best PeeWee and AK consepts ever!

[Gota]

The movie should not be a measure of TA's unit scale.
It is much easier to make sense and be strict in a text document than in a rushed intro to a low budget game.
Personnaly I always prefferd to think of The comanders as the only source of "augmented human intelligence" amongst your arsenal.
Commanders are sent to different locations to be the center of the nerve system on a planet and lead the battle as oppose to commands coming from the source location or home bases for both ARM and CORE.
Controlling individual units and following the grand plan of the commanders is left to AI.

[Das Bruce]

Personnaly I always prefferd to think

Well you're wrong!

[Gota]

I dont feel i need to stay true to the story of the Original TA devs however I dont think that in any place is it stated that all units and tanks are controlled by individual humans or "consiousnesses".

[Mav]

2)Explosion speed. Small explosions (like fire cracker) are extremely quick, almost too quick to see. Large explosions (nuclear bomb) are very slow, and take a long, long time. Medium explosions (bombs dropped by planes, tank blown up by Arm com) take about the right amount of time based on similar-sized real-world explosions.

Watch less crappy movies please.

?
I've blown up firecrackers in real life.
I've seen actual war footage of tanks/vehicles/building blowing up.
I've seen actual footage of real atomic bombs blowing up.

[Das Bruce]

Would you say that bigger explosions are slower?

[Mav]

Jeeze... yes, they are faster, but I mean duration, not speed of pressure wave caused by the blast.

[zwzsg]

I don't understand how you can infer size from the look of gravity in a movie. And anyway, Arm & Core battle on many planets with various gravity.

In Total Annihilation, pressing F1 showed the unit speed in m/s amongst other stats. By comparing that speed with the speed in pixel/second in walks across the screen, it's possible to determine the size of a pixel in TA, and from that the size of units: http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=37905

The peewee is 9.7 meters tall.

[Mav]

I don't understand how you can infer size from the look of gravity in a movie. And anyway, Arm & Core battle on many planets with various gravity.

Which is why you ignore my 2nd argument, even though I clearly stated that my second was a stronger one?

Anyways, I guess if the game says it in m/s, then that's the best thing to go by. If you ask me though, Cavedog chose that as an arbitrary unit set and has more to due with internal coding than actual speed. I'm pretty sure that the Peewee was supposed to be human sized.

[zwzsg]

Which is why you ignore my 2nd argument, even though I clearly stated that my second was a stronger one?

And your second argument is the one about guessing the unit dimension from the explosion speed? That's even more whacky!

If you ask me though, Cavedog chose that as an arbitrary unit set and has more to due with internal coding than actual speed.

Wrong. The meter/second shown by F1 is not related to any internal units.

For instance F1 on the arm commander says it go at 14.4m/s, while the FBI reads MaxVelocity=1.2; and while I measured it going at 39pixel/seconds, which would be 2 500 000 internal units / seconds.

Cavedog meters are pretty close to the [] linear units used in Cavedog BOS though.

I'm pretty sure that the Peewee was supposed to be human sized.

You only say that because your mind sees a human shaped body.

If you had actually played a bit of TA, you'd think differently.

The majority of tilesets are alien (crystal/desert/mars/moon/metal/...) but the green tilset features trees that we can relate too. TA trees are just a little bigger than peewees. That's not precise because trees can range from child sized christmas tree to giant sequoia, but meh, the average pine tree being like 15-45 m tall, that already gives the idea of the smallest TA units being several metter tall/long.

Core Contingency introduced the urban tileset, with wrecked buildings, roads, bridges, lampposts, trucks and cars. It's hard to guess the size of the buildings because they don't have windows, but the little trucks and cars are very similar to our 20th century ones, and gives a very precise feeling of scale. And peewees are way bigger than cars. After playing a few hours on Trout's Farm, you get the idea that Peewee are more on the scale of Armored Core mecchas than human sized power armor.

Some TA units and buildings have little windshields drawn on their texture. It was hard to really seem in TA, but if you opened them in 3do builder, inferring TA unit size from these little windows on the texture, it made TA units look larger than today's biggest ground vehicles. Something like as big as the heavy Battle Tech units.

Lastely, like I said, the F1 shows unit speed in m/s, and from there you can deduce how big is a meter. From there, I calculated the Peewee being 9.7 meter tall. And that is consistent with how tall it appears next to tree, building, and cars.











Of course, TA is a game, and toy soldier or RTS usually compress relative scaling differences, rendering any precise measure meaningless. When you buy toys, every item has to be hand sized: It wouldn't be practical if the solider were 1 millimeter long, nor if the carrier was bigger than the bedroom. And in RTS, they often take the shorcut of making one unit take exactly one tile, be it a lone footman, a tank, or a battle ship. The smaller unit would be drawn with lots of free space in the tile, while the largest orc and tank would be drawn slightly overflowing in the next tile, so you can still see the tank is bigger than the footman, but not to scale: it'll be 10% bigger, not x10 as big.

But one of TA achievment was to grow out of that tile system constraint. Unit movement were free of tiles, and blocking/collisions used a footprint system, were each unit would declare in a tag how big it is. While the pathfinding forced them to limit the number of footprints in use for live units, it still allowed more freedom in the scales.

So there was nothing that forced Cavedog to make trees about as tall as Peewees. They could have made tree take 5x5 footprints, and tower far above peewees. They could have made tree take 1x1 footprint, a quarter of a peewee. The scaling of trees and cars was deliberate, Cavedog had the freedom to make them any size. If they choose this scale for trees and cars, it gives a clear indication of how big the TA units were meant to be next to them. Or maybe they made trees this size just so a peewee could hide just barely under a tree. But that doesn't hold for cars. For game mechanics, cars are a bit too small, they're like tiny wrecks, hard to click upon, too small to provide cover. However they just feel at the right size compared to the roads and rest of scenery. And the futuristic war metal robots strolling around that scenery happen to be several stories tall.

[Gota]

TA models just lack the up close detail they need to look huge.

[zwzsg]

To the contrary, TA models had texture details to make them look huge, but the TotalA.exe engine lacked the resolution to display them.

If you're referring to how TA models are low poly when you compare Spring with DoW or SupCom, that's just because TA was a 1997 game, never meant to be played in full 3D, never meant to compare to 2010 games.

[Pxtl]

@ zwzsg

I disagree about the size... judging from the sizes of cars, peewees looked to be about 10-feet wide at the shoulder, so they'd be 20 feet tall, max. That'd make them about half the size of the towering behemoths of Armored Core.

[triton]

The movie should not be a measure of TA's unit scale.
It is much easier to make sense and be strict in a text document than in a rushed intro to a low budget game.
Personnaly I always prefferd to think of The comanders as the only source of "augmented human intelligence" amongst your arsenal.
Commanders are sent to different locations to be the center of the nerve system on a planet and lead the battle as oppose to commands coming from the source location or home bases for both ARM and CORE.
Controlling individual units and following the grand plan of the commanders is left to AI.

I agree with basic here, with more argues :
-Commander is the only unit which come by warp gate, or at least which is here at start of the game
-all others units are built with energy and metal, no humans.

So basicaly, you have humans in arm commanders only, and humans mind in core commander.

I like this idea cause, its how we play, one mind control army.

[Mav]

If you had actually played a bit of TA, you'd think differently.

Please don't say something you don't know.

I logged probably close to 1000 hours of OTA. It was my first RTS (at age 10) and still my favorite.

[Mav]

The movie should not be a measure of TA's unit scale.
It is much easier to make sense and be strict in a text document than in a rushed intro to a low budget game.
Personnaly I always prefferd to think of The comanders as the only source of "augmented human intelligence" amongst your arsenal.
Commanders are sent to different locations to be the center of the nerve system on a planet and lead the battle as oppose to commands coming from the source location or home bases for both ARM and CORE.
Controlling individual units and following the grand plan of the commanders is left to AI.

I agree with basic here, with more argues :
-Commander is the only unit which come by warp gate, or at least which is here at start of the game
-all others units are built with energy and metal, no humans.

So basicaly, you have humans in arm commanders only, and humans mind in core commander.

I like this idea cause, its how we play, one mind control army.

Ah, the problem here is that when you play the campaign, there is only ONE Arm commander and ONE Core commander. They make it pretty clear that you're the final hope. This is also made apparent by the way you don't encounter the enemy commander of either side until the final battle in both campaigns, and in both cases their defeat ends the war. If this was the case, why would humanity need to clone its best warriors over and over (as described in the official TA players guide)? Sounds like they're replacing all the guys getting killed...

[zwzsg]

The final battle of the Arm campaign is less about killing the Core commander, and more about getting access to the Central Consciousness to blow it up.

The campaign doesn't cover the whole war anyway, just a daring attempt by the Arm commander to strike Core at the heart, and vice-versa.

The commanders were developped because Galatic Gates would require too much energy to teleport a whole army, so instead they teleport a single unit, which then proceed to build a new army on the spot on the other side.

You are the final hope because all the resources of the galaxy have been exhausted by the war, both side lies in ruin, there was only enough resource left to create one commander for each side.

Although they aren't that phenomally superior to everything else, the commanders combine many abilities in a tight package (cloack/amphibious/powerful nano/radar/sonar/huge health), and even some unique abilities (D-Gun/self heal/nuke death), making them stand apart from regular units, which would explain why they're impossible to mass-produce.

As for how would a lone Arm Commander produce the clones to pilot all other units, it's only as unexplained as of how a lone Warcraft peasant can spawn a village teeming with knights and bearded mages, or how a single C&C MCV can create a map-covering military complex with unlimited soldiers.

why would humanity need to clone its best warriors over and over?

Because best warriors are more efficient than rookies?

I disagree about the size... judging from the sizes of cars, peewees looked to be about 10-feet wide at the shoulder, so they'd be 20 feet tall, max. That'd make them about half the size of the towering behemoths of Armored Core.

I admit I only know Armored Core from a couple youtube video, so I might have the wrong ideas of their size. But at least we both agree Peewees are bigger than humans. 20 feets is 6 meters, and I say the peewee are 9 meters, so you're not too far. I guess you just saw Smarts where there were minivans.

[Forboding Angel]

I guess you just saw Smarts where there were minivans.

HAHHAHAA, I saw one of those on the road yesterday! In america! I ROFLCOPTERED! Everybody was just looking at it liek... "Ok, seriously, wtf is that?"

hahaha good times!

[CarRepairer]

Personnaly I always prefferd to think

Well you're wrong!

LOL It's Captain Tenneal! LLLLLLLLLLET'S GO!!

[SirArtturi]

Hehe, great, I was able to derail this thread totally...

[Mav]

why would humanity need to clone its best warriors over and over?

Because best warriors are more efficient than rookies?

No no no...

What I meant is that if there are no PEOPLE in the units (the whole commander = hive mind idea) then why would they even have the need to clone their best warriors over and over again? No one would be dying, therefore, no need to clone warriors.

And yes SirArtturi, you DID manage to derail the thread

/congrats on Folsom again. Love it!