Atomic Tanks 3.8 has arrived

jesse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 537

Ladies, gentlemen and tankers,

It gives me great pleasure to introduce to you the latest Stable version of
Atomic Tanks. Behold, Atanks 3.8!

The main focus of this release was increasing efficiency and reducing CPU usage.
Atanks has gained some bloat over the past several releases and this time, we're
pushing in the other direction! This release also tries to make things a bit
easier on people whose eyes aren't the sharpest and adds some general polish. I
hope you'll let us know how we're doing.

The changes in this release are as follows:

1. Added Chain Missile and Jack Hammer weapons. These were introduced by Yama
in the Experimental branch and they seem to work just fine; similar to the
Chain Gun.

2. During the game, weapons such as the Chain Missile, Chain Gun and Jack Hammer
show the number of shots left for the player, not the total number of missiles
which will be fired.

3. On the buying screen, weapons such as the Chain Gun, Chain Missile and Jack
Hammer now show the number of shots the player is buying, not the total number
of missiles in the shots. This should clear up some confusion.

4. Tried to make the teams (Jedi & Sith) more evenly matched.

5. Improved the way the game updates items on the screen during combat. This reduces
CPU usage by about 5% during the round. (Ex. My modest test computer's CPU usage
averages around 15% now instead of 20%.)

6. Added Network option to the Options screen. Here the player can select if
they want the game to check for new updates to Atanks. This is on by default.
Please note that no information about you or your computer is sent during the
update checks.

7. The MIRV weapon now calculates its height above the ground much more efficiently.

8. Created a new weapon, the Driller, which digs a deep hole where it lands, but
causes very little damage to any tank it hits. This allows a player to use the
Driller under their own tank.

9. Fixed a bug where the game would crash if settings were not saved properly.

10. Fixed a bug where the game would crash when a tank was retaliating.

11. Added a Demo mode. If a player launches Atanks but doesn't click any buttons for
one minute the game plays by itself. The game continues for five rounds or
until the player hits the ESC key.

12. Fixed a problem with Cluster Bombs not having the proper payload.

13. War quotes now show up in black at the end of a round for better contrast.

14. After the buying screen, the game used to pause while the land and sky were
being generated. On Linux machines, this should now be instant. So no more
pauses after you're done purchasing. Hopefully, this will get ported to Windows
and other platforms too. If you can code, let me know and I'll help get this moved
to other operating systems.
I forget the name of the person who first suggested this, but I've been sitting on
this idea for a while. Thank you to the developer who gave me the idea of how
to do this.

15. Fixed bug where text would be garbled if no weapons file was found. Many
thanks to BillyBuerger for reporting this problem.

16. Funky bomblets are now displayed in different colours. They used to be plain green.

17. Removed white "bubbles" from menu screens. This was making things difficult for
some people to read and slowing things down. Makes menu drawing a lot easier on the
CPU.

18. There was a lot of misc code clean-up for those of you who like to look at these
things. Mostly in regards to header files and various free-floating functions in the
main source file.

You can grab the latest copy of Atomic Tanks from:
http://atanks.sourceforge.net

Right now we have the source code and Windows packages.

As always, please let us know what you think of the game. What works, what
doesn't and what would make it better! You can either post
here on the forums or contact me directly via e-mail at
jessefrgsmith AT yahoo DOT ca

Blow up a virtual tank for me!