It is a great game.
It's purpose is to be a recreation of older RTS games and a source for all things RTS, and I like the idea. Unfortunately, it's not playable on older machines, which is why I never play it nowadays.
Now, OpenRA is currently investing in the 2nd generation of games right now and, so far, it's looking pretty good. The TS and RA2 mods are getting new things every day and it even looks like they might be ready soon.
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No, they aren't ready at all.
The problem with the 2.5D graphics are that they are NOT for any normal computer. Sure, I don't have a powerful computer, but I'd be willing to bet all the money I have that with any normal computer (with up to 8GB of RAM) will struggle with the 2.5D graphics at least somewhat. They're not perfect, and working with OpenGL is not good with some computers, especially ones with the Intel series of processors.
Compare that to Yuri's Revenge, though...
Yuri's Revenge has the ability to run great on ALL machines. Sure, there is some fiddling to do with it, but the game is so prominent it has one of the largest modding communities known today and, nowadays, has a lot of great mods such as Mental Omega and Red Resurrection. It's great. Even I have tried tinkering with the code of YR.
Now, I bring this up because at one point I did have a few OpenRA mods, such as Generals Alpha. I have always recognized, however, both through personal experience and by seeing the progression of mods on the ModDB page, that it is hard to get a working mod on OpenRA.
Enter Attacque Supérior, a mod by GraionDilach that has recently been declared deceased.
Honestly, when I saw this mod on YR using the Ares engine, it game me a sense of "what could have been." In my opinion I don't care whether or not one faction is the same as another. Just give me something to play and I will probably enjoy it. Even the mod I run has a lot of reused Allied assets, purely to get the new side fully functioning, complete with its own superweapons (or lack thereof, depending on how you look at it) and with its own unique gimmicks, and I like it that way.
My point is that for AS on Ares, if it was given to me with six sides that are all similar to one another, I wouldn't care on bit. It could have been great. But then the mod was moved to a more unstable OpenRA, and it was a move I honestly didn't understand until the mod was already dead.
Now, let me be frank here: I never had and still don't have anything against OpenRA and it's RA2 engine. I just don't think it's ready for mods yet. It still has a long way to go. I think Attacque Superior's halt in development after moving to OpenRA is an example of this. YR is just a better game to work with and moving to OpenRA for some mods might be a death sentence. Rest in Peace, Freedom Confederates. Rest in Peace.
Of course, I am open to differing opinions and discussion. Is OpenRA actually reading for modding in your opinion, and is what I said wrong or flawed in some way? Let me know in the comments, and maybe we can spark a little discussion.
Also, GraionDilach, about AS on Ares - do you still have the mod files? If so I want to know if I can have them so that I can review the assets and see if maybe I can learn a few things. I as well as my colleagues have been looking to update our mod for a while, and with AS dead, I think its remains will help me out a lot.
Thanks, man. I wish for you the best.
Sorry, I completely missed out on this and only found it today on a completely random google search.
I do have everything regarding AS on Ares. I think I still have all the builds I ever made. This includes the 2011-2012 builds which were Whiteboy's Rules-styled unitspam.
There are some things which are missing from the story though. AS didn't die because ORA wasn't ready. The thing is - I worked on getting it ready and I had a lot of progress on that... which benefited SP the most. However I still met with heavy resistance from ORA to get my aims fulfilled which slowly but surely demotivated me to work on the project. I also have a lot of RL stuff to deal with - when I started modding, I just fell out of the university and my most free years were between 2011 and 2015... and most of those time went into MO 3.0/Ares stuff. Since December 2016, I work full time (first as a three-shift manufacturing worker then since mid-2018 as a system admin with constant standby support and oncalls and I ended up as a technical lead without having the tech skills in all fronts to back it up which is a constant pressure) which took a lot of my energy away and while I had a lot of support in the people I gathered, ultimately I couldn't offload things the way which would have been enough to keep it up.
What I'm gonna say though - AS-on-OpenRA was a LOT closer to what I envisioned about the game when I stopped working on it than AS on Ares. Both projects had a lot of issues (AS-on-Ares lacked identity, AS-on-OpenRA had a lot of issues where I tried too hard on getting one) and while I killed the project, I still feel that changing the engine was a good decision.
When I started VSH, Nolt told me he doesn't like it because the new sides are what made AS stand out and this makes VSH's limited approach very pale in comparison and I guess I can agree with him on that. In fact, nothing stops me to reiterate the Confeds today and pull them in.
I like how you brought that side up. If I think back... the Confeds benefited the most from the engine change. The Confeds in Ares were weak and gimmicky, I had to give them in-name-only scrap vehicles to give them an actual chance because YR+Ares wasn't that good on providing a GLA faction (this was prior to unit-to-promotion in Ares which wouldn't have worked for me anyways) but OpenRA provided me the framework to pull off husk pickups and abuse individual factory queues to turn prototypes into a worthwhile buildlimited factory instead of relying cheap buildable Secret Labs until you get what you wanted. It's just that... everything else was subpar. I suddenly had too many options and ran too far with them.
AS would have needed a restart at that point - it just grew past maintainable and it had too many gimmicks conflicting all over. I just ran out of the energy - and even more than a year later I still don't have those mindful moments -, to get back to the drawing board and redesign it from scratch again to cut all the unnecessary fat it gathered in it's first 5 years on ORA.
TL;DR: AS didn't died because ORA as an engine wasn't ready. That wasn't even the top reason. My feuds with the OpenRA community and my workplace sucking away my energy were the two sole reasons I stopped and even today are the two sole reasons I'm still struggling with VSH even. OpenRA as an engine would have worked - it would have been slow and have had a horrible hardware requirement but I could've accepted that tradeoff already in 2017 and still would have accepted it today.