Total Annihilation Reborn: the 1997 RTS, rebuilt in Rust

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/231fbe92-a6bd-4ff5-bea5-b6174d606288

[!IMPORTANT] Bring your own copy. TA Reborn contains no original game data: no units, maps, art, sound, music or video. It plays a legitimately owned copy of Total Annihilation, such as the Commander Pack on GOG.com or Steam, read in place from where you installed it. It is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's owners.

One battle, two eras

That is one battle, simulated once and drawn twice. On the left, Total Annihilation as it has looked since 1997: its own top-down view and its own panel. Both are still in TA Reborn, a key and a setting away. On the right, the same instant through TA Reborn's camera.

TA Reborn replaces the engine and nothing else. It reads the game's archives where you installed them and plays what is in them: every unit by its own script, every map, every campaign mission, every sound. Everything round them is new.

Everything at a glance

Every world has a sky and a light of its own. Hills throw long shadows and steep faces stand as walls of rock. Surf breaks on the shores and ships leave wakes. Lava crusts over and glows through its cracks. Rain soaks the ground and stands in puddles that mirror the sky. And from TA's usual height, the battle keeps the art exactly as it was painted.

• A modern renderer for TA's art: physically based lighting, soft shadows that harden at the contact, ambient occlusion, HD surfaces that wear paint, soot and embers, and the ground's own materials (sand, soil, turf, rock, snow, ice, volcanic rock, metal, lunar dust) told from TA's painted colours. On cards that trace rays: ray-traced shadows, occlusion and reflections.
• Worlds of their own: smoke over lava, smog over metal and cities, violet over crystal, a black, starry sky on the moon; dull worlds graded as their painters meant them. Beyond the map's edge the world runs on: the map's own ground across the edge, then land and sea like the map's round that stretch of it (a metal world's city of plating, the moon's craters), never copies of it.
• Water: surf and whitecaps, shallows graded by depth with caustics on the bed, bow waves and wakes behind ships and hovercraft, hulls and wading legs seen through the water. Lava crusts and glows; acid looks like acid.
• Time and weather: dawn, dusk, a moonlit night (bases light up, aircraft blink their beacons) or a full day and night; showers that soak the ground and dry; the wind across the land, gusts running over the grass in soft cat's paws, sand streaming and snow drifting the way it blows.
• Battles with weight: vehicles squat, dip and lean on their suspension; guns kick their units back and big blasts shove the units round them; walkers walk in step with the ground and leave footprints the shape of their feet; aircraft fall trailing smoke; ships list and go under; shells landing in the sea throw up spray.
• 3D close to the ground: TA's painted trees, rocks, crystals, ruins, pipework and relays stand as models of TA Reborn's own when the camera comes down to them.
• Skins: nineteen built in (Reborn's own; Heritage's battle-worn TA as it was; desert, winter, woodland, navy, urban, tiger and night camouflage; Christmas, Halloween and parade dress; and the colours of seven nations), for your army, the enemy or both, and an editor to make your own.

Everything is built the way TA built it: a constructor plays its nano-lathe on the ground, a green lattice rises out of the beams and fills in, and the finished building unfolds. Here the beams are streams of light that arc and splash, wrecks are reclaimed into metal, and a destroyed building sags into its rubble.

Select a unit and press Q. The camera dives into it: onto a tank's turret, into a walker's head, onto a ship's bridge, up a submarine's periscope, into a fighter's canopy. You ride along while it goes on with its orders. The mouse looks round, the wheel magnifies the sight, and Escape climbs back out.

• Eight modelled cockpits, made in Blender for TA Reborn: a tank's vision port, a kbot's visor, the Krogoth's heavy cab, the Commander's helmet, a ship's bridge, a fighter's canopy, a gunship's glass, a gun house's slit in concrete. Their dashes are worn working metal: chipped paint, stencils, caution plates and guarded switches. Glass in every window: dust that catches the sun, and in the rain drops that cling and run down it.
• Instruments for each kind: a fighter's helmet display (the pitch ladder, the heading tape, speed and altitude, the flight path) and a glass panorama in the cockpit; a tank's sight with its range finder, ammunition and turret's bearing; a walker's HUD with its armour by section, torso twist, throttle and weapon groups. Every cockpit gives its speed in figures, the unit's figures, its heading, pitch and roll, and the weather outside; the radar scope and each weapon's reload too. One fact in one place: the glass keeps what you aim by, the dash the rest.
• Yours, an ally's, or anyone's: ride along with an ally's unit, or any unit in a replay or as a spectator. You hear the battle from inside the hull, the glass cracks as it wears, the cabin lamp stutters as the hull fails, and a unit lost takes its signal with it.

A group sent somewhere forms up, the short-ranged in front, and marches at the pace of its slowest unit. A right-click on a unit rings its orders round the pointer. A constructor put on duty runs the economy by itself. And every key, command and habit of TA's is still there.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗