Wasn't aware there's a successor. Screenshots make it seem very similar. Anyone played it?
This lineage of open-source games started from Total Annihilation, which had a lot of mods that ran into engine limitations. This resulted in a bunch of enterprising open-sourced devs to develop a compatible engine, without those limitations. This engine (Spring Engine) has then evolved into something much more impressive and capable. Zero-K was implemented on this engine. Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine, which is a fairly recent for of Spring.
What started out as a viewer, escalated into a 106.0 version long engine, providing a war that consumes planets, each side with only one final wish - Total Annhilation at Zero-k, beyond all reason.
Naw, the community comes and goes ebbs and flows. Its mostly on recoil discord, some are still on the irc server, the rest is on the BAR discord.
Presuming that the main code contributions also come from the Swedish scene I'm not entirely surprised that this happened. It sort of fits my impression of the gamer/programmer culture here (although I can't quite express why)
Surprisingly, that was only one metal band and every other metal band hates them for it. I have been told the average metal fan freaking loves churches and their acoustics. They might not like The Church, but they love churches.
Overall fantastic experience, really impressive for FOSS
I don't know how it compares to Zero-K.
But it perfectly captures the spirit of the original Total Annihilation.
BAR units are generally similar to TA units. It captures the feel of "what TA would be if it was full 3D and high resolution". Of course, balance is different, but TA balance was very odd.
ZeroK seems to have terrain modification mechanics which is not present in TA.
In BAR terrain can be damaged by big explosions, but it's very limited.
FWIW I never played ZeroK but based on their intro video BAR seems to be closer to TA visually.
BAR used to stand for "Balanced Annihilation Reloaded" - so it's sticking very close to TA, while Zero-K has been experimenting much more freely with what is possible in the Spring/Recoil engine.
It's also probably a factor that BAR has spent a decade in development hell (under a different team than now ?), so it just didn't have the velocity to fork away sufficiently, even if it wanted to.
The first indicator of that popped up, when valve ended greenlight, and just greenlit all the things. Which propped Evolution RTS upon the steam front page for half a day, flooding the original lobby system and showing how inadequat the whole ecosystem was for that. The original Evo dev Forb learned from the whole mess after he returned from his day job.
Zero-k then learned the lessons, developed a ingui lobby, started the whole matchmaking and better server deployment, detached from the whole "one central server" thing of the spring eco system.
BAR did some graphical overhaul, with Floris, Beherith, Sprung and the whole original crew supported by new faces like Teifion and on and on. They optimized the Spring engine into a new version- more tailored to BARs needs and reworked alot of the stuff.
Its gpl open source, so the project order and who invented what is pretty flowy.. everybody copies from everybody, one progress is everyones progress..
I disagreed about «BAR is more of a unique game (for better or worse), while ZeroK is much closer to an HD remake of Total Annihilation.»
P.S.: You might also be mistaken about EvoRTS' Steam release being specifically behind the motivation of Zero-K splitting up, since according to lead ZK dev the second at least partially predates the first ?
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/236480#236480
> 2012(ish): Zero-K splits off to its own infrastructure after disagreement with infrastructure developers. From my perspective they were very stubborn regarding extending the protocol to allow for new stuff (Eg matchmacking, more advanced planetwars) and would make sudden changes that broke our autohosts.
> 2013-2014: Evolution RTS is greenlit on Steam and released in 2014. I don't think Steam was on my radar at the time, but now it looked like a possibility. Looking back at the dates we actually put up a greenlight campaign five days after the Evolution RTS release.
(Lobby interface issues being another thing, but then IIRC EvoRTS had already tried to improve on this before release, though not successfully enough ?)