Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pfarnsworth 3375 days ago
If I remember, each unit was rendered in 3D so it was visually stunning as well, as opposed to Starcraft that looked flat and old to me. The graphics during huge fights were really awesome, and you got a lot of time to admire it when you had huge battles and it slowed the frame rate down to a crawl.
2 comments

Yep and not only are the units rendered in 3D but the unit's projectiles really move in 3D and get blocked by terrain etc, and line-of-sight gets blocked by hills and so on as well. The terrain is just an image but it's calculated via a 3D mesh that underlies it.

Also, TA supports all screen resolutions your monitor does, so far from needing a Remaster, TA still looks surprisingly good today at high resolution. The interface (which is designed to work with 640x480) quickly gets tiny though.

> get blocked by terrain

This made the green race (forget their name) in Supreme Commander quite overpowered - as artillery doesn't suffer from line-of-fire and that race had the most powerful artillery.

The simulation of projectiles also made the game run like a dog, but we loved that slow dog.

Starcraft's graphics have aged considerably better than Total Annihilation's. Starcraft looks like classic pixel art where TA looks like 90s 3D.