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Posted by mosiuerbarso 8 hours ago

Beyond All Reason (Free Total Annihilation Inspired RTS)(www.beyondallreason.info)
308 points | 167 commentspage 2
gbuk2013 7 hours ago|
I used to play the original TA a lot and BAR is very well done. Much harder than the original though - I had no trouble with TA campaigns but I have not even made it halfway with BAR before hitting skill wall. Not a teen anymore so it’s hard to motivate myself to try and push through. :)
Perz1val 7 hours ago|
There's also Zero-K on steam and it has an actual campaign. Last time I checked BAR had none, but it was on the roadmap
gbuk2013 6 hours ago||
You’re right - it’s not a campaign as such - it’s a set of scenarios (currently 22) in increasing difficulty. I haven’t played for a while after getting stuck but checking now I got stuck on the 5th scenario - even worse than I thought. :)

I played Zero-K several years ago and it didn’t stick in my mind as much but maybe worth revisiting it - thanks!

Reading about it seems to suggest that it’s even deeper in terms of strategy and tactics so I will probably struggle even more. :(

Thundernerd 2 hours ago||
Is it PVP only or can I play this against bots as well?

I would like to play it but the comments about the community make it so that I never want to touch PVP with a 10ft pole.

corysama 2 hours ago||
“Making of BAR” documentary

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5F36yViPz7w

pohl 8 hours ago||
Been wanting to play this. Alas, macOS support is table stakes for me.
gloosx 4 hours ago|
Yeah it's very sad for me as well, I was a big fan of supreme commander and I really wanted to play BAR. They have a special Notice for Mac users, which explain that they don't support Mac because:

1. No support for OpenGL 4.3 by Apple.

2. Dependency on a library not supporting ARM architectures.

The first point is not a big deal, you can emit Vulkan commands from OpenGL via Zink, and then use MoltenVK to translate it all to Metal automatically at runtime. Surely performance will suffer a bit, but it should be playable.

The second one is quite absurd though, ARM processors is not something exclusive to Mac, Windows-on-ARM laptops are becoming increasingly common, ARM market share in the broader PC space is forecast to approach 20-30% in the coming years as Windows-on-ARM software compatibility matures. This prevents a huge number of people from playing the game due to the ancient streflop library, and really this notice should be "Notice for ARM users" not "Notice from Mac users"

UPD:

Actually there is a guy who is trying to invent a direct OpenGL-to-Metal translation layer just to play B.A.R. it seems, and the progress is pretty huge at the moment:

https://appgl.pages.dev/

p2004a 4 hours ago||
That notice is not worded in the best way and hasn't been updated for a while. However, progress has been made.

On the Recoil engine releases (https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/releases) page, we have had experimental Linux arm64 builds since March of this year.

Additionally, several people are trying to get the graphical pipeline and overall build working on Mac; you can follow their progress at https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/RecoilEngine/issues/936

The challenge with arm64 is that Recoil Engine does deterministic lockstep simulation using actual native floats for performance. Porting all of those operations (which were implemented using the mentioned library) to work on arm64 and produce the exact same bit-perfect results as on x86_64 has been challenging.

gloosx 2 hours ago||
It's great to hear, yeah I researched this topic a bit further and there are clearly some very determined people who want to bring BAR to more platforms, excited about the progress! Floats will be a big pain in the ass for sure and will cause countless desyncs, same story prevented playing supreme commander FAF on ARM processors, though a lot of attempts have been made
amitayk 6 hours ago||
Been playing BAR for couple of years now. Do not sign up if you have a minor addiction problem to fun things.
zeafoamrun 7 hours ago||
This looks really slick and also very detailed. Is it free as in beer or free as in freedom?
p2004a 3 hours ago||
Free as a beer due to assets.

- All the code is GPLv2, MIT and other open licenses.

- Some assets are CC-BY-SA but there are also a quite a bunch proprietary ones

qznc 5 hours ago|||
Built on the Recoil engine: https://recoilengine.org/

Which is a fork of the Spring RTS engine: https://springrts.com/

Teifion 5 hours ago|||
It's completely free to play (though they/we have recently signed a publishing deal and there will be a paid for campaign mode later) with a combination of GPL and MIT source code.
gertrunde 7 hours ago|||
Fairly freedom-y by the looks of things:

https://github.com/beyond-all-reason

kcb 5 hours ago|||
It was. Not anymore though.
s1artibartfast 3 hours ago||
was and still is. absolutely nothing has changed.
wffurr 7 hours ago||
Both, as I learned from 5 min browsing the site.
inigyou 5 hours ago||
The game itself notwithstanding, is this website marketingslop? I don't think it's AI but it's definitely not written by the developers.
Ariarule 5 hours ago||
No? It's almost certainly not AI overall despite the Webflow badge; it's pretty similar now to how the site looked in 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806131653/https://www.beyon...

What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?

cwillu 5 hours ago|||
And your evidence for this is what exactly?
PtaQQ 4 hours ago||
Hey there, BAR Community Manager here. Nothing on the website is written by AI, we have a strict no AI art policy. Admittedly the text there is a bit old and we should update it soon.
goels 5 hours ago||
Looks great
encom 7 hours ago|
>All development updates, tech support, finding friends and all player and developer communication takes place on Discord.

[ eye rolling emoji ]

Sharlin 6 hours ago|
It's unfortunate, but what can you do? It's where players are, for better or worse.
MarsIronPI 6 hours ago||
At least bridge to something the freedom-loving folks will use, e.g. Matrix, or (better IMO) Jabber.
p2004a 3 hours ago||
We had Matrix bridge for a few months to some channels related to development. Pretty much no interest (except for 1 person that asked for it), no legitimate activity, yet, there were spammers showing up quite often.

Bridging also didn't map all the discord functionality so it caused some confusion at times.

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