Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers (nanolathe.gg)

263 pointsby jttnr4 hours ago107 comments

modeless 3 hours ago

I recently discovered Beyond All Reason, a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. There have been several of these, but I think BAR is by far the best. It's open source, but looks nice and is polished. It has amazing quality-of-life features I haven't seen in any other RTS. And it supports insanely huge battles with hundreds of players and tens of thousands of units.

150-player match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQJujiZ-oz0

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

Lucasoato 3 hours ago

Yeah, let me add that it’s a wonderful community. They won’t flame you for failing the frontline because your opponent has been playing the game since day 1.

If you just started, just stay in the backlines and do “eco”, people will be ok with that.

techjamie 3 hours ago

That's pretty good to hear. I've taken interest in it from time to time, and downloaded it at one point to spectate matches. It seemed really intimidating to my extremely casual RTS playing self with how much is happening.

Maybe I'll give it another look.

modeless 3 hours ago

There are some single-player missions and modes that you can play to try it out. And I heard there's going to be a commercial release with a full single-player campaign coming out eventually. https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...

thebluegecko 3 hours ago

This experience might uh, might not be universal. I found the 8v8 community unhappy when I accidentally threw games while trying to learn. I will say the 1v1 community is very relaxed though. Starting 1v1s or vs bots might lead to a better experience.

searealist 3 hours ago

As someone who has played BAR, it's hard to read this as not being maximally sarcastic.

dgently7 2 hours ago

ya, this drips with the common noob complaint that people flame you for being a noob.

unfortunately that is a totally fair assessment. its a deep and detailed game with lots of units, commands, mechanics and a few maps that have extremely developed meta.

this is only a problem if you think you can drop into multiplayer on literal day 1 without even doing any of the local/non ai learning options the game provides and expect your team to just deal with you not even knowing the basics.

And even then if you start in "noob" lobbies people are pretty helpful, to the extent that they are trying to play the game and give you tips and can only do/type so much.

so its simple... 1. play the scenerios/vs to learn the basics. also watch some yt basics guides 2. join noob lobbies. 3. when people try to help you and they sound mad/terse/short it helps to assume they are just busy with their own match and are doing their best to play and help you learn. if they give you advice try to take it. 4. do your best and ping out when things are going bad in your lane.

the community on there really is very much "nicer" to noobs that many games, especially ones that are co-op team based. but you do need to have realistic expectations. people will get upset if you mess up their games bc you havent at least tried to learn how to play at all.

handoflixue an hour ago

"It's simple" followed by an on-boarding routine more complex than some paying jobs I've had.

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.

Lucasoato 2 hours ago

Man, I got flamed hard even for losing against one of the game developers, the community is cooked.

nylonstrung an hour ago

The sarcasm isn't warranted

It's very much a game of team coordination where the power curve is exponential but also can have huge turnarounds since buildings are fragile but drive the economy entirely

So naturally you have to know how to play your specific role or it can throw the game for everyone else

It's not casual like Command and Conquer or something, but nor is it incredibly sweaty like StarCraft or DOTA

daymanstep 21 minutes ago

Is command and conquer considered casual?

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).

reactordev 2 hours ago

Can confirm, BAR is what you want...

thaumasiotes 2 hours ago

I was struck by something else about Beyond All Reason.

There's a popular Starcraft 2 commentary-and-gameplay streamer, Winter, who spent some time posting commentated BAR games. Videos from this period include direct pleas to his audience to take more of an interest because it's a better game with a better development model.

Then he took BAR off of his main youtube channel because that didn't work. He now seems to operate a separate variety channel with some BAR content.

I think about what this says about the role that marketing plays in people-in-general's choice of pastimes.

Havoc 2 hours ago

Also bunch of vids by a guy called drongo. Haven't seen any recently (7 months) though

majormajor 19 minutes ago

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. ;)

lloydatkinson 2 hours ago

I keep meaning to try this game when I see it mentioned. It looks fun!

jansan an hour ago

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.

chrysoprace 42 minutes ago

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.

iamnothere 18 minutes ago

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.

somat 3 hours ago

Fair enough, but is there an advantage over the spring engine? Another clean room implementation that understands total annihilation data-structures, a project started 20 years ago.

For what its worth, the Total Annihilation derived project with the most attention currently is is BAR https://www.beyondallreason.info/ They decided to make it legally distinct, but it was the balanced annihilation project which was total annihilation rebalanced for better pvp. I don't play too many RTS so this is not authoritative, but BAR plays better than any other rts I have tried, They really care about the fine details of user experience there.

In fact, I consider Chris Taylor(Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander) to be one of if not the greatest RTS designers. His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft) but he gets the control design better than anyone else I have seen.

PorciiVorbesc 3 hours ago

>His games don't have the fluff people appear to love(looking at you starcraft)

What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?

somat 3 hours ago

Gratuitous cutscenes, annoying barks everywhere, huge useless animated portraits. It is basically the blizzard polish, looks better than it plays. Not that Starcraft plays bad, but none of the fluff contributes to gameplay. And that gameplay takes a lot more micromanagement than it needs to(some people like this. me, not so much).

philipov 2 hours ago

None of that has anything to do with why starcraft is popular, though. Starcraft has a long history of organized professional competition, and that's responsible for sustaining interest in the game.

samplifier 2 hours ago

So: money, gambling, ego bloating, greed, eye candy, narcotics?

IsTom 2 hours ago

At first people played Starcraft for the campaign, internet access in late 90s wasn't common enough for a game to thrive on mostly online multiplayer. And it was popular back then. And playing on LAN was more of "20 mins no rush" thing.

majormajor 18 minutes ago

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.

rvba 2 hours ago

sound (and lack of it) is something that gives aa lot of balance to the game

in brood war you get info when units are made and sounds wben they die. unless an invisible dark templar one shots your units, then no sound

also brood war is the better game

SgtBastard 20 minutes ago

> 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.

ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago

The advantage presumably is that a player gets to experience Total Annihilation's gameplay as it was originally released, without any rebalancing. It's interesting historically as the root of its own lineage of RTS games, it's interesting from a nostalgia perspective, and it's a great, if dated, game in its own right; the campaign, music, and narration still hold up nearly thirty years later.

To whoever put it together, thank you.

Quothling 2 hours ago

Isn't this just the ebitengine doing all the work, with someone having used AI to vibe code TA functionality on top of it?

slightlygrilled 2 hours ago

I have been working on this for supreme commander!

With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be addressed. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)

I think I'm close to a like for like version.

And of course the performance is leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!

and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.

and of course higher player v player battles

You can see that all here and in the replies https://forum.faforever.com/topic/10451/supcom-moho-engine-r...

mscbuck 2 hours ago

Dude.....I need this. SupCom is one of my favorite games of all time (especially the "World" custom map, so many games played on that one). Super excited

lysecret an hour ago

so cool! Loved sup com

samstress 3 hours ago

Random meta comment - but have you noticed that especially Codex generated websites tend to have these 01, 02, 03 numbers as part of card layouts? (see the section just below the header). It's almost the em-dash equivalent for AI built website detection.

wormius 3 hours ago

I really despise these AI generated websites, they often look so samey. IDK about the numbering, but the overuse of cards everywhere, and abusing my favorite color schemes (tokyo-night, dracula style), really irritates me (esp, the color schemes, way to ruin even colors, guys).

It makes me dislike whatever they're trying to "sell" (literally or metaphorically). I wish people who wanted to be "creative" would you know... be creative, not just "push button, machine go brrr" which is what half this stuff spits out. Template, generic, no individuality. Hyper "professional" looking (but just "cool" enough to not be completely corporate).

On the other hand some of these look better and are more responsive than older sites that were definitely fuglier, klunky and less responsive. It feels like there's a middle ground, which I think is where good designer comes into play.

pizzafeelsright 2 hours 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.

userbinator an hour ago

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.

philipov 3 hours ago

Planetary Annihilation was made by some of the people who worked on Total Annihilation:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihila...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation

More than just a spiritual successor, imo.

ffsm8 3 hours ago

That game always felt more like supreme commander then TA to me... Personally I preferred the foss games spawned out of the spring engine like eg zero-k and the previously mentioned beyond all reason over it

philipov 3 hours ago

It's true that the game director Jon Mavor, who wrote the graphics engine for TA, was also the lead programmer on SC. And he's not the only point of confluence between the two games.

jaggederest 3 hours ago

Unfortunately did not even come close to capturing the magic of the original or TASpring / BAR though, sadly. I wanted to like it but it suffered from a lot of sequelitis.

detritus 2 hours ago

Yerp, sadly spherical maps just didn't work. Imho, obv, but I really did try and persevere with it, believing in it at the time.

vladms 33 minutes ago

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.

Tarks 22 minutes ago

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

Waterluvian 3 hours ago

I love this so much. Something I’m a bit obsessed with lately is watching AIs (the classic kind) battling endlessly in games like this. Total Annihilation is a great fit for it because the maps are often wide open and grand scale.

I think Beyond all Reason has had some 50v50s or close that are a bit ridiculous to watch.

nubinetwork 3 hours ago

TA's ai was pretty dumb, actually... on most maps with unpassable water, they'll happily crank out kbots without building any ships or planes, until it hits the unit limit.

Waterluvian 2 hours ago

Yup. Being able to API like open broodwar creates a way to make the game an arena for AIs on a ladder. Then there’s some more interesting stuff that can go on.

I love the idea of having some reinforcement learning approach that keeps generating new AI versions that play each other indefinitely.

wobblywobbegong 3 hours ago

Spiritual successor already exists: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason

pohl an hour ago

Sort of. Back in the day I could play TA on my Mac.

Attummm 27 minutes ago

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.

mmh0000 an hour ago

I have such good memories of TA. I was about 12 years old when it was released, and it was one of my first "computer games". It was my first introduction to RTS games, and in a lot of ways defined the genre of games I love today.

I spent so much time in the game playing the story, then playing skirmishes, building massive bases. "Hacking" the game to increase the max-unit-count to numbers my computer could barely manage.

Then I discovered HEAT.NET and started playing in a competitive clan. Then... life happened, and I have a lot of nostalgia for it now, but not enough time.

arikrahman 4 hours ago

Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.

maqp 4 hours ago

Definitely! Supcoms downfall was the poor threading support and IIRC the in-game AI path finding continuing for destroyed AI units which bogged the game down over time. At least one of them was never fixed properly.

theandrewbailey 3 hours ago

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-...

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4 hours ago

The game still looks great, what's stopping you from playing it?

ls612 3 hours ago

It has some major technical flaws which hold it back even on modern hardware. Something I’m sure a model can fix.

lysecret 4 hours ago

man i played so much supcom every time we played at like 2fps in the end haha

revolvingthrow 3 hours ago

SupCom FaF has a very long list of changes, I'd guess some of the people behind it already have access to source code. IMO only changes that are still missing is making it multi-threaded and maybe fixing some AI deficiencies such as pathing and the like.

The first would be great, but probably very difficult technically. The second would probably cause a holy war in the community, as multiplayer RTS enjoyers glorify fighting against the genre's jank as an expression of skill (admittedly it would completely change all micro).

slightlygrilled 3 hours ago

I have actually been working on this!

With modern tooling, libraries and such, many of supcoms old technical issues can be address. (plus it now works on linux and mac!)

I think I'm close to a like for like version.

And of course the performance its leaps and bounds beyond what supcom could do, in the replies a few down, you can see a 64,000 unit air fight, and I'm pretty sure i can get that going at 60fps plus!

and end game vs the ai, is still 4x realtime, well beyond what supcom could do.

and of course higher player v player battles

https://forum.faforever.com/topic/10451/supcom-moho-engine-r...

avhception 3 hours ago

The Supreme Commander community, the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, still has an active community here: https://faforever.com/ "Forged Alliance Forever" is also a great mod, balancing changes, game lobbies and whatnot.

haunter 3 hours ago

At this point with the speed AI assisted decomps, remakes, reverse engineered ports, and homebrews come out I think GTA VI will be "released" (not by Rockstar ofc) on PC days after the PS 5 release. Especially that an early leaked dev build, compiled on PC, is already out there which helps a lot with the case.

ErneX 2 hours ago

Not sure how will they rip it in days though, it won’t be on Blu-ray and it’s going to require a new firmware.

Zadak 43 minutes ago

Cool, but also, BAR is better mechanically, and content wise though

amiantos 3 hours ago

I wonder how long it will take society to move past the idea of intellectual property being a thing you can own / control / solely exploit. It seems to me that in the future, the spoils will go to the most motivated. Which is already how it works, but money has been the dividing factor: I am thinking of the web game Pandemic 2, it came out as an ugly flash game but it was a lot of fun. Then, another guy (who was on the Shacknews forum at the time) saw it, and I guess he had some money, so he hired artists and engineers and copied the game, creating Plague Inc, a much slicker and polished version of Pandemic 2. We should all be familiar with Plague Inc, as that guy is certainly a multi-millionaire now. But all he did was put more effort into some other idea he liked. It seems to me that this Total Annihilation port, and projects like Beyond All Reason, show that in some cases, humans can appreciate the idea that intellectual property isn't really locked up if the owners aren't exploiting it themselves. We just need to move the needle a little further: if you aren't properly exploiting your intellectual property, and someone else who is more motivated can do it better, that's fair game. Isn't that how it already works in so many cases, anyway? We're all just trying to build better widgets than each other, often just the same widget in so many different variants.

declan_roberts 3 hours ago

I don't think that's likely. A patent has always told everybody exactly how to re-create your magic. The protection never came from difficulty.

DaveChurchill 3 hours ago

Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?

ygra 3 hours ago

I found it very tiring to read, actually.

joefourier 3 hours ago

I can get past the AI slop design myself, but the writing style is absolutely grating, especially the short repetitive phrases.

"Punchy phrase. No X." "An open engine. Room to make it your own. "Same scene. Same instant. The same explosion. A different atmosphere." "A few things to know. The short answers."

Why is it always the same? What awful post-training, or synthetic data training pipeline, or RLHF gone wrong, produced this homogenised, low variety slop style? And it's totally possible for LLMs to write actually decent or at least varied prose and I would think Anthropic (or OpenAI) has the resources to fix the issue, they just choose not to.

Marketing copy wasn't this homogenous prior to LLMs, unless my memory fails me.

userbinator an hour ago

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.

jasondigitized 3 hours ago

What exactly looks bad about it? These models have been trained on high converting UX patterns. They are definitely homogenous but I am not sure they look bad.

DaveChurchill 3 hours ago

The homogenization of the internet. The worst corporate speak PR pages are now what gets generated for every pet project

ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago

> "high converting UX patterns"

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

ssl-3 an hour ago

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.

rfgplk 3 hours ago

My biggest complaint (as always) is that the performance is abysmal. I wasn't going to click on it, but after reading this comment went in and tried to play the demo.

A) I was hit by a multiple _second_ load time (on a 1Gbps pipe btw)

B) The in game cursor was _visibly_ lagging

C) The gameplay itself was stuttery (and I am almost certain there is a hard one frame delay between most actions)

Then I thought, alright it could be Firefox, so I loaded it up in a fresh chromium image, and somehow it's worse. Then finally I looked at the source and it's very obvious why the performance is atrocious (the guy didn't really bother to tell his agent, "hey man, let's benchmark this and keep performance in check, maybe don't spam a billion draw calls everywhere y'know, maybe

Values below are medians across runs, including the median of each run's maximum tick time. Each pair reads *Go 1.25.0 → Go 1.27.1*; timings are ms.

|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|---:|

| 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 ")

dgently7 3 hours ago

i never played ta, but "beyond all reason" is worth mentioning as it seems to be also a more modern (relatively) take on ta. mostly similar units but a 3d engine etc. Also open source and free to play wo any of the dark patterns that pervert most modern multiplayer online games. "battle passes" , "pay to win", gambling "crates"

foolfoolz 3 hours ago

TA is an amazing game. Forged Alliance is a better game because it was made 10 years later. The open source FAF project to mod it and keep it alive can only go so far without engine replacement. I’m hoping we can see something like this for Forged Alliance. BAR is a TA clone, missing out on the structural improvements from Forged Alliance

rcxdude 3 hours ago

Yeah, BAR is more modern but doesn't have the feel I enjoy in FA. It's a little too... small scale and cartoony for my liking.

chainingsolid 2 hours ago

For me the 3.5 teirs of units in Supcom feels better then the TA style. The simple start with teir 1, the expantion of options with teir 2, sledge hammer of teir 3, ending with the experimentals. TA and clones felt like simple straight to end game.

apitman 2 hours ago

Dang there's been twice as much time between SupCom and now as there was between TA and SupCom.

talloaktrees 3 hours ago

People in the comments are misundertsanding the difference between a faithful remake and a "spritual successor" with completely different units, gameplay, and content.

nirav72 3 hours ago

The best thing about TA years after it was released was the mod scene. Specifically around AI and unit mods. Because of that we kept playing it well until SupCom forged alliance was released.

dwroberts 3 hours ago

Why does it have the name nanolathe attached? What is that about? You can’t just steal an entire commercial game and give it a new name and pretend it’s your own thing

rvz 3 hours ago

> Same scene. Same instant.

closes tab.

IshKebab 27 minutes ago

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.

AlexErrant 3 hours ago

I love the TA soundtrack. (Pity about Jeremy Soule being an alleged predator.) The old RTS games (Age of Empires, Starcraft, Red Alert) had such great soundtracks.

Nition 3 hours ago

> The original isometric view gains a new sense of scale.

Come on ChatGPT/Claude, you're smart enough to know the original wasn't an isometric perspective. It was directly top-down, no camera rotation. 3D over 2D terrain with a heightmap.

ses1984 2 hours ago

Top down can be isometric. Isometric means “same measurements.”

It refers to how the viewport is not like a camera above 3D terrain. Instead, you see each point below as though directly above. In other words, you can only ever see the top of an object regardless of whether it is centered or on the edge.

If it wasn’t isometric, you would see more of the sides of objects that are near the edges.

Nition an hour ago

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"?