
How Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun punished the computers of the day [video] - Tomte
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/02/video-to-make-tiberian-sun-westwood-had-to-find-the-right-pathfinding-system/
======
ardit33
Great games..... I really feel that peak gaming was in 90s/early 2000s.

You had C&C, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Quake 1/2, Half Life, Pro Evo
Soccer, and so many more in the PC side, and probably a SNES or a N64 around.
Super Mario (all of them), Golden Eye, Mario Kart, Street Fighter 2, Final
Fight and more

Online gaming was crude but fun (Age of Empires, Quake, Unreal Tournament,
Half Life, had a great online implementation). LAN gaming parties were coming
in my dorm.

Games had a well defined start, end, and progression that was dependent on
your skill.

Now games are just a way for you to spend money in loot boxes, dcls, and
cosmetics, or 'upgrades' so you can escape the artificial grind. Tutorials
everywhere, handholding to the point that destroy any type of mystery or fun
of the game.....

Or maybe I am just getting old.....

~~~
iforgotpassword
While the gaming industry has turned huge and inevitably is much more about
money then when it wasn't really taken that seriously by the broad public,
thanks to the indie scene there is still great games being released today in
any genre and subgenre you can possibly think of. There has definitely been a
game released during the last 12 months that you'd totally like if you only
knew about it.

But the "getting old" part definitely plays a role too. When you're a kid or
in your teens everything is just more exciting and impressive to you. A teen
today might think the latest Wolfenstein installment is the most awesome thing
they've ever seen while to you it's just another first person shooter or doom
clone, with somewhat better graphics. Now you could say "but doom _was_ new
and groundbreaking", but even if there had been a dozen identical games
before, if doom were the first one you played, it wouldn't have mattered.
Graphics is another thing I stopped caring about. In the late 90s and early
2000s I was blown away by new graphics demos released every year showing off
what the next gen of gfx cards were capable of. Nowadays I'm so out of the
loop. Graphics from 5 years ago look no different than today. Although I must
admit the latest unreal engine tech demos actually did manage to impress me.

~~~
lordnacho
That's the thing about getting old, you end up seeing enough examples of
everything that you generalise and everything fits in your model of the world.
Which also means some of the magic is gone, and possibly also your ability to
recognise something genuinely new.

~~~
brian_cunnie
> ...and possibly also your ability to recognise something genuinely new.

I think we can still recognize something new: I found that playing "Vader
Immortal" on Oculus Quest to be a genuinely new gaming experience. And I've
been gaming on PC since 8/81 (when PCs were first released) and on Apple IIs
before that, and IBM 5110s before that.

------
ACow_Adonis
I have to say, apart from nostalgia, the main thing I miss from that period of
gaming is the death of RTS.

I think everything peaked with supreme commander forged alliance, and after
the strategic zoom, i couldn't go back and play things like StarCraft without
feeling like I was watching a genre defined by fighting the interface and
hotkey mashing obsessives rather than playing the game or worrying about grand
strategy. I know in all these games at the top levels you do have to worry
eventually about hotkeys and commands, but after supreme commander on dual
monitors, all the rest have been like viewing an art exhibit through a toilet
roll.

These days there's barely a handful of games anymore in the RTS genre, and
maybe publishers like paradox, will focus on longer running strategy, but
nothing that quite meets that old feeling of sitting down for a 30 - 120
minute epic match of actual wits and thought and ability that supreme
commander (and the C & C universe before it) contained. We lost something with
the death of Westwood and when blizzard moved Warcraft from its roots, and no
real successor to the old total annihilation, which is so sad considering how
powerful computers have gotten in the meantime and how hard these games were
pushing them back in the day.

(PS, if anyone can post me a working tute on getting SC:FA multiplayer working
on Linux, I might sell you my firstborn).

~~~
jadbox
Supreme Commander FA, WarHammer 40k Dawn of War 1, Company of Heroes 1, AoE 2,
SC1, and, of course, Total Annihilation are the quintessential strategy games
imho.

~~~
aetherspawn
I never understood why people didn’t like AoE:3 as much as AoE:2. With the
unit bonuses (ie spears bonus against cavalry, etc), multiple attacks per unit
(some units have both ranged and melee attacks with different stats that can
be toggled, ie musketeers could be put in melee to deal with horses) and
seriously different civs (ie up to 30% of units available might be different)
it was a much more strategic play. And the interface was arguably more
advanced than SC2, so it was more relaxing to play.

Is it because they picked the wrong era to set it in?

~~~
Aeolun
I think the problem is more that it came after AoE 2. While 3 was a fairly
good game by itself, it didn’t quite live up to nr 2.

------
broth
This is one game that always impressed me as a child.

Things I loved about the game:

\- Destructible terrain, buildings, and vehicles.

\- Ambient lighting.

\- Exciting story with known actors.

One thing that always frustrated me was on the back of the box it showed the
ability to create light towers but I don’t think that was ever possible in the
game without mods.

~~~
jasonvorhe
Yep, Westwood got a lot of flak for that one image on the back of the
packaging back in the day. Especially since they basically lied about shipping
a 3D engine during development when Tiberian Sun was actually using Voxels.

~~~
aliswe
Having written a voxel renderer for ts models I can confirm that it's
definetely a 3d rendering engine. It's not just polygon_based (nor are they hw
accelerated)

------
yakattak
In case anyone wants to know what happened to C&C, I heavily recommend this
documentary [1].

[1]: [https://youtu.be/OlIkGlTMUNE](https://youtu.be/OlIkGlTMUNE)

------
ChuckMcM
This is one of the few games I re-bought when they ported it to the Win7+ set
of OSes from Microsoft. This game, Dark Reign, Descent 2, all consumed so much
of my entertainment time. It wasn't until World of Warcraft dropped that I
didn't have a 'lan party' rig that I could pick up and carry to a friends for
a great time.

------
londons_explore
How exactly is pathfinding an NP complete problem?

Surely a simple Dijkstra search across all grid squares would do the job?

Edit: Perhaps it's 'find an optimal strategy for everyone to get to their
destination while nobody collides with anyone else'?

I didn't think real time strategy games normally did much collision avoidance
between units though... The number of times I've seen an army just walk
through another...

~~~
eric-hu
The RTS games I know definitely do collision detection. StarCraft 2 disables
collision detection in a few cases: workers harvesting resources, adept
shading, and the colossus walking over ground units. To see what no collision
detection would look like, see how the air units stack and move across each
other.

I think collision avoidance might be overkill. It's fine if two units bump
into each other while going in the same direction. Collision is bad if some
units are moving through a choke point and the units in back turn around to
take a different route because there's no open grid squares to walk forward
through.

I'm currently playing through the StarCraft 1 campaign and the pathing
differences with 2 are huge. Imagine being in line at Disneyland and every ten
seconds, the people in front of you decide the entrance is blocked and turn
around to try finding another way in. Then they bump into you and turn around
again. Or maybe they just keep bumping into you for a bit.

------
sprash
You can download the game for free at [1] and still play it online.

[1]: [https://cncnet.org/tiberian-sun](https://cncnet.org/tiberian-sun)

~~~
Gracana
Oh man, this is awesome. I have very fond memories of playing the original
C&C. My copy of C&C had a Tiberian Sun ad that I always thought looked
amazing, but I never did play it. From the Ars Technica video, it looks like
it ought to feel modern enough to play today and have fun. And there are Linux
builds. I'm gonna try it. :)

~~~
chihuahua
I don't know if it's still available, but a few years ago I bought all 17
games in the C&C series for $5 on Amazon. Downloadable, not CD/DVD, but it
works. Some of the games crash occasionally on Windows10, but C&C:Generals
runs very well on an Intel NUC with Win10.

------
bsdubernerd
I played a ton of RTS games, but I still remember fondly Tiberian Sun for the
art style.

It has a very, very distinct feel from anything else back then, and anything
that followed.

For me it's a combination of many factors. Voxel units looked _great_ at small
scale compared to any polygonal type that came after that. The infantry and
landscape is 2D and hand-crafted. It's gorgeous. I think this was the last
game in the series where this was the case. Dynamic and scripted lighting, esp
nearby tiberium, added a ton to make some of the landscapes really look alien
and alive - but did so without changing the vibe of the game. The soundtracks
were very fitting as well, although not as memorable as C&C RA.

I'm not nostalgic here. I really did like subsequent games in the series. RA2
was great. I had lots of fun with Generals too (which I always thought looked
stunning).

But Tiberian Sun has really a _distinct_ feel to it encompassing everything.
RIP Westwood.

~~~
aliswe
Yes, the difference in style really caught me as well. But ts was developed by
another studio independently from cc / ra if Im not mistaken.

------
shoo
Some great anecdotes here about the development of pathfinding in starcraft 1:

[https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-
finding-...](https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-hack)

> But the biggest thing holding back StarCraft was unit path-finding.

> It wasn’t that the path-finding was totally broken; in most cases it worked
> quite well. But there were enough edge-cases that the game was un-shippable.

> Game units would get stuck and stop on the battlefield. Often they would go
> through elaborate efforts to find paths, inching forward or looping around
> but not making progress, and sometimes getting wedged and unable to move
> further. Entire task forces would get bogged down in what looked like the
> afternoon commute.

previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5252003)

------
anewhnaccount2
Since the detail on path finding is a little sparse, I'll link this very
exhaustive treatment for anyone interested
[http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarCompa...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarComparison.html)

------
extropy
"pathfinding is actually a murderously complex programming challenge—one that,
depending on the path, might be NP-complete."

The article is crap, the actual interview makes a lot more sense. Fond
memories :)

------
dead_mall
Ah just seeing C&C getting brought up brings back nostalgic memories. I
remember Red Alert 2 being the best game ever.

I revisited this game with a friend of mine during high school years ago, we
had to pirate the game and install some 3rd party LAN software to get RA2's
online mode working. Once installed, we were surprised to see a good amount of
people still playing the game. Good times

------
torgian
I feel blessed that I grew up during the late 80s and 90s. I got to see and
play games in arcades, and I owned my first computer in 2001. So I played
games mostly at friends houses.

Nobody else will go through what we did, though I suspect my generation might
hit the beginnings of good VR tech (hoping so anyway).

------
throw7
I'm old. Dune 2 was my childhood. Thank you Westwood.

~~~
bgeeek
You're not old if Dune 2 was your childhood. Trust me. Vic 20 was my
childhood... _waits for someone else to go back further..._

~~~
mingmecca
Another VIC-20 alum here. At the age of 10, I remember trying to write a
version of Donkey Kong in BASIC and was flabbergasted when I ran out of memory
before I could even get barrels rolling! Ah, the good ol' days!

------
rootw0rm
Nah man, Total Annihilation punished computers of the day.

~~~
Havoc
The modern version - planetary annihilation kills modern computers still.

~~~
bsder
Ooooh, the dumpster fire that is Planetary Annihilation.

If they spent a fraction of the effort on _the actual bloody game_ that they
spent on making it Twitch and E-sport friendly, the game might not, you know,
suck.

~~~
Havoc
>the dumpster fire that is Planetary Annihilation.

huh? I enjoyed it. Mainly played AI skirmishes with mods though

~~~
Ruthalas
What mods do you recommend?

------
aembleton
Did anyone else here find the rules.ini file and modify it? This controlled
power levels and distance of weapons. You could modify a bazooka guy to have a
weapon as powerful as a nuke.

[https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Rules.ini](https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Rules.ini)

------
hermitdev
Has anyone been able to get C&C Generals to work on Win10?

My Win10 box doesn't seem to want to read my original discs (I've tried 2
drives, they both appear to hang). Excepting that, is there anywhere to get
working ISOs if you have CD keys? Didn't look available on Gog.

~~~
HoppyHaus
Up to you, but I'd say you are in a situation where piracy is justifiable. You
already bought a copy.

------
mevile
I don't understand what is challening about pathfinding specifically. Are
there just a huge number of vertices and edges so known algorithms don't
perform well? How big are the grids? Is it making the path finding look a
certain way to humans that's the hard part?

~~~
shoo
Consider the scenario of doing "select all; move over there past a bunch of
obstacles and choke points" for 300 tanks.

if you're not playing a starcraft , you probably want them to trundle in the
right direction and avoid ending up in a huge traffic jam.

if you are playing a starcraft , bad pathfinding is an opportunity for a
skilled operator to worsen their RSI while lovingly micromanaging each tank's
route

------
vturner
Did they ever publish their path algorithms? I'm building a simulation that
will soon need path finding, and something that is good and doesn't appear to
be doing obviously stupid things (but not necessarily the best) would be a
perfect fit

~~~
Synaesthesia
Starcraft 2 has excellent path finding algorithms, which they did discuss
quite a lot prior to release. I don’t think they published the algorithm but
maybe you can find it.

------
jdkee
I taught myself BASIC programming on a ZX81 to create Star Raiders clone back
in the early 1980s. My version was terrible, but it was games that brought me
into the world of computers. And it is games that keep me interested today.

------
ehonda
I used to play this on my old P200 just fine. It was a great game and I loved
the electronic soundtrack and artwork. It was very immersive.

------
bredren
Pro players of DOTA 2 still complain about pathfinding.

------
segfaultbuserr
> _Pathfinding is actually a murderously complex programming challenge—one
> that, depending on the path, might be NP-complete._

> _The "eureka!" moment came when Castle and team realized they didn't have to
> build perfect—or even really great—pathfinding. Rather, they had to build
> pathfinding that didn't look stupid to the player._

> _The most interesting thing, at least to me, is that pathfinding is still a
> difficult problem even for modern games, and simply throwing more CPU power
> at the problem doesn 't really help that much—such is the curse of NP-
> complete problems._

It reminds me of my experience of some pathfinding bugs in OpenRA (free and
open source _Command & Conquer_ clone): one day I was playing OpenRA on Linux,
and I find the game was running extremely slowly like a snail, the more I
played the more slow it was. So I decided to check GitHub, it turned out that
AI has built a huge number of soldiers, but unfortunately, due to geography
features of the map and the battles, a lot of them have trapped inside
"islands" with no available path connected to the rest of the world, or they
want to attack targets inside "islands". One example is isolated waterways,
another is land with destroyed bridges.

But edge cases like these were still not handled well in the OpenRA engine,
the AI would keep ordering those units to move and attack. OpenRA uses a
variant of the A* algorithm, and those AI orders will force the engine to run
a huge number of A* pathfinding attempts on every second and exhaust most of
your CPU time.

The solution should make the AI to detect these endless attempts and "bail
out". The developers have already fixed some of those edge cases, but there
are still a few to hunt down.

* [https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/12435](https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/12435)

* [https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/7694](https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/7694)

* [https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/12938](https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/12938)

* [https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/12435](https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/12435)

* [https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/10860](https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/10860)

------
smarri
Just for nostalgia, some other gems from that era -

Silent Hill, Residential Evil, Unreal Tournament, Wolfenstein Enemey
Territory,

*Edit, commas.

