Galactic Battlegrounds. Should it have been produced by the makes of Total Annilation

[Guest Hockey_Beast]

I wouldnt be able to play it cause my comp is slow as it is

[Influenza]

First, thanks to the people that actually read what I had to say Re: TA engine, especially to those of you who realize the difference between an engine and a game. And for those who DO realize the merits of the TA engine, go download SWTA. You won't regret it .

 

Hockey: the TA engine isn't true-3d, so you'd be able to play it fine. I used to play TA on a P133 with 32 MB RAM . Of course, I've since moved on to bigger and better things...*cough*Athlon 1.3 GHz 256 MB DDR RAM Radeon 64 MB DDR*cough*

[Influenza]

First, thanks to the people that actually read what I had to say Re: TA engine, especially to those of you who realize the difference between an engine and a game. And for those who DO realize the merits of the TA engine, go download SWTA. You won't regret it .

 

Hockey: the TA engine isn't true-3d, so you'd be able to play it fine. I used to play TA on a P133 with 32 MB RAM . Of course, I've since moved on to bigger and better things...*cough*Athlon 1.3 GHz 256 MB DDR RAM Radeon 64 MB DDR*cough*

[Influenza]

Funny how as soon as some real arguments are offered all the "TA ***XOR" people who have nothing concrete to say just disappear. Man, and I thought I was going to get a good laugh out of people's responses to my queries .

[EndSub]

I have already shown you told you the reasons why TA engine would not be good for SW:GB.......I don't need to reapeat myself......

[Influenza]

Yes, you did. I actually meant to commend you for that, but forgot to while writing the post. My apologies.

[Guest Locust99]

Look, it is simple, TA engine would have been the best to use.

 

But they did not.

 

So..... go buy Total Annihilation - £5 from shop and download swta

[Guest Neuralize]

What the hell are you guys talking about?

TA would be the best engine. First thing, alot of you people have to agree about how lame the lasers look the the BG demo. Its like they are throwing light sticks at each other. In TA they actually look like lasers. Another thing.. why dont the tie bombers bomb do a bombing run in AOK? Because the engine sucks, They just sit there like an ass and fire. In TA you can pretty much have any kind of unit behavoir because each unit has its own scripting and such, in the SWTA mod for TA the TIE BOMBERS do bombing runs which is very cool to see. When the Units in the BGs demo rotate its just sprites shifting very unrealistic. WHen somethign turns with the TA engine it actually TURNS. One thing that I really thought was crap was the AT-ST firing in the BG demo. It looked so freakin retarded. When I played the BG I could tell right from the get-go that it was using the AOK engine, BG is basicaly a Total Conversion of AOK to StarWars. As for until detal in TA it just depends on how well the unit modeler is at making units. Ta uses 3d models for units making everthing really smooth and nice. The terrain in TA is hands down alot better then RA2, AOK, or anything else. Mainly because you dont see blockly slops just smooth terrian. And in TA the unit limits are alot more then in BGs making bigger and more intense battles. The only reason I would say the the AOK engine is better then the TA one is because with the AOK you can have more then just 2 sides, but then again.. in the starwars universe there are technically only 2 real sides. Imperial and Rebel. Hey im not saying that BG is going to suck. I'm just pointing out that its not the best engine to be used. If SWTA sucks I'll go out and buy BG if it doesnt I wont. As of now Im like'n SWTA better, and thats only in the beta version.

[Guest Fes2001]

thank you, SWTA is the best, I'll show you a quote from the SWTA forums

 

Influenza

Hah. Well, give us a professional team of game developers, pay us each $100k US/year, and we'll have it dones reaaaal quick .

[Guest DarkTrooper]

anyway it is stupid that the bombers just sit their like dead duck dropping bombs even i ESB when they went into the asteriod feild the TIE bombers did bomb runs

[Guest DinoDoc]

The only problem with the TA engine, and I've not seen this addressed in either TA or TA:K, is its horrible ability to render people. They end up looking like a collection of rectangular prisims, IMO. Now this really doesn't take away from the efforts of the SWTA team and once the mod is finished I'll reinstall my copy of TA to play it but lets not kid ourselves and start to think that it would make a decent retail game especially since several years after its release melee units are now where in sight.

[Dvlos]

Let's look at the facts. Rebellion and Force Commander REEKED. LucasArts is looking to fix up their rep. and start selling the kind of games that turned people like me into hard-core gamers. Games like Xwing and Jedi Knight really brought lots of people towards PC gaming.

 

Now, lets look at SWGB. They wanted to make a good RTS? Ok let's stress the number one, most infinitely importing thing about RTS's, gameplay. I still like Starcraft, even though the gfx are absurd, because the gameplay is fantastic, fast, and exciting. Runner up in my book would be AOK. It allowed you to amass large armies, the interface was simple, nice unit formations, simple to grasp, tons of ways to play and win (or lose).

 

I am sure Lucasarts looked at TA, RA2, and these other engines, and look at which RTS series had the largest fan base, and the longest history of followers. I believe that is why they chose Ensemble's Engine. Personally the graphics arent the greatest, its not 3d, but I am forever hooked on this gameplay. That battles are good, and are fun to watch. I am sure when the full game releases and we can all play at 1280x1024 the gfx wont look so bad and if the trailer is any indication it looks like they revamped some the effects like explosions and the shield effect from the generators.

[Guest DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Influenza

I really feel sorry for all of you that think the Total Annihilation engine is "horrible." I'm going to give you a list of reasons why the TA engine is better than either the SC OR AoK engines:

 

To my knowlege, there is no SC engine. SC was made using the WCII engine.

 

Ease of development and modification. The TA engine is very easy to learn and modify to do close to anything.

 

Let's say that I want a jedi that stays faithful to the movies and also doesn't look like a robot. Could TA accomodate my wish?

[Guest jediaoe]

this game and aok kicked some serious ass so don't ***** about who made it because ensemble rocks.

[Guest Toothless-OMO]

OK, I jump in here.

 

To start I must say I have not read every post in this thread and I am not about to. So if someone has mentioned this already forgive me and discard this post.

 

Here goes.

 

The question was never should GB be based on the TA engine, but what if the crew from CaveDog did the game. I dear say if they did they would not dig up the old TA engine, but design it fresh.

 

I personally think TA blows SC out of the water but the is me and you are you. Let me just say control 12 units at a time, gag, gag, gag!

 

OK, I know I am drifting now, so I stop.

 

Toothless-OMO

[Guest crazy_dog]

More people have played AoK than TA.

 

TA might be a great game, but more people have AoK.

[Influenza]

Wow, I really thought this subject had died.

The question was never should GB be based on the TA engine, but what if the crew from CaveDog did the game

You're right, but somewhere someone brought up that "TA SUCKS!", and I just could not let that slide .

 

More people have played AoK than TA.

Point being? Is LucasArts selling this game as Age of Kings: Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds? No, they aren't. The game is being sold on its own merits (or lack thereof ). If it were being sold as an addon/mod, then Yes, it would be important to use a widely-distributed game.

 

Hell, FAR more people have played Tetris than AoK. Should GBG have been designed with the Tetris engine?

 

To my knowlege, there is no SC engine. SC was made using the WCII engine.

IIRC, StarCraft was made with a modified WCII engine, updated to allow control over more units, a wider array of spells and spell types, and different damage/armoring types.

 

Let's say that I want a jedi that stays faithful to the movies and also doesn't look like a robot. Could TA accomodate my wish?

Absolutely. Have you played SWTA? The Stormtroopers and other infantry look very good, both to myself and everyone who has commented on them. As for Jedi, why not? It could certainly be scripted. I'll have you know, that if/when SWTA debuts a Darth Vader character, it will not take more than one slice of his lightsaber to kill a Rebel Trooper. How is that faithful to the movies?

[Booya2020]

Please delete this thread. All it is is a flame war. All I see are people saying Starcraft suck, AOK sucks, TA sucks blah blah blah. I just hope that someone besides me realizes that they are all good games and each have their own merits. In my opinion, Neither three games are any better than the last. If all people want to do is to flame GB go to TA, SC or whatever forum and do it there. I am sick of this.

[Guest DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Influenza

Absolutely. Have you played SWTA?

 

Not as of yet. I've been following the mods progress for about a year off and on but I've been waiting for it to get closer to being complete before I install it.

 

As for Jedi, why not? It could certainly be scripted. I'll have you know, that if/when SWTA debuts a Darth Vader character, it will not take more than one slice of his lightsaber to kill a Rebel Trooper. How is that faithful to the movies?

 

It would impress me to no end if you could do that, esp. in light of the difficulty in scripting melee units. BTW, has there been any progress on mission scripting? IIRC, you guys were planning on adding a campaign to go with the mod a while ago. Was that idea dropped?

[Influenza]

The missions are on the backburner, for now. We're aiming at releasing most/all of the units first, then going back and developing missions.

 

And you'd (probably) be surprised how far along TA scripting has come the last year. It really isn't that big a deal to make melee troops which only "fire" in certain directions... especially for HANSOLO, our project lead .

[EndSub]

bah, I thought this thread died.......

 

See: Top-Down View

 

See: Bland LandScapes

 

The End....

[Influenza]

See: Star Wars: Total Annihilation TC, which proves that a top-down view is an excellent one for an RTS.

 

See: fact that TA engine can display anything you want.

 

The End...

[EndSub]

I wasn't arguing that BIV wasn't a great view for RTS's (TA was an AWSOME game) I was arguing that it isn't the best view for a SW game because of the lack of detail you get......

 

Show me one TA landscape that is almost as detailed as the ones in AoE and I will fold right now........

[Influenza]

You called down the thunder...now, reap the whirlwind.

 

(I spent a while taking and resizing these pictures, so please do me the courtesy of looking at all of them objectively and honestly)

 

[Edit: click on a link, then once the 404 stops displaying, delete the "http://" in the front of the link. That should display the pics right. Sorry about the inconvenience]

 

SWTA Interface: a little fuzzy and downsized to make the file size acceptable. The general SWTA layout, with unit commands and build menus on the left, under the radar minimap. Actually takes up a much smaller area of the screen, leaving more room for the important part: the battlefield.

Airspeeder, Hallucigenia I, Hallucigenia II: pictures of the Hallucigenia tileset, a third-party tileset developed for Total Annihilation. Not exactly 100% Star-Warsy, but if you can play on something as radical as this, terrain like Endor and Hoth should be a piece of cake to design.

Landspeeder: a landspeeder scout hovering over open water. Notice the bubbles from the speeder's repulsors. Taken on the Total Annihilation: Kingdoms "Veruna" tileset, which was ported back to TA. That just shows you the power of the engine, when it can display a tileset designed for a more modern and powerful engine.

A-Wings on patrol: a group of A-Wings flying over another Veruna map. Yep, flying, not hovering like in SWGB.

Veruna Landscape, Veruna Coastline, Imperial Base: all detailed shots of the Veruna landscape. The last is a small Imperial outpost, defended by ranks of Stormtroopers, a few TIE Interceptors (and one TIE Scout, just finished), a company of TIE Crawlers, and a few Speeder Bikes. I had to resize that picture to make it all fit.

Another Landscape, Second Shot: shots of C_A_P's (a very famous and influential TA map designer) "Evergreen" tileset. The "gasbags" in the second shot actually sway with the wind in-game. C_A_P is also working on converting all of TA's trees to animated ones, thus livening up the battlefield in a way never seen before. It's supposed to be absolutely stunning.

Interceptor Escort: a squad of TIE Interceptors escort TIE Bombers on a bombing run. If the Int's look a little strange, it's because the model for the Int got a little crossed with the TIE Advanced. We've fixed it, but are releasing the fix with the next pack.

Gunboat Assault Group: a handful of TIE Fighters lead the way for some Assault Gunboats.

 

That's what I managed to make this afternoon. Many of the terrain-only pictures are resized to be smaller, but I tried not to do that with the unit-pics so you could get a sense of scale. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

[Guest PhantomMenace]

Why would anyone want this game to be made by the guys who made Total Annihilation? First off, as stated before, the top down perspective sucks..and the units were cheesy.. I heard you could like download new units off the internet and have like 600 units or something but that was becaues the units were a top-down, jigsaw puzzle of pixels...with so little time and graphics put into their units sure you could whip up a couple thousand and put em on the internet and they'd probably download faster than standard text! Why do people constantly trash the graphics on this game....it uses the Age of Kings engine...that engine was built for detail. Detail...look at those sith lords..look at the r2d2's...as small as they are you can almost make out every little curve and notch on em. Lucasarts used the best 2d engine out there right now, and most of those 3d games are going back to "fixed perspective, 3/4 view" anyways. I had a friend who had allt he liltte Total annihilation games including kingdoms and i felt like i was watching an old Sega Genesis strategy game...in fact, i have honestly seen top down strategy games on the friggin Playstation that looked better than TA!!!