StarDestroyer.Net BBS

TA just showed up on GOG.com. Its called the "Commander Pack". Everything.

Total Annihilation
Core Contingency
Battle Tactics

The game is downloaded as a single file. No CD or disc check, no mounting drive. No DRM of any sort. Make as many copies as you want. Comes with the entire sound track as downloadable items separate from the game.

$6 for the whole package

Many fond memories of this game. I had a 6 hour marathon game with Chris O'Farrell against the cheating BAI mod.

If you had fond memories, just crack your disk version and voila, the same thing.

Stark wrote:If you had fond memories, just crack your disk version and voila, the same thing.

I never owned Battle Tactics. Its a fairly cheap price to pay to get the complete digital copy in an easy format. I don't mind supporting an old game years later.

By 'support old game' I guess you mean 'support whoever currently owns the rights'?

It's a shame the guys behind spring went so insane; TA is a fun game (until it turns into basegrinding) but it's just not worth the fat UI and the no-camera.

WZ2100 is my basegrinding game of choice, and it even has a camera.

Stark wrote:By 'support old game' I guess you mean 'support whoever currently owns the rights'?

To an extent. It shows possible popularity if they were to consider a sequel.

It's a shame the guys behind spring went so insane; TA is a fun game (until it turns into basegrinding) but it's just not worth the fat UI and the no-camera.

A relic of its time. I did not encounter a free moving camera until the first Ground Control game. It was the first strategy game I played that had customizable resolution.

WZ2100 is my basegrinding game of choice, and it even has a camera.

Never did play that game.

Man, TA was my first RTS, and it brings back memories. My mother wouldn't let me get Starcraft at the time (too much blood ), so when I found an RTS that was pure robot battling, that was amazing.

My brother and I would play massive "no attack until we agree" games against each other. What was really fun was taking down his massive defenses with a cloaked commander sneak-self-destruct in front of his lines. "Gate's open, come on in!"

The only thing that really bugs me about it even these days is how the pathfinding AI collapses under either (1) massive armies or (2) boats colliding. Ships just could not seem to get their act together if anything got in the way.

That's why TA sucked. Basegrinding because 'oh noez no attackz for 10m'. The fun of TA was the huge array of interesting units and massive patrol lines of spacebombers, not 'lets sit here for half an hour while our giant guns blast each other'. They could have just make TA a screensaver if that's what people wanted.

Stark wrote:That's why TA sucked. Basegrinding because 'oh noez no attackz for 10m'. The fun of TA was the huge array of interesting units and massive patrol lines of spacebombers, not 'lets sit here for half an hour while our giant guns blast each other'. They could have just make TA a screensaver if that's what people wanted.

I didn't mind base grinding so much. I rather like strategic artillery. But I understand exactly what your talking about and I can see that it would turn people off.

Supreme Commander tried to rectify some of these issues by tweaking the navies to be more effective and of course the insanely powerful super units that could usually be counted on cracking any base.

Stark wrote:That's why TA sucked. Basegrinding because 'oh noez no attackz for 10m'. The fun of TA was the huge array of interesting units and massive patrol lines of spacebombers, not 'lets sit here for half an hour while our giant guns blast each other'.

Well, I expected you to jump in and bitch about that. I've had a few fun games of rush, but I'm not very good at it. Og knows I get stomped in Supreme Commander 1v1 matchings.

Alyeska wrote: Supreme Commander tried to rectify some of these issues by tweaking the navies to be more effective and of course the insanely powerful super units that could usually be counted on cracking any base.

I thought it did pretty well at that. You think otherwise?

I seriosuly think a multi tower-defence RTS would be what a lot of people want; even better if you can run it in the background like Defcon. A kind of DotA/TD/RTS thing; all the pew pew giant guns breaking fortresses you could want, all day, forever.

Dave wrote:I thought it did pretty well at that. You think otherwise?

It did. You could still turtle, but it was different and it involved mobile forces. The navies were improved fairly well to the point battleships actually had range. But I still miss some components of TA. It seemed to play faster. Air was a little funner. The Tier-3 defenses rocked.

Rushing to a few T3 things were hilarious, but defences were a bit shit (although good at assassinating). It was nothing like the cheap an effective TA defences, and watching monkeylords causally walk through defences because tac missiles are micro'd was funny.

Stark wrote:That's why TA sucked. Basegrinding because 'oh noez no attackz for 10m'. The fun of TA was the huge array of interesting units and massive patrol lines of spacebombers, not 'lets sit here for half an hour while our giant guns blast each other'. They could have just make TA a screensaver if that's what people wanted.

There were people who played TA competitively and they didn't basegrind at all - it was all about raiding, harassment, and territory (well, metal spot) control. The huge arsenal of units was ironically mostly terribly balanced - very few of the top players used Core, Flash tanks and missile trucks were overwhelmingly the favorite (although the game hilariously choked on a modem connection with too many Flash tanks or Brawler gunships shooting, something to do with the code sending something for every pellet or sound effect or some such crap), and level 2 land units were incredibly rare. L2 bomberswarm was lethal against an opponent with no fighterswarm, but hilariously the fighterswarm was more lethal against a single target as they were air-to-ground capable and more likely to penetrate to the target and flood it with missiles. And the end-game condition was usually Commander Death, so...

Most of the "interesting array of units" only really came out in contests between newbies and/or basegrind battles. Hell, some of the Core Contingency units (Krogoth, the RFLRPCs, i think a couple of others) were explicitly, deliberately designed to be grossly inefficient resource sinks. But then, that's not at all a surprise when Chris Taylor thought flattening a forest with a nuclear missile to make way for his army was totally rad.


I don't doubt that you ran into basegrinders back when people still played TA online (oh god, Boneyards was such an amazing and lovable gimmick), but there were definitely people who played it seriously as well. The Gnugs and the Swedish Yankspankers (or were those one and the same?) were among them; I'm sure there were others.


Hell, I was never a particularly brilliant player, and even most of my TA games were more about my blob of units grinding against his blob of units than any sort of duelling fortresses arrangement. (That was reserved for LAN games with my friends, who were utterly incapable of handling any other way of playing TA.)


And yeah, I could never get into Spring either, it always felt incredibly clunky.

Alyeska wrote: Supreme Commander tried to rectify some of these issues by tweaking the navies to be more effective and of course the insanely powerful super units that could usually be counted on cracking any base.

That was never a big problem in stock TA, as the anti-missile system was relatively easily swamped - just toss three nuclear missiles at once (or hell, I think three in a row had a chance at locking up the unit in the firing animation or something) and one would usually get through. They weren't smart enough to coordinate either, so multiple AMS batteries would waste their ammo on a single inbound.

One of my funnest TA moments was building one of those minor twin barrel fixed artillery pieces within range of the other guy's metal on his half of the map (small map, separated by lava). He myopically fixated on trying to take out that artillery position for the entire game until I sent some units by air to his island and went on a rampage. Fun times.

Not much incentive to get this, since Ye Olde version of TA runs on a modern OS like a charm. The only trick is installing it on a 64-bit OS, since either TA or CC has a 16-bit installer. Fortunately, the devs were nice enough to make the installer not fuck around with the registry, so all you need to do is copy a functioning install from another machine. Bonus points for the game supporting resolutions and aspect ratios that didn't even exist when the game was published.

I loved TA when it first came out, but why play it now? Doesn't Supreme Commander basically supersede it in every way?

Uraniun235 wrote:although the game hilariously choked on a modem connection with too many Flash tanks or Brawler gunships shooting, something to do with the code sending something for every pellet or sound effect or some such crap

The lag came from two things. The netwok being saturated when the game sends create notifications for each attack pellet and the sound effect being queued with the sound subsystem. Back in the day, throwing a 100 sound effects to play in under a dozen seconds at most sound cards would cause them to crawl painfully slowly.

oh god, Boneyards was such an amazing and lovable gimmick

Boneyards had an amazing amount of fluff (for TA) locked into behind the doors which died when the server's they where on got switched off.

The Gnugs and the Swedish Yankspankers (or were those one and the same?) were among them; I'm sure there were others.

Two seperate groups. The Yankspankers created the TA Demo Recorder which recorded the network bytestream and actually recorder multiplayer games. I later improved it to include true-line of sight sharing between allies and added a bunch of modding tools to the scripting engine which are used to this day (back in 2004-2006 or so)

Oh wow, I'd forgotten about TA Demo Recorder. Yeah, that thing was fucking awesome. Didn't it also allow for whiteboarding and to lay down lines of buildings (which made queuing up a wall of Dragon's Teeth waaaay easier)? Easily one of the best fan-made enhancements to a game ever.

Yup. Arbitary whiteboarding, named markers, pings, drag/preset pattern build queuing, and showing allied incoming totals & flows. It also permitted queuing 100 units at a time, since the game lacked a repeat queue.

It made teamplay a blast, and really set the bar for cooperative features which most modern games have failed to meet. Only way to make it better would have been VOIP, but back then VOIP was rare as hell and actually having the upload bandwidth for both the game(TA can peak at 10-20kb/s upload depending on unit count and activity) and VOIP was rarer.

Now that I think about it (and while you're here ), how did you get it to do LOS sharing between allies?

Reverse engineering of the Total Annihilation exe. Basicly I managed to find the location where a unit's LOS footprint was added to the player's LOS map compared to the Yankspanker solution which only hook a few different spots on rendering. Injecting x86 asm code which loops around that function altering the "owning" player so the unit adds it's LOS footprint to all allied players then enabled Line-of-sight sharing. This took about 1-2 years or so to get right, and I was looking on how to fix the pathfinding code so it scaled better before I basicly ran out of steam w.r.t to TA.

Amusingly one of the major complains was it also shared unit sounds of allied units (even if it was attenuated by distance).

The sad thing is it was probably a 10 minute job with the source-code to actually add line of sight sharing, and equivelent to prevent the pathfinding from imploding @ 150-200 units.

The TA scripting is also horribly limited where a few simple things could have made it vastly better. TA's net packet parsing is also stupidly lacking on the validation side.

Xon wrote:Reverse engineering of the Total Annihilation exe. Basicly I managed to find the location where a unit's LOS footprint was added to the player's LOS map compared to the Yankspanker solution which only hook a few different spots on rendering. Injecting x86 asm code which loops around that function altering the "owning" player so the unit adds it's LOS footprint to all allied players then enabled Line-of-sight sharing. This took about 1-2 years or so to get right, and I was looking on how to fix the pathfinding code so it scaled better before I basicly ran out of steam w.r.t to TA.

Could you do something like this today given modern security techniques like ASLR?

The sad thing is it was probably a 10 minute job with the source-code to actually add line of sight sharing, and equivelent to prevent the pathfinding from imploding @ 150-200 units.

What pathfinding algorithm did they use, if you can recall?

TA's net packet most applications' input parsing is also stupidly lacking on the validation side.

Fixed that for you

phongn wrote:Could you do something like this today given modern security techniques like ASLR?

The TADR DLL(s) gets loaded in replace of dplayx.dll or ddraw.dll (which load on application start), which then proxies calls to the actual system dlls and patch the non-relocatable exe image. There was a small app which hex-edits totala.exe to load spank.dll instead of dplayx.dll because Win95 (and no other) had dplayx.dll in the "known system DLL list".

My TADR variant, went a step furthur and injected a code-jump into the 1st 3-4 bytes of the exe actual start point which ran on DLL load. Meaning TADR always had a chance todo it's initialization and code injections before TA could do anything after it un-did the injection and jumped back. This is how it implemented the soft-mod 1500 unit limit. It edited the upper limit before the ini file was read on startup.

The big thing to realise is the network packet parser was very simple, and basicly the entire TA netcode could be decoded by reverse engineering the x86 asm which only covered about 3-6 a4 pages. The biggest challenge was to find the pathfinding code, which I never got around todoing (as I was focusing on the line of sight sharing).

What pathfinding algorithm did they use, if you can recall?

Some A* variant. But the issue was it had a filter which increased the courseness of the mesh it searched which was based on the total number of units with no regard for the CPU's actual power. Plus the design forced the entire path to be mapped out, without any iterative searching per frame. At least it only did the search based on the current move order and not the entire order queue.

Fixed that for you

So true.

Xon wrote:

phongn wrote:Could you do something like this today given modern security techniques like ASLR?

The TADR DLL(s) gets loaded in replace of dplayx.dll or ddraw.dll (which load on application start), which then proxies calls to the actual system dlls and patch the non-relocatable exe image. There was a small app which hex-edits totala.exe to load spank.dll instead of dplayx.dll because Win95 (and no other) had dplayx.dll in the "known system DLL list".

Ah-hah. That makes sense.

Fixed that for you

So true.

The project I'm on was originally written by undergrads.