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.

Are all those vehicles shps? Has vxls still not been implemented in openRA?

I don't understand, he has a working mod that he could just cut factions from and call it a day, but instead he puts in work to make another...

Are all those vehicles shps? Has vxls still not been implemented in openRA?

OpenRA has implemented voxels. However, at the moment, they seem to be much more heavy for the game, in computational terms, than SHPs.

i5-2500/8 GB RAM/GTX 750 Ti PC

Except... I don't have a working mod. Well, technically I do, but practically I wouldn't count that one either.
AS-on-Ares worked because by 2014/2015 it got to the final playtesting phase (sans artwork, because artwork was a mess).
AS-on-OpenRA was an unplayable mess where I messed up my own AS-on-Ares paradigms with the stat conversions and ended up breaking everything. The error I made back in 2015 during the Ares->OpenRA jump was that I did not use the opportunity to reconsider what worked in the faction design and what didn't.

...

The option of getting back to Ares technically exists, but that would have led me to drop the engine research I made in the last 4 years which revitalized the OpenRA modding community. It would have been very awkward to me to drop my own coding, considering that I was always better at that compared to art.