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Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

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Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#101

Post by StopTencent »

estearum wrote: post #25
aetherspawn wrote: post #14

Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units. Also, one particularly aggravating part of the com…

It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy wha…

[flagged]

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#102

Post by p2004a »

gloosx wrote: post #90
pohl wrote: post #2

Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.

Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because: 1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple. 2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures. The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate i…

That notice is not worded in the best way and hasn't been updated for a while. However, progress has been made.

On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.

Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936

The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#103

Post by annasnna »

rpdillon wrote: post #92
bheadmaster wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta-gaming is a natural progression in all human games. Chess players find "metas" like openings. It's just that video games are too simple and have very restricted meta set.

Wait, are you suggesting BAR or StarCraft are simpler than chess? I can't imagine that's true.

I don’t know but I can imagine many of the levers in games cancel each other out or don’t turn out to be useful while in chess every variable is orthogonal. It’s all important. Complicated versus complex, like how untangling Christmas lights is time-consuming and gnarly but it is not complex fundamentally.

That said, I don’t know if it is true in those cases.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#104

Post by whartung »

tobinfekkes wrote: post #87

This is amazing to see TA on HN. I grew up playing Total Annihilation in the 90s because my cousin worked for Cavedog and got us a CD for free. It is still one of my favorite games to this day. So many great memories with that game, countless hours playing with my brothers, getting up early to play before school, asking my parents for extra chores to earn more computer time. Games aren't the same anymore. I still hav…

TA is the only game I consciously went out to buy a faster machine to play. Upgrading from my 133MHz to a 400MHz so I could run more units in TA.

I rarely played TA vs other people. It was always either the PvE scenarios, or skirmishes.

Against multiple AIs I would strive to take out several of them, leaving one time to build up. Then the game would quickly devolve into "hose on hose" combat where my automatic production with bottomless resources would push out toward the oncoming bot army fueled by their infinite resources.

You could see on the large map how well you were doing based on how close the hose front of clashing machines was to whose base. But that was necessary to open up space to create special armies and other techniques to get around the hose, and flank the base.

All while being blasted to splinters by bots and Berthas and Brawlers and everything else.

But get a good Goliath drop into the rear, and it's just glorious spectacle.

The whole thing, in the end, was spectacle. The sounds, the shrapnel, the rocking of the maps when some wandering commander would wander into the wrong area. Like getting winged by a far off Bertha and giving chase to enact revenge upon it.

And a special Flea scenario is hilarious fun.

Loved that game.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#105

Post by NortySpock »

redrobein wrote: post #97
Teifion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.

I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.

Speaking as an occasional contributor: there's a roadmap towards that, but there's a few components that need to finish baking before we release on Steam. e.g. the current lobby protocol isn't capable of handling Steam levels of traffic, so we are working on replacing it.

You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if the server melts on release day, that's not a good first impression. :)

The Hooded Horse deal is expected to provide some professional development time to help knock out these blocking items.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/development/steam-release#M...

https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-...

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#106

Post by Teifion »

nekusar wrote: post #96
PtaQQ wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, PtaQ here, BAR’s Community Manager. I’m sorry this was your experience. There are definitely some very competitive lobbies, but harassment is not acceptable. Please report any players involved, as reports are the only way we can identify patterns and take action. We have an active moderation team and do review them. For a more relaxed experience, I’d recommend trying less established meta maps. Lobbies marked “r…

These days, online public lobbies are almost always hostile. Doesn't matter the game, either. You can ban words, phrases, etc. The hostility is also through actions and not just insults. The only way to have actual fun gaming is a private group of friends. Think lan party, and definitely not public.

We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#107

Post by paulmist »

estearum wrote: post #25
aetherspawn wrote: post #14

Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units. Also, one particularly aggravating part of the com…

It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy wha…

I think that's a normal evolution of these games? In the end they are cooperative so your teammates depend on you. Although you'll find plenty of people at the top of the ladder spamming werid strategies and being successful.

Re: Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)

#109

Post by Teifion »

redrobein wrote: post #97
Teifion wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.

I'm curious, why isn't the the free version of the game on steam? It'd be a lot easier to get my friends to try it, and setup parties if it used steam friends.

The current version isn't on steam due to a variety of (mostly infrastructure related) issues, the free version _will_ be on steam in the future though you will still be able to get the free version from the website for those who want to avoid steam.
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