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.
> The game itself is the epitome of responding to a user's inputs precisely the way they would expect them to.
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.
Could you say more on this? I've tried StarCraft a few times over the years, thanks to a lucky thrift store find as a teen. Got a Battle Chest for $10 and the key hadn't even been registered! Never got close to beating it, though. Been a while since last time, but my lingering impression says it was always a confusing sequence of disconnected events taking an agonizingly long time to play out, and the controls were hella clunky and fiddly. I kept trying anyway because something about it feels real appealing, but I don't quite get it. But I feel like I want to get it, y'know?
I'd love to say more but I'm not sure where to start.
Your experience of the game is going to change dramatically depending on when you first played it and how much experience you have with the genre in general. For all my gushing adoration for the game, it is well over a quarter-century old at this point and even then it assumed a fair amount of knowledge and understanding about how the genre works.
When you say "close to beating it" I assume you're talking about the single player campaign, as opposed to the multiplayer death matches?
It's impossible for me to separate my current opinion from the decades of memories I have bound up in the game, but I think the campaign still holds up today, especially in the remastered version. It tells an interesting story with missions that are still fun to play, assuming you enjoy the basic rts build base make units attack enemy.
Like I said, it's hard to tell exactly what part of it you're having problems with, the fundamental gameplay loop is start with a small base, build workers, gather more resources, build bigger base, use bigger base to build army, use army to secure more resource areas to build even bigger base, use biggerer base to build biggest army, win map.
If you're having trouble actually beating the campaigns, 90% of the time the problem is people aren't building enough workers, the exact math gets a little complicated but as a very general rule of thumb you should probably have 25-26 workers for every set of minerals you have a base at, and you should be prioritizing building these workers above basically everything else.
Once you reach something like 8 workers mining minerals you can afford to both constantly build workers and build other units, then once you hit 26 or so you can stop building workers and focus on maxing out your army. Generally speaking the campaign AI is pretty forgiving, concentrating on defense for the first 10 minutes and then pushing out with a maxed out army works on like 90% of the maps.
Beyond that, I don't know what to say about clunky and slow. If the game is too slow, you can actually change what speed it plays at in the options menu, it actually defaults to a medium speed that nobody actually plays the game at, everyone plays at fastest setting, so dunno, maybe that's it. Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less, that's the nature of this type of game, you're expected to be controlling essentially every unit on the map at all times.
> 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.
Queuing orders in TA and then in Supreme Commanders was best-in-class. Both single units and structures, and groups of them (selected with an assignable hotkey), could have infinitely long command queues. Patrol mode was useful for both engineers and normal units. SupCom added air- and sea-based transportation corridors. The queues were not broken if you ran out of resources temporarily; they just paused and then resumed when possible. I played TA before StarCraft and after Warcraft 2 - I felt SC to be a huge downgrade in terms of controls, and dropped it almost immediately. SupCom then came close to the absolute peak of RTS for me in terms of controls, physics, and economy management. The problem with all the fan-made successors is that I don't want PvP at all, and they seem to focus on that, while the original TA and SupCom were incredible single-player experiences, too.
Wow, thanks for replying! Thought I was pissing into the wind with that one.
I've never once touched the multiplayer mode. I don't recall seeing the option for it. I mean, I'm sure it's there, but I don't remember it, which means I've never clicked on it. So, yes, single player campaign only. A decent amount of the original, and then about half a level of Brood War when I skipped forward one time.
Wow, that sounds like a hella lotta workers. I vaguely recall trying that in a mission or two where I had severe resource problems, but then I didn't have enough offensive units and ran out of minerals by mining them too fast. Hmm... I remember getting frustration-curiosity a couple times and checking YouTube videos of how people beat missions I was completely stuck on, and being very unsatisfied because what I saw worked when I tried it myself but I didn't understand it (I can tell I didn't understand it because I don't remember it).
I didn't know there's a speed setting. That could make missions less of a long-ass slog, although, uh, controlling every unit at once? That sounds like a massive amount of busywork and I'm not confident I could pull it off (unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean). What I meant by "slow" is the missions can drag on for a reeeaaaally long time, and by "clunky and fiddly", I mean it was hard to make things happen because of all the... not sure how to describe it. I guess I'd want to change the speed lower, but then everything would take too long ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And if by "the genre" you mean real-time strategy games, StarCraft is the only one I have any level of familiarity with, so if it assumes you already know that stuff, then that's probably a problem. When I said it's "a confusing sequence of disconnected events", I mean I couldn't correlate most of what I did to any of what happened. It was just random stuff happening most of the time, and when I changed my approach, I couldn't predict what the outcome would be and no significant learning occurred.
Despite all that, I really do like the game (wouldn't be talkin' about it so much if I didn't). I appreciate your advice, too. I'll have to see if I can get the thing running again.
> Other than that, units do exactly what you tell them to, no more, no less,
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The controls are a finely tuned machine in starcraft, as evidenced by the competitive scene with crazy apm.
If you dislike the micro required, thats fine, but just because it doesnt suite your preference doesn't mean its bad or clunky.
Just say “I dont like it”.
Thats fine.
If you want to “get” it, devote a few days to playing online multiplayer.
There is a design choice to be made balancing apm and technical play and I think they went to far towards the apm side. Could compare it to bullet chess. While broodwars was arguably even more neurotic it oddly seemed to have more surprising builds. Like many, I've been wondering what slower speed sc2 tournaments would look like.
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.
Huh? I specifically said "my lingering impression". What I described is how the game felt to play, to me. I'm not talking about preferences and I'm not asserting some absolute universal state.
> 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.
It's an amusing complaint because there's nothing in the TA engine that would prevent players doing the same level of micromanagement as StarCraft, it just never developed that level of skill required to win games.
There's an element to that, but also, the more QoL you have and the smarter unit AI is, the less you have to do that. Yes, unit AI obviously won't ever play as good as you do but if you control a few units at key locations you'll outperform someone who's trying to control everything and do a mediocre job at it. You might say "how about they control every unit then" - works in games with a few units, way less so when you've got unit counts in the hundreds.
As Boomers would say: Mayfly Attention Span.
Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.
Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.
And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.
>Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming.
Starcraft came way before that was even a thing
As someone with 100s of hours in SupCom and 1000s in SC2:
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.
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.
At first people played Starcraft for the campaign, internet access in late 90s wasn't common enough for a game to thrive on mostly online multiplayer. And it was popular back then. And playing on LAN was more of "20 mins no rush" thing.
Starcraft came with battle.net and a mapeditor.
Quake3 was released a year(ish) later and effectively had no single player and it was a major success (by the standards of the day)
Being online was a major, major factor.
A campaign is not enough to sustain a game's popularity for decades. Use Map Settings and the competitive scene did that. The latter of the two is still around and single-handedly explains the game's continuing popularity.
Yeah, the TA campaign was... not very compelling.
By the time my crowd had reliable enough connections for multiplayer, the number of people who knew and liked Starcraft from that campaign was much higher than the number who'd either gotten to love TA from the campaign or from vs-computer matches.
I beg to differ, I loved the TA campaign. Going from one lone commander with their side on the brink of defeat to orchestrating a final titanic clash of armies as you conquer the homeworld of your opposition was epic. SC never clicked with me in either gameplay or story.
So: money, gambling, ego bloating, greed, eye candy, narcotics?
What?
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...