but never seen it. I know vaguely what "Command and Conquer" is, I think.
Nobody can effectively explain anything to an audience unfamiliar with the entire field using only referents from within that specific field.
I started playing computer games in 1981, and I own maybe approaching 1000 of them. I have bought at least 4 or 5 games for my kid this year alone.
None of these are among them, not a single one.
In order to learn how to explain, you need to examine your context. You need to know where you are to explain how to get there. Without understand what your context is, and learning to step outside, you cannot explain anything much.
Along with "every page is P1" there's another tech-docs saying:
"Docs or it never happened." No docs = no project. Docs, even a README, that fail to say what it is are not docs.
But where do we stop? We can't assume everyone knows what an RTS is. We can't assume that everyone knows what a computer game is. We can't assume that everyone knows what a computer is (some people really don't know this).
You can see that this could quickly bloat the explanation.
I remember someone got frustrated on the article about ur-languages posted here on HN. He didn't know what ur-language is and didn't want to look it up by himself. I also didn't know the term, but I just went and googled it instead of berating the author of the article.