Atanks 4.1 is here!

jesse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 465

Ladies, Gentlemen and anyone else!
Introducing Atomic Tanks version 4.1!

This release covers a wide range of changes, so I'm going to
split them into two categories. The first being changes for the
players and later in this note I'll cover things for translators and developers.

First, a quick note about network play. It's not working yet. There's a button
on the main menu which says "Network Game" on it. That's there for testing
purposes and I don't recommend you try to use it. All it does right now
is try to connect to a game server and exchange some basic information. There
is nothing interesting to see there unless you're a coder. Sorry.

New things for the players....

1. There are two new styles of tank to choose from. These tank skins can
be found in the Player's menu. Many thanks to CtHx for providing the drawings.

2. The full screen option has been added to the Graphics menu. Activating
or deactivating full screen requires Atanks to be restarted.

3. On a similar note, Windows players should now see the mouse pointer
when playing in full screen mode.

4. Also in reference to full screen, Atomic Tanks attempts to detect your
desktop resolution and sets the game resolution to match (if possible). This
saves people from try to manually set the correct size in the Graphics menu.

5. When a tank earns money for shooting another tank, the amount of cash
earned is displayed in green above the shooter's tank.

6. When displaying money, the comma should show up every three digits. Before
it sometimes would show up where it wasn't wanted.

7. Added new weapon which reduces the power of enemy missiles (if you shoot them).
The weapon is called the Reducer. Each hit reduces the enemy's fire power a small amount.

8. Added an item called SDI Missile Defense. This item will allow your tank to
shoot down incoming missiles. It doesn't work 100%, more on that in a moment.

9. Tank speech text and damage rarely over-lap now.

10. A new weapon has been added called the Per Cent Bomb. This weapon destroys about
half of the target's armour and shields.

11. Added a new weapon called the Cluster MIRV. This device releases a cluster
bomb while it is falling.

12. Updated Russian text translation. Thanks to MyO and Sergei for all their help
doing this. Translators have been added to the Credits file.

13. Added a new weapon called Small Dirt Spread. This weapon drops a spread of
small dirt bombs.

Okay, a little note on SDI Missile Defense, because I think some people will wonder how
it works and if it's balanced. I was a bit uncertain as to whether I wanted this item
in the game, but I think it has enough good and bad points to avoid changing the balance
of the game. Here is how it works. When a missile comes toward a tank which has SDI, the
tank has about a 50/50 chance of shooting down the missile. If it works, the missile
explodes before hitting the tank. This is great for shooting down small weapons, but
can backfire if larger weapons or highly explosive weapons (such as clusters or napalm)
are in the air. The SDI doesn't work well against missiles which can travel under ground, it
can't stop lasers or lightning.
The SDI also does not descriminate between team mates. So if you park your tank next to
a friend, your SDI will shoot down their missiles as they pass over head. Also, if you
park near a foe, you might end up protecting them. The SDI has a fairly short range, but
it can interfer with nearby tanks. The SDI also does much better against slow missiles
than fast ones. The Missile Defense system is fairly cheap because of these problems,
but it has proven to be useful against tanks armed with small weapons.

On to stuff for the translators and developers....

The big thing for translators is all the game text is being moved into text files for easy translation.
There's now a "text" folder, which contains all the text (tank speech, instructions).
The most important set of files is probably the one called "ingame". These are new and
include most of the text found in the game, in the menus, buying screen, etc. Translators
no longer need to look through the source code to change things, they can look in
the "ingame" text files and change what they want.

The exception right now is the menucontent.h file, which is a mix of code and translations,
but I hope to break down this file at some point. The best feature of this new approach is
that translations can be updated without re-compiling Atanks.

So, please, take a look at ingame.txt, ingame_ru.txt, etc, translate them into another
language and e-mail them to me.

A few other notes, for the developers. A lot of code has been cleaned up, a few hundred lines
of it. This may affect patches. The main thing is that a lot of old, unused code has been
removed.

When Atanks starts up, it now loads all the text it needs into memory. This means hard disk
access after the initial start-up is virtually nothing. Before we were relying on the
disk/cache way too much. Accessing text should be around 30 times faster now. The trade-off
is much less than a megabyte of memory used by Atanks.

The Makefile has been fixed to compile the "client" file properly and to install
the new "text" folder.

I think that's everything. You can grab your copy of Atomic Tanks 4.1 from
http://atanks.sf.net
As usual, please post feedback here or e-mail me at jessefrgsmith AT yahoo DOT ca.

BillyBuerger · Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 35

Awesome. I'm still playing around with the missile defense stuff. It's interesting. Seems to hit more than 50% of the time though.

Some windows build issues...

1) I always get an error when trying to include the .res file that's in the source. I have to copy the .rc file I have and update the makefile to recompile that. Could the .rc file be included instead of the .res file and the makefile commands for compiling the .rc file be uncommented?

2) I always have to comment out the -DTHREADs and -lpthread from the makefile as I didn't think pthread worked in windows. I just found pthread-win32 but haven't been able to make things work yet. Maybe I'll start a new thread about that.

3) Along with that, I had to uncomment all the sky constants from globals.h as sky.h is only included if THREAD is defined. Should sky.h be included even if not using threading or should the globals.h constants be included if THREAD isn't defined?

Simeon · Joined: 04 Feb 2008 Posts: 52

Its nice to hear someone is working on the windows version!

jesse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 465

1. If you send me the .rc file, I'll add it to the source. Send me the changes you've made to the Makefile too please.

2. The threads thing depends on which Windows compiler you're using. Some will handle pthreads nicely, others won't. I think MingW will compile pthreads, but this is really a hit or miss depending on your compiler. Perhaps I should disable this by default.

3. The sky.h file should be included whether you have threads or not. I'll take a look at that. Thanks for bringing it up.

BillyBuerger · Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 35

I decided to start a new thread for the pthread discussion.

Moving sky.h out of the #ifdef THREAD block worked fine. I was then able to comment the global.h parts out again.