Atomic Tanks 2.5 Released!

jesse · Site Admin Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 221

I am happy to annouce, hot off the presses, Atomic Tanks version 2.5!
This release covers some new and interesting ground and addresses some
annoying bugs. The changes are, in no particular order...

1. Jim contributed a new colour theme (Crispy), which will be the default. This
causes land, sky and explosions to look better. You can revert to
the old colour theme (Regular) under the Graphics option menu.

2. Fred provided Brazlian Portuguese translations for some of the text
in Atomic Tanks. The Help file is now in Portuguese, also tanks can talk
Portuguese now. The language setting is in the main Options menu.

3. Money should no longer over-flow if Interest is set over 1.1.

4. Fixed some graphic issues concerning full screen or higher
resolutions. Should make the menus look better on bigger screens.

5. Tanks now buy parachutes more often. There was a bug, introduced in 2.4,
which caused tanks to avoid parachutes.

6. Players can now buy and sell items in bulk. Holding down the CTRL
key on the buying screen causes items to be bought or sold in large
quanities.

7. Shooting a burrower or pentrator into a Steel floor no longer causes
the game to hang.

8. Some parts of the game use less CPU now. Also, the Help and Credits screens
should display smoother.

9. Added a new land slide type, Cartoon, which can be found on the Physics
option screen. This land slide type causes tanks and dirt to hover for
a brief period of time before they fall.

10. There is no longer an AutoPlay option for when all the human players
die. There does not seem to be a need for it. When only AI tanks are
left they either fight in normal time or fast forward to the end of
the round.

11. Fred pointed out some errors in the Help file. This is now updated.

12. Teams have been introduced into Atomic Tanks. The team option can
be set in the Players menu by selecting a player.
There are three team options:
Jedi
Neutral
Sith

Neutral is not really a team. A Neutral tank will shoot at anyone
and works only for itself, just like tanks have up until this release.
You can think of Neutral as the default behavior.

The Jedi and Sith tanks shoot at anyone who is not on their own team.
So a Jedi will attack Neutral and Sith tanks, but will (usually) not
shoot at other Jedi. Sith players will attank Jedi and Neutrals.
If a Neutral player wins a round, they get sole credit, as before.
However, if a Jedi or Sith player wins a round, then the entire
Sith/Jedi team gets credit and the bonus money.

Mostly, this was introduced to encourage friendly play between human
players and, as a bonus, to make games much harder. Try fighting
five or six Sith tanks at a time!

There were also a string of minor code changes, which do not directly
change game play. You can read about them in the Changelog file.

As always, may thanks are due to Keilaron for continuing support,
bug reports and testing on Windows.

I would also like to thank Jim for the new colour theme and Fred for
the language translation. If anyone else would like to see Atanks
support their language, please let me know.

Please visit http://atanks.sourceforge.net for the lastest
version and report any bugs, comments or questions to the
forum. Thanks!

-- Jesse