[fergal_reid]

I used to play Total Annihilation online back when I was in secondary school in the late 90s

We'd hang out on IRC, and people would host a game on their IP.

Eventually I got into creating new units for the game. You had to animate them with a C-like language, and I was trying to teach myself C at the time so that was part of my programming journey.

The 'Swedish Yankspankers' were a clan that had a channel on the IRC server, and my recollection, which may be wrong, is that they started building an app, 'TAreplay' that we could use to record and rewatch tournament games. People used to pass the exe around - not very secure, but those were the times!

It's amazing to me that those players hacking little apps together for themselves, have spawned a lineage of RTS engines and games that are still going all this time later.

A small but incredible example of hacker culture.

[russnewcomer]

It’s still some of the same folks - SJ and some of the other SYs wrote the Spring Engine that Zero-K uses.

I myself learned how to code writing .bos scripts and hanging out at Annihilated, TAU, and #gnug

If you want to see some of the stuff still possible and being done in the TA engine, check out TAUniverse.com

[jhoho]

You'll love what the community did with Supreme Commander, Chris Taylor's spiritual successor to Total Annihilation: https://www.faforever.com/

They even created a Coop-Campaign and a completely new faction.

[willis936]

I put a lot of hours into SupCom. It was always a buggy mess, but I do remember it quite fondly. Planetary Annihilation has felt like the right progression in the spiritual series. It was always a very smooth experience and fixed the technical issues with scaling up to massive scale combat while fixing the balance issues of turtling. The skill ceiling is immense and I could never beat high level bots. The nature of having one to many planets also means you can play cooperatively with up to several friends. It's a good time.

[rl3]

Supreme Commander's getting its own spiritual successor:

https://www.sanctuaryshatteredsun.com/

[disintegore]

I thought Planetary Annihilation was a spiritual successor to both TA and SC

[rl3]

That's technically true. Planetary Annihilation was a heroic effort lead by Jonathan Mavor (formerly of Gas Powered Games) that fused elements of TA, SC, and its own crazy ideas on what amounted to a shoestring budget.

Supreme Commander's budget was about $50M USD (circa the mid-2000s), and Mavor was lead engineer on the project.

Beyond All Reason is arguably more similar to Total Annihilation than Planetary Annihilation.

By that same token, Sanctuary is the closest thing to a complete remake of Supreme Commander. Granted, Forged Alliance Forever has had such incredible work put in by the community that it comes close, but it's ultimately stuck on the same engine.

Turns out Mavor has a new company now, and I'm elated to hear someone's finally combining Factorio with a decent RTS component:

https://industrialannihilation.com/

[drannex]

I am incredibly excited for Industrial Annihilation, really looks close to my ultimate dreams RTS.

> IA is a unique blend of genres: deep factory building combined with real-time strategy action.