Yet another Hacker News

Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

121 points jttnr 1 hour ago 61 comments

arikrahman 1 hour ago | parent

Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.

maqp 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

ls612 1 hour ago | parent

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

lysecret 1 hour ago | parent

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

revolvingthrow 51 minutes ago | parent

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 33 minutes ago | parent

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...

pdntspa 1 hour ago | parent

Eat your heart out, Spring Engine

Jabrov 1 hour ago | parent

So sick and tired of AI websites

rvz 1 hour ago | parent

> Same scene. Same instant.

closes tab.

haunter 1 hour ago | parent

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.

modeless 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

thebluegecko 54 minutes ago | parent

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 17 minutes ago | parent

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

reactordev 12 minutes ago | parent

Can confirm, BAR is what you want...

thaumasiotes 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

someotherperson 1 hour ago | parent

Cool! I wonder if Total Annihilation: Kingdoms would be supported!

DaveChurchill 1 hour ago | parent

Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?

ygra 1 hour ago | parent

I found it very tiring to read, actually.

joefourier 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jasondigitized 1 hour ago | parent

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 44 minutes ago | parent

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

ThrowawayR2 30 minutes ago | parent

> "high converting UX patterns"

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

rfgplk 47 minutes ago | parent

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 ")

wobblywobbegong 1 hour ago | parent

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

dgently7 1 hour ago | parent

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"

markus_zhang 1 hour ago | parent

Guess this is going to be the norm and we will soon run out of games to decompile.

foolfoolz 1 hour ago | parent

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 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

philipov 1 hour ago | parent

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 53 minutes ago | parent

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 50 minutes ago | parent

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 44 minutes ago | parent

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.

Waterluvian 1 hour ago | parent

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 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

samstress 1 hour ago | parent

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 38 minutes ago | parent

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.

AlexErrant 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

somat 54 minutes ago | parent

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 32 minutes ago | parent

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

What fluff (of Starcraft) are you referring to?

somat 27 minutes ago | parent

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 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

ThrowawayR2 19 minutes ago | parent

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 minutes ago | parent

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

nirav72 54 minutes ago | parent

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 52 minutes ago | parent

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

avhception 52 minutes ago | parent

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.

amiantos 50 minutes ago | parent

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 49 minutes ago | parent

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.

12h4atr 41 minutes ago | parent

Did you attend the Roy Cohn school of ethics like Trump?

Nition 49 minutes ago | parent

> 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 8 minutes ago | parent

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.

Retr0id 45 minutes ago | parent

"Dynamic lighting / Bloom / Glow"

Heh. I did my own game engine rewrite project recently, and once it reached parity I started thinking "ok so how can I make it look better?". I also added bloom, and on some level it did look kinda cool but ultimately I decided it was tacky. No offense to OP but I think the graphical "enhancements" here are also pretty tacky (but I totally understand the urge to add them!)

talloaktrees 38 minutes ago | parent

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

monster_truck 21 minutes ago | parent

The non slop version would be Zero-K

slightlygrilled 6 minutes ago | parent

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 1 minute ago | parent

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