TA is now available on Impulse

[Gota]

Gundam mech is not pleased(is it correct to write Gundam mech?or does the word Gundam already imply it's a mech of some sort?).

[Neddie]

The word is implied.

[Caydr]

Ahh don't worry I won't post anything of the sort and I don't consider anyone here an enemy, I was just fooling.

Now, other people... random passers-by will probably mention at some point that they played TA for free at some site. It seems to be an eventuality.

Glad I made the decision to rebuild AA from the ground up already or else this would probably scare me shitless.

C&Ds could be in the future... It would probably be smart to remove any overt references to TA-based mods from officially-controlled parts of the site. Example, "maximum annihilation" ad on front page, remove TA-derived category from wiki, TA-based mod screens from the media page, etc. The forums should be safe to stay though IMHO, they aren't in anyone's face.

[Gota]

Seems whenever someone starts work on some game that does not include TA ip we suddenly hear how dangerous TA resources are,even though we have not heard anything about it since Spring was released many years ago.
Naive paranoia or scare tactics?

[AF]

Ataris primary market are spring players who want to see what the original TA was like.

Impulse is the store

We are the marketers

[Hobo Joe]

Like it or not, the majority of players existing in spring, as well as new ones that come in, are coming from a TA background. Removing that background, or reference, or method of advertising is just shooting this community in the foot.

You can say "Oh, it's an engine with all these great RTS games!", but lets be honest, it has a steep learning curve, and a very unwelcoming lobby system and interface, very few people will take the trouble to deal with all that unless they have a strong interest, something more than just "oh this will be neat to try". Either that or someone walking them through every step of the way.

The community is already largely stagnant, it would be a big step in the wrong direction to take out its biggest marketing tool.

[Caydr]

Spring community =! TA community

There is lots of overlap, but the inability for people to capture the attention of any significant portion of the player base with something besides TA has less to do with the ....

....

I forget how to end this sentence and I'm getting a headache.

If people were only playing Spring to play TA, then TA-based mods besides BA would get played. BA has many fundamental flaws that are inherent to its basic design - another game just needs to be made which is better than or significantly different from BA without taking any big steps backward at the same time.

The threat of a C&D has been hanging over our heads from the beginning, but TA has never been widely available for sale before. It's been an ebay item or something you buy from a shifty online store that's probably not even a legit copy. However, now that has changed and this is why I'm actually concerned this time around.

[Tribulex]

but is the TA community growing on its own? If anything it would be shrinking. People learn about TA through spring these days. Thats the point that was made. Thus, people buying TA on impulse are probably spring players. WHICH MEANS WE MUST END THIS EXPLOITATION OF OUR INNOCENT NOOBS!!! :/

[AF]

Valid point but one poitn I would like to raise:









Like it or not, TA players here did not all come from the TA community. A lot of TA players that come here also never joined the original TA community, and are lured by the promise of 3D and the new revelation that it is alive and kicking in spring.

Many will want to be able to say they play spring legally by buying a TA copy. A lot will either never have played OTA, or lack a copy they can use to play, either because it was a friends, they played only the demo, or it was destroyed/scratched/binned.

I know my TA CD is in its original holder and scratched in just the right place to bork the installer. Luckily I had a backup of the install folder.

Then there are those who own OTA but don't own Core contingency.

Either way Ataris greatest tool for selling this is Nostalgia, and the Spring Engine is their greatest means of doing that.

You want to decouple the cease and desists from this site and the engine? Move TA spring offsite. It will always have incoming hits, and doesn't need nannying on these forums to survive. Doing so will help increase our hits at both entry points, and untaint the official package, allowing us to return to the free game listings that refuse to list us because of Atari IP.

[JohannesH]

http://d-gun.com/newbie.htm

[Hobo Joe]

Spring community =! TA community

I made a huge long post then realized there's really not much to say. Short version is that most of the people who play Spring are playing *A mods and most of them came from a TA background, and we shouldn't risk missing a lot of new faces to the community because we remove one of the biggest attractors from the website.

[Das Bruce]

Your logic is truly and most definitely irrefutable.

[Gota]

Instead of stuffing our heads into the sand we should just contact them.

[Neddie]

No benefit to that.

[bartvbl]

http://forums.impulsedriven.com/377353
lol@almost no negative reactions about this being outdated..
what a fail..

[Machete234]

Shit you could have spread the misinformation that it doesnt run on win7 or that the resolution is 320x480
That it needs the ruski dos7 and a special bootdisk (they would have crapped their pants)


How was OTA? I never played it, could you zoom in and out smoothly?
Was it the same but you couldnt tilt the camera because it wasnt real 3D?

[Master-Athmos]

Fixed perspective, no zooming, maps consist of rendered "3D" tiles giving you all the 3dish things like height boni & stuff. Controls feel very stiff when compared to how it's done in Spring nowadays but I guess that's true for any older title...

Resolution is free to choose though (it simply makes everything "smaller" giving you a wider view) - probably gets nasty on 1600x or 1920x resolutions...

[Caydr]

Not sure how much of what was posted was intended as sarcasm, but TA works beautifully on Windows 7 x86 @ 1920x1080. Since the renderer is all-software, it's futureproof, in a perverted sort of way.

I still have my "Absolute Annihilation 6.0 Colossal Edition" disc here - every TA & expansion map, every AA community map, AA itself, TAMEC HPIs, and all the fixins', compressed into a single HPI archive to give you superfast loading. Comes to almost exactly 700 mb. It's like it was meant to be.

~~~~

On a more directly related note, I think it's been proven about eleventy thousand times over that music piracy drives music sales, however that does not stop RIAA & Co from demonizing pirates. It's also been proven over 9000 to the power of 9000 times that game DRM is hilariously simple to break and only serves to frustrate legitimate users. Again, this did nothing to stop Ubisoft from making AssCreed 2 require a constant internet connection, where if you lose your connection for a split second you lose all your progress form the last save.

There's reality, and then there's business. Spring is the best advertising TA has, and we're even doing it for free. This does not preclude any sort of legal action.

[AF]

Moving TA to a second site would not remove TA from the community.

Lets be realistic.

Would TA mod developers vanish from these forums? No...

Would TA content vanish from the lobby? No....

Are players incapable of playing in more than one community? No....

[Machete234]

Chances are that OTA will die silently, seriously who wants to play this today?


Westwood gives away their old c&c games for free and they are more popular than TA.