Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

arikrahman

Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.

pdntspa

Eat your heart out, Spring Engine

Jabrov

So sick and tired of AI websites

rvz

> Same scene. Same instant. closes tab.

haunter

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

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/

someotherperson

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

DaveChurchill

Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?

wobblywobbegong

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

dgently7

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

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

noduerme

I was wondering what this "clean-room" jargon actually meant, after looking at the Adobe ripoffs being vibe coded by ArtCraft. 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?

foolfoolz

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

philipov

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.

Waterluvian

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.

samstress

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.

AlexErrant

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

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.

nirav72

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

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