It's been a while since there has been any update here.
Where to start…
Well, let’s face the truth. Attacque Supérior was a beast of a project. It was unexpectable from the start to get 6 or so factions running. While the goal was mostly reached by 2014 (depending whom you ask), it was mostly done via reusing the same gimmicks and basically cloning units left and right to counterparts at different sides.
The uniqueness was simply lost in the armada of stuff, and instead of factions standing out, there were only individual units which either ended up at the same faction, either not.
While the jump to OpenRA from Ares helped to change a lot on this setup with faction gimmicks and similar aspects, it literally pushed back progression beyond limits the project could not recover from the most part. Attacque Supérior already had artwork issues and the lack of artist manpower of it was not resolved with the engine update, especially considering I ended up getting more and more involved in coding OpenRA itself/putting more emphasis on the features I coded for it instead of picking up the necessary skills at the art department to have it finished.
Remember these times? They never came back ultimately.
Over time, Attacque Supérior on OpenRA became nothing more, but an excuse for me to maintain additional features upon OpenRA itself, knowing these features have little to none chance of getting merged into upstream directly as time passed by. The ability to have these features around proved influential for an entire modding subscene of OpenRA’s however, as they became the basis of spearheading projects Crystallized Doom and Shattered Paradise, even founding their way to Romanov’s Vengeance.
Basically, the mod’s own progression got sidetracked for the engine progression and my realization of this in the first half of 2019 was the final nail of the coffin. There’s no point at keeping up the hopes that AS would ever get done considering there were constant moving goalposts in the entire project’s lifetime.
With all the above, it’s about time to call AS as a mod dead with the name Attacque Supérior reinterpreted to mean this engine project alone.
There’s also an urge of me to getting retired from modding. While it has it’s merits, it took more of my time than what it gave back to me in return. However, there were personal reasons back then which started the project back in 2010… and those particular reasons prevent me to leave the scene without having something done. Since AS-as-an-engine can never be called finished and there should be a proper project aimed to atleast showcase it’s depths… I took another choice.
Let me present to you... Valiant Hearts.
Inspired by the relative simplicity of Red-Resurrection and VS_INI, Valiant Hearts is a limited-to Allied-vs-Soviets project, even lacking countries/subfactions for the time (and I don’t have any active plan to introduce them either). Limiting the scope allows the units to become more different themselves and allows me to utilize the tricks I picked up during AS-as-a-mod, transferring the features which made AS unique back then, like resource spawner meteor storms and rebuildable tech buildings.
With this announcement, VH development has been moved out to the open, with everything visible at Github.com, including public devtest builds powered by OpenRA’s ModSDK and Travis-CI. Documentation and branding is lacking for the time being, but will be resolved with time. Note that Valiant Hearts utilizes the new, in-testing OpenRA OpenGL 3.0 backend and limited-to-OpenGL 2.1-capable hardware won’t be able to run it.
Regarding the status of Valiant Hearts though – if a picture is worth a thousand words, than a video will tell everything about it what I could.
Feel free sharing your thoughts/getting involved in the further development on Discord at Discord.gg.
Unlike AS, Valiant Hearts isn't and never intends to be a magnum opus, moreso aim to be a respectful farewell to the community. Only time will tell how well it performs in that regard. There are still things I still haven't decided on, like if it needs it's own ModDB page and similar aspects. We'll see.
Graion out.
Will you release source code / unused parts or anything of that nature? If used I'll be sure to give you credit.
If you mean AS-as-an-engine or VH, both are released on the AS GitHub account. I'm not sure if I want to do this with either of the AS-as-a-mods (the Ares version still feels more complete gameplaywise than the ORA version, but I prolly should backport selected assets from the latter to the former if I decide to throw that one out to the open).
If this is about the assets I got/made for AS which end up unused in VH - I gave myself options to reuse most of them as tech units at worst. I guess I can review their status after VH's done.
I know the feeling all too well Graion. I wish you the best of luck with your new project. Will there be a new ModDB page for it for us to follow? :)
Maybe after I really get there to finish the branding (it still uses the ORA RA2 logos and the generated builds have the fallback Ex icons) and have the remaining artwork limitations fixed (incorporating the YR theaters and civilian additions, because atm only vanilia RA2 ones are set up).
I don't think there would be much newsposts to spam the world with anyway since most of the things work already and the next major jump videos could showcase would be if I fix weapon firing offsets everywhere and then set up muzzles for everything (which would be really nice but kinda low priority and might even be done after a first "official" release even).
Tried Valiant Shades for the first time. You don't mind if I did a review on it, do you?
Sure I don't. It was only today I noticed you did a post-mortem on AS even, sorry for missing out - I don't follow ModDB lately much.