I wish there also was an open-source engine for WarCraft 2, with modern AI, big screen resolutions support but without the drawbacks of modern RTS games like GPU power requirements (making it hard to play them on commodity hardware) and excessive graphics complexity (making map and tile design hard).
Very cool, thanks! Whoever is also going to try it - don't miss the -v XxY command line key to have a bigger view. Also don't waste time trying to make it work with BNE resources, just download the DOS CD from archive.org.
I want someone to make an RTS with sprites instead of 3D models and shader-based flow simulation for path finding so I can have battles with billions of units.
Sort of like how Total Annihilation could scale but updated for modern computer architectures.
And I want sprites instead of 3D models for yet different reason - it's somehow in practice very hard to make serious game with 3D graphics. As far as I can tell, no RTS like that was ever made. 3D graphics - especially with tight polygon budget - ends up being cheesy.
Take StarCraft vs. StarCraft 2. The transition from drawn sprites to 3D models made the game lose its entire mood.
Warcraft 3 was what first made me worried when I heard they're doing StarCraft 2. W3's graphics were very visibly low-poly and had this specific color palette that made the whole thing look distinctivly non-serious. It ruined the game's mood for me and my suspension of disbelief.
Warcraft 3 seems an RTS (you can do everything you could in WarCraft 2 there, WarCraft 3 has quite a number of "classic" missions) with simple RPG-ish elements (heroes, artifacts, NPCs) yet I can name what I see as a much better example of the same genre - Dawn of War / Soulstorm.
Are you aware of any real world examples that implement this? I've seen a few research papers over the years, but nothing beyond a rough proof of concept. As a fellow TA fan disappointed by SupCom and every other RTS since, this sounds tempting.
As a Total Annihilation fan, what displeased you about Supreme Commander?
I adored TA, but I"m REALLY struggling to come up with anything better than Supreme Commander.
TA's ships moved like molassess. TA's planes had enormous turning radii. TA's big units were effectively useless because they took far too much resource to build.
Three things displeased me. First, one of the (many) ways in which TA was revolutionary for its time was that it largely emphasized thinking over rapid micromanagement and SC was a regression in this regard, an unnecessary concession to the RTS scene of the day. Second, how technically underwhelming it was in terms of pushing the envelope in scale, unit counts etc. compared to the gigantic leap in available performance between 1997 and 2007. Third, the unsolvable technical limitation that any game against the AI (including custom AIs) would eventually crawl to an unplayable lagfest - this is still true even on today's hardware.
Well, the primary problem was that Supreme Commander made a bet that "Teh Pretty(tm)" was worth pursuing (probably as a result of complaints about TA). SupCom absolutely murdered graphics cards of the day--and it still plays like a dog on modern integrated graphics. Consequently, unit count was always going to be limited.
I suspect that modern graphics cards could probably chew through this--but you need to build an engine that leans into the way modern graphics cards work.
Emphasis on graphical fidelity was an issue when it came out, but the long term performance nightmares are all single threaded CPU bottlenecks. The whole engine just scaled really poorly with increased unit counts and AI/pathfinding computations. For a game that's basically all about scaling that was something of a dealbreaker.
> TA's planes had enormous turning radii. TA's big units were effectively useless because they took far too much resource to build.
Can't these parameters be tweaked somehow? Experimenting with unit parameters was a lot of fun in Tiberian Sun where you could just edit a text file to get whatever you imagine. TA has to store unit parameters somewhere too, perhaps these can be edited with a hex editor.
I am not but it seems like an intuitive solution to the problem where the path is blocked by other units so one of stragglers routes alllllllllll the way around the map and straight through the enemy base.
> the problem where the path is blocked by other units
Why this should even be a problem? It seems reasonable when a tank can't ride over another tank but as for infantry units - it always seemed bizarre a man can't travel through a cell occupied by another man.
If you want that many units I'd precompute the paths with Floyd-Warshall instead of doing anything on the GPU. Probably still need to invoke the GPU to handle billions of units in the first place, though, and you'd need several gigabytes of RAM for them. Unless the entire game is happening in summary statistics.
