INTRODUCTION
The history behind BAR
Where did it start and how did we get where we are now.
Part of why we consider BAR to be an excellent game, is because of its history and the path it took, which is perhaps unconventional in terms of game-development. Development of BAR started as early as 2010, but even before that many foundations for what BAR is today had been laid.
Where it all began
When the commercial game Total Annihilation by Cavedog Entertainment was modded by its player community it ultimately resulted in a port to a newly crafted, fully 3D engine called TA Spring, later named Spring.
Over the years the Spring engine gave birth to a variety of original projects. However the TA port brought forth a line of Spring powered decedents. Games using most of the original TA content (models, textures, effects, sounds, etc.) and still featuring the original Core and Arm factions, remained present and popular.
A long history of constant changes and additions to these games, evolved (among others) into BAR’s most recent predecessor Balanced Annihilation. Though visually retaining much of it’s ancestors, its many new features made it slowly move towards becoming an original game in its own right.
When a decision was made to replace all the artwork with new original artwork, the BAR project was born. Since then, the entire body of original artwork was replaced and even expanded, along with BAR’s other features, while the BAR team continued to develop and evolve its many facets.
Timeline
#1: Modeling and texturing
2010
Beherith remade all of the Core T1 and T2 kbots, but they lacked a visual consistency.
2011
Then Mr Bob came along and plonked down a set of ~120 models for Core. About half of them were mapped with the same atlas made by Pyro. These included most of the buildings and vehicles.
They looked very good and consistent, and the atlassing made texturing possible for the rest of Mr Bobs models by Beherith.
2012
This atlassing procedure was performed by Beherith on the rest of the untextured models, and they were imported into Spring and animated.
Using the visual style of Pyro's atlas, Beherith remapped his kbots to the new atlas for a consistent look, and began to model and texture aircraft, hovercraft and ships to complete the Core models.
2013
Cremuss released his set of ~30 Arm buildings, and Beherith merged all of them onto one 4k texture atlas, so that the textures could be reused for all the other models too.
Firestorm and KaiserJ modeled plenty of arm ships, vehicles, aircraft and kbots, Beherith modeled most Arm buildings. Beherith textured and animated and imported all of them.
Smoth textured Firestorm's Arm Commander.
Beherith created all the wrecks and projectiles for the models to use.
#2: More Balancing and maintenance
2014
There where various maintenance developers tweaking/polishing BA and also keeping it alive. In this period all kinds of small and large tweaks/improvements where done. It was a period where unfortunately the whole RTS genre was in a decline, and player numbers were not as before during the high-tide back in 2007-2010.
2015
Anyways, along came Floris, already as a player in 2010 but also a developer in the making. He joined the community after already making some additions in the form of widgets and joined the BAR team in 2014. In 2015 he became an official developer for BA.
2018
During this period of maintaining and developing/improving BA, back came IceXuick (a former mapper and UI designer from (even) before BA). Contributing at first, but quickly picking up talks with Floris about the future of BA and BAR.
Also the 'real wizard' ivand, around from the start of TA Spring in 2006, was doing various things to improve BA and had a similar progressive vision on the game and engine.
We quickly found common ground and vision about the future
Thanks (or due) to quite some progressive and renewal/updates to BA, there came an important moment of choice: The progressive views on the future of BA eventually led to a (small) crisis: One group of BA players did not want to evolve further and stick to the old formula/game, the other group (also, mostly developers & contributors) willing to continue to ascent/expand/improve the game beyond.
Even though these things are not really fun to go through, it helped in re-lighting the fire to focus on BAR and go beyond.
A decision was made, and it was the first real step of BAR becoming a game on it's own.
Floris turned over the development role for BA to Bluestone, so BA could still be developed/maintained.
#3: BAR
2019
BAR started as a separate game, eventually called "Beyond all Reason". Development was only done by a very small team with Floris and IceXuick on the wheel. As already discovered, this team was golden because of the synergy and renewed positive vision and freedom for a much more progressive environment.
It began with removing all possible TA/BA content, and defaulting everything to BAR, the game went through a (identity and visual) metamorphose. Also PtaQ joined in more and more to help/assist and also to find more people.
It was an awesome first phase and very good start of BAR
More and more people hooked onto the development and also just playing the game. The new website went live, models were upgraded, practically every aspect of the game started to get individual love and attention. It was a very energetic start.
Still kept in tact was the latest balancing setup. Even with it being progressively altered in the last 2 years before, it had a very good foundation, which was laid by everybody who ever play(test)ed and developed for BA. In the coming years however, the improvements on balance continued fiercely, since in a game with roughly 400 units, there's always some area to improve or tweak.
#4: Growth & Expansion
2019+
Like in the game itself, the team quickly grew. It's unsure to exactly pinpoint why, but we like to believe the most important factors were:
A) the positive attitude and very kind/very helpful community we started with
B) because we all had the same passion.
This led to amazing forms of synergy and eventually led to the re-appearance of Beherith - The One that started it all 9 years earlier. In this year a lot of new and old people joined in on the team or as a contributor like:
Damgam, Flaka, Zecrus, Teifion, Gajop, Rossco, Watch the Fort, Jazcash, Tarnished Knight, Born2crawl, Badosu, Doo, and many others like Masterbel, Skynet, Pandaro, Lamer, Bibim, AF, Nikuksis, Noize, _Kek, etc.
What has been done since 2019
So sit back and enjoy the next section - which roughly(!) holds all major things that we're done to make BAR as it is today. All of the below parts are done by someone on the team, or as a contributor or some even as play-testers. So everything here is an accumulation of all the work since 2019:
Engine
- Upgraded pathfinding to be Multithreaded (MT), increasing performance massively
- Upgrading collision detection to be MT, increasing performance massively
- Upgrade to GL4 rendering, increasing performance massively
- Loads of performance increasing updates also noted below
- Support for Animated Textures
Gameplay
- Rebalanced new pathfinding / movement system
- Full naval rebalance
- Optimized balance between bots & vehicles
- 1000's of balance tweaks for practically all units in BAR
- Added a totally new Game Mode called 💀Scavengers™ - as addable random entity in PvP or as a full survival mode as PvE
- Re-imagination of the Alien Raptors with a load of new units, weapons, mini-queens, improved AI, etc.
- Scavengers and Raptor factions also controllable/playable as a player
- New Lootbox spawn-system option for normal and Scavenger games
- New Unit Printer spawn-system
- Reintroduction of Control Point game-mode
- Added a new Scenario system with over 20 Scenario Missions for solo play
- Collaborated and extended the Circuit AI to the BARbarian AI which is very performant and likely the smartest Spring AI.
- Crushable Walls depending on wall strength and unit weight
- New Transport AI
Units
- Designed, animated and scripted over 60 new units (on top of all new 380+ models made between 2010-2014)
- Over 120 new animations for all bots and alien chickens using inverse kinematics
- New Scavenger units like Epic flying gunships, rolling nuke bombs, unit cannons, T4 flamethrowers, T4 super ships.
- Retextured all construction units to stand out better
- Multithreaded pathfinding for theoretical 90% better performance
- Multithreaded collision detection for theoretical 70% better performance
- Start of new ''Legion'' Faction with new units and mechanics
Graphics
- Upgraded to PBR* for massively better looking units (*Physically Based Rendering)
- Added CAS* for major leap in clarity / visibility (*Contrast Adaptive Sharpen)
- Major upgrade to new OpenGL4 modern standard for 3-10x more performance (started back in 2019)
- Big upgrade to multithreaded pathing for ±40% better performance
- Upgraded all particle FX and added dozens new ones
- Rotational particles now part of the engine
- New water-wake FX for all ships, subs and hovercraft (+66% better performance)
- Upgraded and added dozens of new textures (double or quad more quality)
- New 3D waving grass
- Greatly enhanced unit-texture atlases (added new tank tracks and camouflage textures)
- Upgraded all alien chicken textures with complete new ones
- Overhaul of all AA and smoke-trail weapons and effects
- New fully animated cursor-set in 4 sizes
- Low-energy icons
- Team Colored parts of Buildings like Fusion Orbs
- Complete new style-design for shields
- New Building + Unit ground decal system upgrade to GL4
- Extra real-time lighting system for awesome looking lighting for weapons, projectiles and explosions
- Updated hundreds of weapons to look/feel better (muzzle flashes, sparks, shockwaves, water splashes, fire, flamethrowers, EMP clouds, bolts, dirt, debris, etc.)
- Custom unit shading (CUS) to new GL4 system for much higher fidelity and dynamic shading/rendering of units
- Upgrade dozens of graphic-systems to GL4 improving not only performance, but deliver modern styled graphics and effects
- Fully new Volumetric Lighting system, with over 1400 new lights added to all units
- New Volumetric Clouds and Fog systems
- New GL4 Decals / battle scarring system
UI
- Revamp of in-game UI (wip)
- Designed a complete new set of 320 Strategic icons for each unit
- New resorted build-menus by category, type, role (+ upcoming alternative new grid-menu)
- 400+ unique and custom-made new build pictures for each unit and Scavenger variant
- Ally cursors lights and names, all configurable
- Lot's of tiny tweaks to improve for color-blind people
- Real-time range-rings for Radar, jammer, sonar and Line of Sight (GL4 / stenciled)
- Radar-coverage live-preview for selection of radar units (GL4)
- Unit Selection shapes to GL4 for 10-20x better performance
- Teamplatter revamp to GL4 for 10-20x better performance
- Healthbars upgrade to GL4 for 10x better performance
- Rank Icons upgrade to GL4 for 5-10x bette performance
- Upgraded the existing ZK lobby to fit BAR with many additional features
- Re-designed all in-game player colors/balance to be recognizable and unique (+ adjusted system per game-mode)
- Fully new Lobby build from the ground up to connect with the new infra (wip)
Sound
- New multi-layered sound system for categories, unit-types, weapons and commands. (dynamic 3 layered system, in fully 3D space)
- Remastered existing and created hundreds of new sound effects (989 in total)
- All sounds in highest possible fidelity / clarity / bit-rate
- 100+ in-game voice notifications are added for intel and as tutorial help
- Rework of implementation of the 3D sound system + new 64-bt sound absorption/distance cut-off
- New music player with fades, dynamic playlists, varied silence (depending on gameplay)
- Improved UI interface (clicks/pops)
- Awesome soundtrack specifically written for BAR by Ryan Krause
Maps
- Exploration & Discovery of many better ways to make maps (World Machine, World Creator, Gaea)
- Creation of over 120 new maps with over 4x higher quality (remakes and new ones)
- Completely new atmospherics system for smoke, fog, rain, fireflies, clouds, day-night system, thunderstorms, etc.
- Created/upgraded dozens of map objects (trees/rocks/mushrooms/plants/crystals/bushes)
- Ambient Sound effects per map (integrated into around 20% of all certified maps)
- New dynamic Lava/Acidic/Liquid shader (can rise/drop + fully configurable with new GL4 shading)
Community
- Setup, maintenance and growth of the BAR Discord Community (currently over 4.900 users)
- Creating a new website to communicate all sorts of things (through news, guides, commands, faq, download, units, compare units, etc.)
- Setup for proper way to handle Privacy for website / Game accounts (and opt-in/out for sharing data)
- Setup of Code of Conduct
- Setup of Donation system through website
- Setup of BAR Merch + design of our first collection
- Setup of BAR YouTube + creation of mini dev-videos
- Setup of BAR Twitter
- Active involvement and promotion on Reddit, Discord, other online platforms
- Been partner or hoster of 3 BAR tournaments - including fully pro live-stream setup (4th is in the works)
Infrastructure
- Build an entire new online platform for real-time active battles, replays and leaderboard (soon expanded with maps and units)
- Created entirely new Server Platform Teiserver for extensive account-management
- Engine & Game updates building/compiling on Github
- Automatic release of new versions to all server-clusters
- 3 server clusters in EU, AU and US
- Dozens of update for Spads
- Schematized the entire infra-structure for comprehension of the whole infra
- Cleaning up the entire code-base file-by-file since 2020
- WIP new lobby + new Tachyon protocol
INTRODUCTION
The history behind BAR
Where did it start and how did we get where we are now.
Part of why we consider BAR to be an excellent game, is because of its history and the path it took, which is perhaps unconventional in terms of game-development. Development of BAR started as early as 2010, but even before that many foundations for what BAR is today had been laid.
Where it all began
When the commercial game Total Annihilation by Cavedog Entertainment was modded by its player community it ultimately resulted in a port to a newly crafted, fully 3D engine called TA Spring, later named Spring.
Over the years the Spring engine gave birth to a variety of original projects. However the TA port brought forth a line of Spring powered decedents. Games using most of the original TA content (models, textures, effects, sounds, etc.) and still featuring the original Core and Arm factions, remained present and popular.
A long history of constant changes and additions to these games, evolved (among others) into BAR’s most recent predecessor Balanced Annihilation. Though visually retaining much of it’s ancestors, its many new features made it slowly move towards becoming an original game in its own right.
When a decision was made to replace all the artwork with new original artwork, the BAR project was born. Since then, the entire body of original artwork was replaced and even expanded, along with BAR’s other features, while the BAR team continued to develop and evolve its many facets.
Timeline
#1: Modeling and texturing
2010
Beherith remade all of the Core T1 and T2 kbots, but they lacked a visual consistency.
2011
Then Mr Bob came along and plonked down a set of ~120 models for Core. About half of them were mapped with the same atlas made by Pyro. These included most of the buildings and vehicles.
They looked very good and consistent, and the atlassing made texturing possible for the rest of Mr Bobs models by Beherith.
2012
This atlassing procedure was performed by Beherith on the rest of the untextured models, and they were imported into Spring and animated.
Using the visual style of Pyro's atlas, Beherith remapped his kbots to the new atlas for a consistent look, and began to model and texture aircraft, hovercraft and ships to complete the Core models.
2013
Cremuss released his set of ~30 Arm buildings, and Beherith merged all of them onto one 4k texture atlas, so that the textures could be reused for all the other models too.
Firestorm and KaiserJ modeled plenty of arm ships, vehicles, aircraft and kbots, Beherith modeled most Arm buildings. Beherith textured and animated and imported all of them.
Smoth textured Firestorm's Arm Commander.
Beherith created all the wrecks and projectiles for the models to use.
#2: More Balancing and maintenance
2014
There where various maintenance developers tweaking/polishing BA and also keeping it alive. In this period all kinds of small and large tweaks/improvements where done. It was a period where unfortunately the whole RTS genre was in a decline, and player numbers were not as before during the high-tide back in 2007-2010.
2015
Anyways, along came Floris, already as a player in 2010 but also a developer in the making. He joined the community after already making some additions in the form of widgets and joined the BAR team in 2014. In 2015 he became an official developer for BA.
2018
During this period of maintaining and developing/improving BA, back came IceXuick (a former mapper and UI designer from (even) before BA). Contributing at first, but quickly picking up talks with Floris about the future of BA and BAR.
Also the 'real wizard' ivand, around from the start of TA Spring in 2006, was doing various things to improve BA and had a similar progressive vision on the game and engine.
We quickly found common ground and vision about the future
Thanks (or due) to quite some progressive and renewal/updates to BA, there came an important moment of choice: The progressive views on the future of BA eventually led to a (small) crisis: One group of BA players did not want to evolve further and stick to the old formula/game, the other group (also, mostly developers & contributors) willing to continue to ascent/expand/improve the game beyond.
Even though these things are not really fun to go through, it helped in re-lighting the fire to focus on BAR and go beyond.
A decision was made, and it was the first real step of BAR becoming a game on it's own.
Floris turned over the development role for BA to Bluestone, so BA could still be developed/maintained.
#3: BAR
2019
BAR started as a separate game, eventually called "Beyond all Reason". Development was only done by a very small team with Floris and IceXuick on the wheel. As already discovered, this team was golden because of the synergy and renewed positive vision and freedom for a much more progressive environment.
It began with removing all possible TA/BA content, and defaulting everything to BAR, the game went through a (identity and visual) metamorphose. Also PtaQ joined in more and more to help/assist and also to find more people.
It was an awesome first phase and very good start of BAR
More and more people hooked onto the development and also just playing the game. The new website went live, models were upgraded, practically every aspect of the game started to get individual love and attention. It was a very energetic start.
Still kept in tact was the latest balancing setup. Even with it being progressively altered in the last 2 years before, it had a very good foundation, which was laid by everybody who ever play(test)ed and developed for BA. In the coming years however, the improvements on balance continued fiercely, since in a game with roughly 400 units, there's always some area to improve or tweak.
#4: Growth & Expansion
2019+
Like in the game itself, the team quickly grew. It's unsure to exactly pinpoint why, but we like to believe the most important factors were:
A) the positive attitude and very kind/very helpful community we started with
B) because we all had the same passion.
This led to amazing forms of synergy and eventually led to the re-appearance of Beherith - The One that started it all 9 years earlier. In this year a lot of new and old people joined in on the team or as a contributor like:
Damgam, Flaka, Zecrus, Teifion, Gajop, Rossco, Watch the Fort, Jazcash, Tarnished Knight, Born2crawl, Badosu, Doo, and many others like Masterbel, Skynet, Pandaro, Lamer, Bibim, AF, Nikuksis, Noize, _Kek, etc.
What has been done since 2019
So sit back and enjoy the next section - which roughly(!) holds all major things that we're done to make BAR as it is today. All of the below parts are done by someone on the team, or as a contributor or some even as play-testers. So everything here is an accumulation of all the work since 2019:
Engine
- Upgraded pathfinding to be Multithreaded (MT), increasing performance massively
- Upgrading collision detection to be MT, increasing performance massively
- Upgrade to GL4 rendering, increasing performance massively
- Loads of performance increasing updates also noted below
- Support for Animated Textures
Gameplay
- Rebalanced new pathfinding / movement system
- Full naval rebalance
- Optimized balance between bots & vehicles
- 1000's of balance tweaks for practically all units in BAR
- Added a totally new Game Mode called 💀Scavengers™ - as addable random entity in PvP or as a full survival mode as PvE
- Re-imagination of the Alien Raptors with a load of new units, weapons, mini-queens, improved AI, etc.
- Scavengers and Raptor factions also controllable/playable as a player
- New Lootbox spawn-system option for normal and Scavenger games
- New Unit Printer spawn-system
- Reintroduction of Control Point game-mode
- Added a new Scenario system with over 20 Scenario Missions for solo play
- Collaborated and extended the Circuit AI to the BARbarian AI which is very performant and likely the smartest Spring AI.
- Crushable Walls depending on wall strength and unit weight
- New Transport AI
Units
- Designed, animated and scripted over 60 new units (on top of all new 380+ models made between 2010-2014)
- Over 120 new animations for all bots and alien chickens using inverse kinematics
- New Scavenger units like Epic flying gunships, rolling nuke bombs, unit cannons, T4 flamethrowers, T4 super ships.
- Retextured all construction units to stand out better
- Multithreaded pathfinding for theoretical 90% better performance
- Multithreaded collision detection for theoretical 70% better performance
- Start of new ''Legion'' Faction with new units and mechanics
Graphics
- Upgraded to PBR* for massively better looking units (*Physically Based Rendering)
- Added CAS* for major leap in clarity / visibility (*Contrast Adaptive Sharpen)
- Major upgrade to new OpenGL4 modern standard for 3-10x more performance (started back in 2019)
- Big upgrade to multithreaded pathing for ±40% better performance
- Upgraded all particle FX and added dozens new ones
- Rotational particles now part of the engine
- New water-wake FX for all ships, subs and hovercraft (+66% better performance)
- Upgraded and added dozens of new textures (double or quad more quality)
- New 3D waving grass
- Greatly enhanced unit-texture atlases (added new tank tracks and camouflage textures)
- Upgraded all alien chicken textures with complete new ones
- Overhaul of all AA and smoke-trail weapons and effects
- New fully animated cursor-set in 4 sizes
- Low-energy icons
- Team Colored parts of Buildings like Fusion Orbs
- Complete new style-design for shields
- New Building + Unit ground decal system upgrade to GL4
- Extra real-time lighting system for awesome looking lighting for weapons, projectiles and explosions
- Updated hundreds of weapons to look/feel better (muzzle flashes, sparks, shockwaves, water splashes, fire, flamethrowers, EMP clouds, bolts, dirt, debris, etc.)
- Custom unit shading (CUS) to new GL4 system for much higher fidelity and dynamic shading/rendering of units
- Upgrade dozens of graphic-systems to GL4 improving not only performance, but deliver modern styled graphics and effects
- Fully new Volumetric Lighting system, with over 1400 new lights added to all units
- New Volumetric Clouds and Fog systems
- New GL4 Decals / battle scarring system
UI
- Revamp of in-game UI (wip)
- Designed a complete new set of 320 Strategic icons for each unit
- New resorted build-menus by category, type, role (+ upcoming alternative new grid-menu)
- 400+ unique and custom-made new build pictures for each unit and Scavenger variant
- Ally cursors lights and names, all configurable
- Lot's of tiny tweaks to improve for color-blind people
- Real-time range-rings for Radar, jammer, sonar and Line of Sight (GL4 / stenciled)
- Radar-coverage live-preview for selection of radar units (GL4)
- Unit Selection shapes to GL4 for 10-20x better performance
- Teamplatter revamp to GL4 for 10-20x better performance
- Healthbars upgrade to GL4 for 10x better performance
- Rank Icons upgrade to GL4 for 5-10x bette performance
- Upgraded the existing ZK lobby to fit BAR with many additional features
- Re-designed all in-game player colors/balance to be recognizable and unique (+ adjusted system per game-mode)
- Fully new Lobby build from the ground up to connect with the new infra (wip)
Sound
- New multi-layered sound system for categories, unit-types, weapons and commands. (dynamic 3 layered system, in fully 3D space)
- Remastered existing and created hundreds of new sound effects (989 in total)
- All sounds in highest possible fidelity / clarity / bit-rate
- 100+ in-game voice notifications are added for intel and as tutorial help
- Rework of implementation of the 3D sound system + new 64-bt sound absorption/distance cut-off
- New music player with fades, dynamic playlists, varied silence (depending on gameplay)
- Improved UI interface (clicks/pops)
- Awesome soundtrack specifically written for BAR by Ryan Krause
Maps
- Exploration & Discovery of many better ways to make maps (World Machine, World Creator, Gaea)
- Creation of over 120 new maps with over 4x higher quality (remakes and new ones)
- Completely new atmospherics system for smoke, fog, rain, fireflies, clouds, day-night system, thunderstorms, etc.
- Created/upgraded dozens of map objects (trees/rocks/mushrooms/plants/crystals/bushes)
- Ambient Sound effects per map (integrated into around 20% of all certified maps)
- New dynamic Lava/Acidic/Liquid shader (can rise/drop + fully configurable with new GL4 shading)
Community
- Setup, maintenance and growth of the BAR Discord Community (currently over 4.900 users)
- Creating a new website to communicate all sorts of things (through news, guides, commands, faq, download, units, compare units, etc.)
- Setup for proper way to handle Privacy for website / Game accounts (and opt-in/out for sharing data)
- Setup of Code of Conduct
- Setup of Donation system through website
- Setup of BAR Merch + design of our first collection
- Setup of BAR YouTube + creation of mini dev-videos
- Setup of BAR Twitter
- Active involvement and promotion on Reddit, Discord, other online platforms
- Been partner or hoster of 3 BAR tournaments - including fully pro live-stream setup (4th is in the works)
Infrastructure
- Build an entire new online platform for real-time active battles, replays and leaderboard (soon expanded with maps and units)
- Created entirely new Server Platform Teiserver for extensive account-management
- Engine & Game updates building/compiling on Github
- Automatic release of new versions to all server-clusters
- 3 server clusters in EU, AU and US
- Dozens of update for Spads
- Schematized the entire infra-structure for comprehension of the whole infra
- Cleaning up the entire code-base file-by-file since 2020
- WIP new lobby + new Tachyon protocol
.svg)
