Total Annihilation, rebuilt for modern computers

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/

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.

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...

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.

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.

Super interesting. Was the creation of these four rules agentic?

https://github.com/nanolathe-gg/nanolathe/blob/main/AGENTS.m...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Love it, hope something for Supcom comes out soon.

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.

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.

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.

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

Do people understand how bad these AIslop websites look?

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"

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

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

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.

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

> Same scene. Same instant.

closes tab.

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.

> 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.

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.

Eat your heart out, Spring Engine

There's a dead comment asking about the use of the term "clean room". I'm not sure why. I am not entirely certain that deeply analyzing super detailed traces qualifies as "clean room".

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

The non slop version would be Zero-K

"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!)

So sick and tired of AI websites

> See the tank catch the blast, glow spread across the scene, and grass and healthy trees gain detail

How is anyone meant to understand this Claude bullshit

Sorry, but I'm not interested in AI slop. I care about stuff humans make, not stuff a machine makes.

Now do Jagged Alliance 2.

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?

[dead]

Typical "piracy with way too much effort". With modern ML tools, author could at least change all the graphics; but no, generic upscale.

I hope it gets booted off Microsoft-owned Github for blatant copyright infringement. Total Annihilation ain't abandonware, and Xbox division don't need legal boycotts from third party publishers.

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