I'm currently on a TA kick, and it occured to me that if I was going to babble on about 'all things TA', I should probably keep it all in one place, so that people could read (or avoid) it conveniently.
First off, I have the Total Annhilation Commander's Pack, which includes Core Contingency and Battle Tactics. It is outfitted with the last official Cavedog upgrade (3.1a), Switek's Bugfix 1.4, TAMECHeavy.hpi 11.3(?), and TAUIP 5.5beta. I mostly play skirmishes, and only rarely play the campaigns.
Total Annhilation is a wonderful game that is now in danger of extinction. It's parent company, Cavedog, shut down last year, and the current owners of the title are no longer developing it. Fortunately, the third party developers have been busy creating their own expansions, and because of thier efforts, TA probably has many years ahead of it.
And now, the news:
(found on TAMEC.org, August 7, 2000)
quote:
The closing of Boneyards ... it's official.
Posted Monday, August 7, 2000 by tamad
Just ran across this on Annihilated Board. It is posted by someone who those of us in the TAK Community knew to be an official Boneyards Employee and the one who personally made most of the Darien Crusades Maps - Winged Elf. Here's his words: "Although it's not yet been officially announced, Boneyards will quite certainly be dead very shortly. On Tuesday, 2 August, 2000, all remaining members of what was once the Boneyards team were laid off by Infogrames, the company which now owns GT Interactive and its subsidiary companies, including Humongous Entertainment, the studio which birthed the offspring studio Cavedog Entertainment.
At the time it was announced to those of us who remained, we were not even given the privledge to remove our personal possessions from our offices, but were told instead that we must set up appointments to do so in the future."
No date has been set to "officially" close Galactic War or Darien Crusades, but with sending the last employees packing, they've tacitly closed both, as there's no one left who even knows how to restart the servers should they go down (having just failed to successfully log into GWar, it may now be down permanently). Regardless, there are no more sectors queued and awaiting deployment- each one requires a patch to be built before it can be posted, and I've never finished writing the documentation of how that process gets done.
And so it ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. If we'd even been informed, we'd have done everything within our power to have given you all at least a grand show before the end, but even that's been denied us.
It's been my distinct honour to work with the others who created Boneyards, and to serve the TA and TA:K communities. You guys deserve far better from your online gaming service than this has become.
Vanya Y. Tucherov
who created and/or played the following characters on Boneyards:
TA: Core Tactical Commander tesseract and NEWSBOT
TAK: Zhon Chancellor K'shinsa StormRider, ServerDog WingedElf, and TownCrier
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[This message has been edited by The Mad Monk (edited August 13, 2000).]
