Bring in 4.3!

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

I am happy to announce that Atomic Tanks 4.3 is out and ready for
download. *Pauses for cheers.*

This release is mostly a bug fix and some time has been taken to update
some of the graphics and translations. Most of the effort in this version
is directed aat making the game stable, especially on higher-end machines.
I'll write about the details of that in a bit. But, first, here is
a list of changes in 4.3.

1. Updated Russian translation. Thanks to CtHx for providing this.

2. Updated German weapons file. Translation provided by Simeon.

3. Added new tank styles (Spider and Bigfoot). Graphics by CtHx.

4. Added updated Slovak language files. Provided by Jozef.

5. Made sure all ingame language files are the same length to avoid
empty strings.

6. Switched to a new button and main menu look. Graphics provided by CtHx.

7. Changed the way menus are draw to avoid crashes.

8. Updated the game's spec file for Linux packagers.

9. In place of the tank style's name, we actually show a preview of
the tank.

10. Cleaned up a memory leak in floating text code.

11. Made Atanks NOT use threads by default. Threads can be re-enabled
by using the "--thread" command line option.

12. Removed old shield drawing code and replaced it with new shield
animations. This is to avoid crashes.

13. Put another cap on money to avoid players getting so much money, it
rolls over to a negative amount.

14. The game now tries to detect where its data files are. This means we
were able to drop the extra "make system" makefile. All games can now
be compiled with either
"make" on Linux machines or
"make winuser" on Windows machines.
The "make system" option is no longer needed or supported.

Okay, now a few words about the crashes that have haunted the project for
a while. It turns out that there was problem between Atomic Tanks and its
underlying library, Allegro. For some reason, Allegro wouldn't draw two
different things at the same time. So, if we had two threads, one drawing
a tank and the other drawing the background, the game could crash. To get
around this, I have put all drawing into one thread. There are other threads
for networking and such tasks, but drawing is all in one thread. It seems
this bug only pops up in higher end machines that can actually handle two or
more threads at the same time; single-core machines are not affected. People
running on single-core machines can run atanks with the "--thread" flag
to enable background drawing and speed up the game. My reasoning is that
higher-end machines don't need the extra boost, so it's not a big deal that
they lose the threading.

Some changes, especially networking, didn't make it into this release because
I've been really busy with other things. But it's important to me that the
stability issues get resolved, so here we are.

You can grab the latest version of Atanks from the website:
http://atanks.sf.net

As usual, please send me bug reports, donations, feature requests, comments
and fan mail at jessefrgsmith AT yahoo DOT ca. Or, you can post here on
the forum.

Happy tanking!

BillyBuerger · Joined: 02 Jul 2009 Posts: 43

I've posted the windows version. Both the zipped windows build and the installer. I've only played a game or so but have thus far not encountered any crashes. So hopefully your changes fixed that. Thanks!

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

Wow, that was fast. Thank you, sir.
Hopefully we'll get some feedback from the Portable Apps folks in the next few weeks. If this release proves to be stable, I'll get back to the networking code.

CtHx · Joined: 11 Sep 2009 Posts: 66

Thank you! Good release Smile

(but bug in player edit menu is still not fixed Razz

)

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

I assume you mean the bug that comes up which switching languages? It's on my to-do list. Smile