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I think Total Annihilation is the only game out there where all players have the same abilities and resources, but how they decide to use them changes the whole game. Each side has wheeled, legged, flying, hovering and floating (naval) units. The game gives you unlimited resources at limited rate. Since all sides have roughly the same units, the game depends largely on how you react to your opponents' strategy. There's no fixed general strategy, it keeps the game challenging and entertaining. If you haven't tried yet, get TA Spring http://spring.clan-sy.com/
and it's open source!

http://spring.clan-sy.com/

... they should instead use TASpring (see also spring.jobjol.nl ) which, besides being free software, has a huge community behind, is cross platform and developed with talent and passion.

the Balanced Annihilation mod really lets you enjoy strategy to a decent level of detail, while slashdot readers should really have a look at the geeky Kernel Panic mod ...

cheers from XXX
with due rezpect to LAP, eXe and others ;^)

TA Spring is a completely open source 3D RTS, and it's awesome! http://spring.clan-sy.com/

If you can't get fast enough hardware, try faster software.

Here's my personal favorite open source project I discovered in 2008: Spring Engine http://spring.clan-sy.com/ [clan-sy.com]

I would completely agree with you... if it were 1995.

I clicked on this article thinking I could maybe find some really cool open source piece of software that I haven't seen yet. I am completely unimpressed, the list is barely anything more than a bunch of Linux distros.

Here's my personal favorite open source project I discovered in 2008: Spring Engine http://spring.clan-sy.com/

my 2 cents

Project Spring is an open source RTS platform that has the ability to be skinned and modified for user created games. There are several excellent remakes of the RTS classis Total Annihilation (upon which the Spring platform is based) with an updated user interface and much better POV control and queue management. My only beef with the platform is that it does require some good 3D hardware to run correctly. I can't get a good frame rate to save my life with my integrate radeon x1250... even on a dual core 3ghz Athlon! http://spring.clan-sy.com/

I think Bos Wars would be a great choice:
http://www.boswars.org/

Also Spring with its various mods is a great free game, but might be a bit much for the hardware:
http://spring.clan-sy.com/

Spring http://spring.clan-sy.com/

I have recently started playing Balanced Annihilation based on the Spring game engine. http://spring.clan-sy.com/ The game has mainly been oriented to online play, but at least 3 good working AI's have been built by the community and I have enjoyed pitting them against and watching how they behave. http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=15 You can almost anthropomorphise them to have different personalities. Being that it is all free and open source, if you are interested in RTS game AI, you may want to check them out.

I have recently started playing Balanced Annihilation based on the Spring game engine. http://spring.clan-sy.com/ The game has mainly been oriented to online play, but at least 3 good working AI's have been built by the community and I have enjoyed pitting them against and watching how they behave. http://spring.clan-sy.com/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=15 You can almost anthropomorphise them to have different personalities. Being that it is all free and open source, if you are interested in RTS game AI, you may want to check them out.

Lots of projects have their own repositories because they update at a higher frequency than the distro updates. For example, Spring has it's own repository. Once you add the repository via Synaptic (or whatever), it's packages are available and get updated right along with every other package. I'm guessing the Debian packages would include the screenshots, or have links to some place in a repository. No (good) reason 3rd party packagers wouldn't be able to do this.

Get Spring, it has much lower sys reqs than SupCom and both the engine and the games on it are still seeing active development so if an issue arises it can actually get fixed.

This is vaguely off topic, I suppose; but I think that TA Spring the weirdo timeline defying clone of the TA/SupCom family deserves a mention. It brings classic TA mechanics(assuming you use the appropriate mod) into a modern 3D engine, all with fairly modest resource requirements.

playing games like Star Control 2, Total Annihilation, Tribes 1 & 2, and Quake 2 & 3. I am not sure if I could survive another round.

The fan community has redone SC2 and released it as Ur-Quan Masters - http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ (great remake btw). Total Anni has been remade as Spring - http://spring.clan-sy.com/ but I still find the original modded with TAMutation more fun.

The gaming community has changed considerably though. Gaming is bigger than it ever has been and a massive casual gamer crowd has entered the market. Anything that mainstream is bound to have it's share of mediocrity. There are still great titles out there. You just have to wade through more crap to find them.

Hey I loved the original CNC Gold :) Or CNC 95 or whatever it was called. Loved RA, RA2 IMO was the decline Tiberium Sun was so-so, Firestorm was just eh as well I loved AOE/AOK and all it's friends. AOE3 has let me down. I never played TA BUT this leads me to the main point of this: Try out TA Spring It's a 3D engine and there are many mods made for it, most of the popular ones from the TA strain There are units like PeeWee's, Big Bertha's, Buzzsaw's, ARM vs Core, etc. It's much more abstract than CNC, but if you could bleieve that Nod vs GDI... I'm sure it'd be easy enough :) http://spring.clan-sy.com/

Do you play TA mostly on LAN games or online? I've tried TA:Spring http://spring.clan-sy.com/ and I have to say I really like it but only one of my computers runs it smoothly. I play TA on LAN games but the group I play with has been getting smaller and smaller so I've been trying to find somewhere to play online.

You know how many people try to automate seemingly trivial things with scripts in Spring? You quickly run into a barrier because while the strategy may be standard the specific execution must be adapted to the situation. E.g. a commonly requested feature is an auto-dgun widget for Total Annihilation clones/ripoffs but there's tons of factors to account for, the thing costs a lot to use, it can easily cause friendly fire that, depending on the situation, could be acceptable or unacceptable and it has to be aimed properly so the shot actually connects. If you automate that the enemy player will quickly learn the pattern of your automation and adapt to use it against you. That's why the tactics cannot be automated easily, a good player will employ tactics that beat your AI. Well, unless you make it impossible to override the AI's decisions but then you'll end up with units doing stupid things and players learning the situations in which the AI behaves well or badly and exploiting that.

Real time strategy is really more on a tactical scale most of the time, strategic advantages can be countered by good tactics and a player must handle both the macro and micro (pretty much strategy and tactics) at the same time to get the maximum efficiency out of his troops. Any predictable behaviour is going to be a weakness.

Sounds a bit like Kernel Panic.

I'm glad you mentioned it, because there is even a complete engine that was created to run Total Annihilation in fully rendered 3D, called Spring. It has since surpassed its main goals and has become something even bigger, with many more games that have been developed (or currently being developed) including WWII based, Gundam, Star Wars, and even games based on the internal systems and parts of a computer (Kernel Panic).

It has been the only source of entertainment (besides occasional bouts of fallout) that I've had for months. If you do go check it out, and you should, the Complete Annihilation mod is in my opinion one of the very best mods available. The technical and artistic ability of the main developers and contributors is awe inspiring. There is some more information on the trac page.

But imagine for a moment full resource and control sharing. At that point you can differentiate roles and responsibilities.

A few games support that, in Spring you can assign multiple players to one id and they all play with the same units and resource pool. I don't think people like doing that though, they prefer each having their own units and resource pool (which can usually be freely transferred between players so there's still some budgetting going on).

That depends on what you're making. Obviously a one man team can't make the next Call of Duty or whatever, making what's essentially a new, AAA grade game needs a professional development team, making the mod equivalent of a flash game doesn't take long and can feasibly be done in one's free time. I've made loads of smaller mods (for the Spring engine, modding that involves making a new set of units as well as scripting any game logic you need beyond the standard Total Annihilation hehaviour it offers) in my spare time.

And hell, modding that engine almost requires making a TC and it's not much work either.

Flashspam says hi.

The tankrush is only a bug if it's the unconditionally best way to win, many RTSes allow it as one valid strategy but make it possible to counter as well so it's a massive gamble, try to defeat the enemy early but risk economic growth in the process or build up more econ and risk less.

Hell, even in Kernel Panic we've got that mechanism, you can go and spam cheap units quickly and hope theys win you the game or you can use a con unit and expand to increase your production capabilities. If the first rush fails you're usually left crippled so going tank rush all the time isn't a good idea, especially once your opponent expects it.

If the tankrush seems impossible to stop to you maybe you're just not playing well enough.

Go play Spring then, it allows zooming out until you see the whole map if you want to (I usually play in a zoom level that's further out than other games allow but not THAT far out).

Spring is one of the best games (RTS) I have ever played the interface is a little rough and it takes a bit to learn unless you played Total Annihilation, but it is incredible for an open-source indie game

Guess I should provide links. :-) Spring is here (TA fans check it out!), and Nexuiz would be here.

Depending on the game that won't do jack though, it's pretty easy to lead a target moving in a straight line and in e.g. Spring all units are smart enough to do that. If you want to dodge bullets you have to keep changing directions. It's feasible and pretty much required at high-level play.

Have you encountered the Spring project? If you enjoy TA, you should check it out, it's an open source RTS engine that started out as a remake of TA. it's here.

Meh. I'm a contributor to Spring, an (opensource) online RTS where we allow anyone to run custom Lua code and automate what they want to. It hasn't led to cheating, at least nothing I'd count as cheating (there's often heated debates over whether automating "menial" tasks is cheating but I think it's not, if you don't want e.g. dgunning planes then tell the engine, don't hope that the player is too incompetent to enter it!). A script can only automate trivial things, it cannot do the thinking for you. I don't know much about Eve but since it's an MMO I expect it to have little twitch gaming. In such a situation automating tasks will only give you a small boost as the most important actions are those the computer cannot do for you. Since it's a server-client model information cheating shouldn't be an issue either, just don't tell the client what the player must not know.

Let me add Spring's (opensource RTS platform) 76b1 release to the list...

Try some Spring, the mods do have occassional balance issues but since they're still being maintained any such issue won't last for long and there shouldn't be anything major remaining.

This needs more Spring RTS. Version 76b1 just came out. It's opensource, it runs on Linux (not sure it'll work on Macs but I guess if you wanted to play games you wouldn't have bought a Mac) and it's got plenty of "mods" (there's no base game so these aren't really modifications). The engine was originally meant to run Total Annihilation so there's plenty of variations of TA around and most if not all mods allow large scale battles. AFAIK the only recent commercial RTS like that was Supreme Commander and that was pretty disappointing with its bland gameplay.

Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.

The following publishers develop comemrcial linux games:

http://www.pompomgames.com/
http://www.garagegames.com/
http://www.introversion.co.uk/
http://frictionalgames.com/
http://sillysoft.net/
http://www.basiliskgames.com/
http://www.guildsoftware.com/
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/
http://www.rune-soft.com/
http://grubbygames.com/
http://www.caravelgames.com/
http://www.planewalkergames.com/
http://www.graalonline.com/

There are also the high profile ones such as neverwinter nights, the doom and quake series, unreal, etc.

There are many high quality independant titles such as neverball, you mentioned wesnoth, crimson fields, flight gear, torcs, the spring project, total annihilation 3d, tecnoballZ, powermanga, tile racer, pingus, clonk, freeciv, ultimate stunts, planeshift, scorched3d, VDrift, silvertree (not complete, but being created by the wesnoth guys so likely will not be vapor), ufo: alien invasion, scourge, etc.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.flightgear.org/
https://icculus.org/neverball/
http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/
http://linux.tlk.fr/games/
http://tileracer.model-view.com/
http://pingus.seul.org/
http://www.clonk.de/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/
http://www.planeshift.it/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://vdrift.net/
http://www.silvertreerpg.org/
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
http://scourge.sourceforge.net/

Many of these are very impressive independently made free games. Perhaps they lack the multi million dollar marketing budget and won't make your geofrce 8800 gtxz 45 x super elite ultra melt, but theya re *fun* games, and they are numerous. Also keep in mind this publisher and free game list is only what I could find in 1 hour of searching.

Then there are freed older commercial games such as warzone 2100, homeworld, descent 1 and 2, doom, quake, etc.

Lets not stop t

First would have to be TA Spring, a fully 3d reimplementation of Total Annihilation and many mods and maps for it.

Then Warzone 2100 (Resurrection), a revival of a great commercial RTS game that was Freed a few years ago.

Bos Wars is by far the best and most polished of all the games based on the Stratagus(formerly FreeCraft) engine, but

Also, Globulation 2 is pretty fun, if a bit less deep than the others in terms of strategic options.

Finally, Glest is a fun from-scratch fantasy RTS game, not as polished as the others though.

Those are the ones I have installed. Of them, I play TA Spring the most, and Glest the least.

If you think SupCom shows how much TA has aged try Spring. Some of the mods there demonstrate a TA-like ("like" because purists can produce a huge list of differences between TA and even the closest mods on Spring) gameplay that's properly balanced and shows dynamic gameplay and unit variety much greater than what you see in SupCom.

As for Super Mario Galaxy, try playing Super Mario 64 again and compare. The N64 title is just vastly inferior in every way. Sure, SMG is based on the same gameplay to a degree but it's a huge improvement and SM64 was already considered a great game.

I do agree that the enormous majority of games in the last 5 years at least all number among the worst.

We call that "Sturgeon's Law". If you think your chances that any randomly selected game is good are worse now than in the Atari age you're living some serious delusions.

BTW, SupCom sucks, play Spring, the TA-like mods have much better balance along with more unit and strategic variety. Plus it doesn't require a super expensive/powerful machine to remain playable in lategame.

OK, it's not dead, it's just... confusing. ;)

Last time I looked at http://spring.clan-sy.com/ , it sure looked stalled. Is this the right page?

Making Spring easy to work with (easy selection and download of mods, maps, etc) would go a long way towards player enjoyment.

There are some fine RTSes, a very nice one is Spring, which was once a Total Annihilation more-or-less reimplementation in full 3D, but now is much more than that.

TA Spring is available for Linux, these days. clickie

Just play Spring RTS.

TA didn't require more CPU power than was available to consumers. If you have slightly older hardware you're toast, SupCom's framerate hits rock bottom. My PC has pretty much exactly the "recommended" specs but five minutes into the game it's already slowed to a crawl.

Of course you could just play Spring which has much lower CPU demands.

There's a mod for the Spring opensource RTS engine that lets you fight that battalion of bugs! [/shameless plug]

I have had personal experience that disagrees with your claim. I recently decided to modify the Spring code to include a new camera mode that followed the action. This was the easiest programming I have ever done, despite not having used C++ before (I am proficient in C and Java). The code was beautiful and easy to understand and extend, and I don't think I read five lines of code that were irrelevant to what I was trying to do. It took two days before I had a quite functional demo. I stopped working on it at that point, but it worked, and I used it for spectating often. In contrast, in my old job working on a POS system, we never had time to make code beautiful, as there was always something else to do. As a result, the code was very untidy, and it took a long time to sort things out before anything could be changed. Witness a task estimated to take less than a week that ended up stretching over three months. It seems obvious to me that programmers under no pressure will take more time to massage code until it is beautiful. In addition, the frequent refactorings that seem more common in the open-source world probably help readability even more. Witness Blender 3D. The people working on that project are brilliant. They have to be to produce a product as good as what they have, with a somewhat lacking design (the main problem being the lack of a global scripting system that records every action and can alter one down the chain and then replay the rest - the modifier stack goes some way towards doing this, but there are other solutions out there). I would claim (without any real evidence) that open source programs are probably much better commented than equivalent proprietary ones. There are exceptions, of course, but then again, one might mention the linux kernel as an example of a well-commented product. I also can't help mentioning that oss evolution could be much more efficient due to cross-pollenation of code, but that's not really related to this discussion. All in all, I think the open-source method produces much more maintainable (modular and commented) code than many production software houses, as a result of the frequent changes of developers (and contributions of others).

Than Spring, for pure RTS games (with novel FPS functionality thrown in). It was built in the spirit of Total Annihilation originally, but is flexible to accommodate a Star Wars mod, Gundam mod, a visually stunning (think Darwinia) mod, various World War II | I | III mods, etc etc. Also has some very intelligent AIs built for it, along with

full 3D maps/units/features, full LUA support, totally scriptable, dynamic particle effects, shadows, cool terrain. Very very active community.
http://spring.clan-sy.com/

If you're looking for something more in the vein of a tried-and-true scientific engine (you mentioned something like that), give ORTS a whirl (http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/orts/). A couple of seniors at my school (University of Michigan) did some cool senior projects with it, its very useful for AI work, backed by a very smart community (several well-know professors work with it), and is also really stable. The graphics are weak, but its not meant to be a "fun" engine so much as a research engine (although you can have some interesting experiences playing it ;) )

Of course, depending on your ultimate needs, you may be best off simply making a mod for another successful game. There are very very rarely situations where you'll need a full engine of your own creation. Most engines nowadays can accommodate your needs in some way or another.

And an open-source clone called TA: Spring at http://spring.clan-sy.com/

I hope they take a clue or two from Spring. It's basically what happens when player demands get followed and the interface is very powerful compared to other RTSes (based on TA, taken a few ideas from SupCom and of course a lot of stuff that was found useful). I haven't played any other RTS that lets players choose their start position freely just by clicking on a spot on the map, no matter where it is rather than just pick one out of a list of predefined points (though usually you want to give each player some area to place himself into to avoid people spawning right next to each other).

But all of this is futile hope. This is Blizzard we're talking about, a company that considers limiting the number of units the player can select a valid feature. It was acceptable in Warcraft 1 but after that they should have dumped the idea.

You should try Spring if you haven't already.

Hell, I'm still making mods for Spring which is a TA-compatible RTS engine.

If gaming is so much about user-generated content then why bother buying games? Just make your own game!

First, thanks to you and Cthefuture for pointing these out.

The only OSS shooters I was aware of were Cube and its sequel Sauerbraten. Those two are interesting in that they achieve quite a lot with, technically, very little -- the spatial heirarchies they use are quite primitive, and they don't do any occlusion culling, for starters. Cube, the simpler of the two, is actually pretty cool in that it will run, and run well, on damn near anything with a graphics card. Yet it somehow feels like little more than Doom.

So I just tried Warsow and Nexuiz.

Nexuiz: It could be that this game looks great on a monster gaming rig, but me, all I've got is a 3.5-year-old Dell laptop. 2 GHz Pentium M, Geforce somethingsomething mobile (the product numbers in this industry long ago stopped meaning anything: It supports the first version of vertex shaders, and no pixel shaders. UT2004 looks pretty good, and that's about my top end). And on my laptop, Nexuiz was less-than-impressive. In terms of eyecandy-per-dollar-of-computing-hardware, I was underwhelmed. I also agree with Cthefuture that it felt like Quake2.

I was much more impressed by Warsow! It put out nice graphics at a good framerate. It felt a lot like Quake III, with many hints of UT -- but hey, I liked both of those games. Compared to Nexuiz, the "effects" weren't as great, but the quality of artwork was superior: Professional, consistent, and appealing -- and the levels looked better. Unfortunately, there was nobody online to try playing against.

While I'm talking about OSS games -- and I know I'm veering dangerously near the realm of completely off-topic; forgive me, it's cool -- I'd also endorse TASpring. It's a strategy game, not a shooter, and it is also unapologetically a remake of the commercial Total Annihilation -- but it's quite good. Unfortunately, single-player (and the interface for it) is largely neglected, and AI, last I checked, was horrendous. But the multiplayer experience, the graphics, and of course the gameplay (I know: the part they ripped off), are all quite good.

If anyone else knows of any OSS games of Warsow caliber, I'd be curious to see them, whatever the genre.