Total Annihilation Graphics Engine (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Total Annihilation Graphics Engine (2012)

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41 pointsZeroCool2u16 comments

I still play TA every now and then. It's STILL fun, much more fun than SC2 to be honest, especially with the homebrew units that people seemed to have created over the last 30 years! I remember when I used to play against my cousin before the turn of the century and we would be playing across the continental US east coast to west coast. We maxed out the units to 500, gave each other 30 mins of build time, and then launch massive attacks. It would slow down to something like 1 FPS when the fighting was the most intense but it never crashed and it was rock solid and probably the most impressive piece of software I've seen.

You should try BAR.

In so many ways it feels like the perfect modern-day TA.

For anyone looking to play a modern version of TA, there is Beyond All Reason (BAR).

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

Also the entire game is open-source on GitHub.

https://github.com/beyond-all-reason

It's one of the best RTS games I've ever played. Incredible work.

>All units and projectiles are simulated in real-time. The game offers fully simulated projectile ballistics, explosion physics and terrain deformation.

This actually looks really cool!

...don't forget about Planetary Annihilation! Not free or open source, but still a lot of fun! https://planetaryannihilation.com/

...don't forget about Zero-K! https://store.steampowered.com/app/334920/ZeroK/

not directly related to the article but Beyond All Reason (open source spiritual successor to TA) is quite enjoyable and I recommend anyone who enjoyed TA give BAR a try.

Total Annihilation was a big favorite of mine back in the day, and I guess I have to thank him for that, as I had a PC Chips powered Celeron with 32MB of RAM and it was one of the few great games I got to play.

I think I still own the CD-ROMs and the very awesome soundtrack is playable on a CD Player, as it used track 1 for data and the rest for audio, just like Sega Saturn games.

BTW the plot from Total Annihilation would make for a very good TV Show, I wish someone picked up the rights.

What a great blog, TA was by far my favorite RTS in that era! Poking around other posts, I found this link to someone examining the Supreme Commander engine, too: https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/06/23/supreme-comm...

> Now the whole way that TA did texture mapping was just screwed. Frankly we had no idea what we were doing.

I worked on an open-source TA successor game way back when, and I figured mapping a texture off of a big atlas of different textures to each quad of your model was just how old games did things. I am just now realizing that this level of jank was unusual.

This sounds very much like a spritesheet to me (who has never worked on video games). Is the concept similar, and what was the better approach at the time?

It's basically the same thing. You use a texture atlas because switching textures is expensive. We do have a better alternative now called array texture, but texture atlases are still a thing today on limited hardware for performance reasons.

TA has unreasonable influence on many technical people. I always see it being revered. Love to see it, way ahead of its time

What was the competitive play scene like? I thought TA was much more spectator friendly than the RTS games that blew up.

> Except I fucked up and left a bug in there. Ever notice that a lot of the buildings have a weird purple halo? Basically the table broke when dealing with the edge and transparency because I didn't have a correct way to represent that. Then I ran out of time, I think I could have fixed it.

No I can't say I ever noticed that... and I've probably played thousands of hours, including playing through the entire campaign for both sides...

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