Battle Tanks 

Yet another bicycle was born today! I’ve started another compact patching system about a week ago. So, the first patch is out: 0.8-update1. It updates battle tanks from version 0.8.7656 to 0.8.7667. It’s only 900k! It fixes HRTF noise, updates french translation and adds capitalization for auto-generated nicks. Download it now and help us improving our nice game! Windows only.

At last! What Bolsheviks were dreaming about for so long now comes true: after a whole month of work we present a final Battle Tanks 0.8.7656. And even for Mac users! Thanks to all for your bug reports, and please send more!

The full changelog is more than 100 lines long, so we will only mention news after 0.8-RC1.

General:

• The engine is ported to MacOS X 10.5 Leopard. We also think about a port for 10.4 Tiger.
• For linuxoids, an “install” target is added for scons.
• A new Ukrainian localization is added, as well as new diacritic marks for the Cyrillic codepage.
• Thanks to a better algorithm of counting the delays (based on bar chart of errors) and a new method of serialization of floats, the quality of life network game became better.
• A DNS cache is added to eliminate delays on scanning the servers.

Interface:

• Servers in the connection dialog are now colored: live servers are green and dead ones are white. We have also added a progress indicator for the scanning process.
• Buttons are now highlighted on mouse hover. Easy but looks great!
• System messages are now displayed using user’s language, not server’s.
• System icons are re-drawn for WinXP, Vista, and Mac.

Gameplay:

• Damage is increased for tank ammo.
• Shilka now unloads its cargo when it is killed. So if there were troopers or nuclear mines inside–they drop for everyone’s joy and surprise :-) .

Fixes:

• An incorrect work of UDP on BSD systems is corrected.
• Hanging on scanning servers is eliminated.
• Crash on machines that don’t have a sound card is fixed.
• A wrong number of channels in ogg stream is now right.
• Problems with broadcasting UDP are no longer problems.
• A bug is fixed that allowed some objects to be immortal. (Everyone should have seen a non-destructible spaceport on cooperative maps.)
• A swarm of small but nasty errors is fixed.

Warning! The Internet game server is also updated, so please don’t try connecting to it using an old client.

Five months and 1679 commits passed since build 0.7.5800 has been published. Finally we decided that we should no longer wait for release, and we must publish it ASAP. But the code is not yet free of bugs, and we present an intermediate build 0.8-RC1. It has so many new features that our small team needs your help in testing it.

Here is a brief list of innovations:

Muliplayer

• Ability to play in teams. Two new modes: Team DeathMatch and Capture the Flag.
• World-wide-internet-network game. We have established three servers that are available across the planet; each one serves one type of network game (CTF, TDM and good old Cooperative). Currently, the servers are in test mode, but everybody may connect: just click Scan button in Join the Game menu and find btanks.media.netive.ru in a list.
• Enthusiasts may set up their own standalone servers.

Video and Audio

• Thanks to our D3dSDL library, BTanks for Microsoft® Windows™ now use DirectX™® and not OpenGL™. This has really increased the overall performance.
• Screen resolutions are now taken from SDL.
• We no longer support OpenAL because we have our own Clunk library now.
• Some new sounds are added.

Controls and Gameplay

• The effect of slowing/speeding-up is eliminated.
• Diagonal shooting is improved (yeah we did that!).
• Shilka looked a bit boring, so we have improved its turret: now it rotates and self-aims.
• Grenades and mortair missiles now fly over obstacles.
• Frags are counted better; a telefrag trick is added (if two people enter the same teleport, only the last one survives).
• Join/leave/death messages are sent to chat automatically. Messages from players are coloured according to colors of teams.

Maps

• A new ‘Four Rooms’ map is added for CTF anf TDM.
• The map editor is now shipped with the game. It is still user-unfriendly. We are not sorry.
• Timers and OBEY effect are added to scripts to help controlling objects with LUA. Now scripting is much more powerful!

Code
An incremental network protocol, a new serialization model, compression with dictionary made it possible to decrease network traffic in times! All code is ported to g++ 4.3. All game resources are packed into a single resources.dat file (DEB, RPM and other ebuilds builders must be happy). sigc++ is no longer used because we now have our own library. Random number generator is improved.

Phew… These are only the most important things, so if you want to find out more–see the changelog. And we look forward to your bugreports!

P.S. Oh, dear Mac users, you will unfortunately have to wait for the new build. But we do remember you!

Do you have 64-bit Linux and experience frequent crashes? It’s known OpenAL problem.

1. Report about that problem to your distro’s bug tracker.
2. OpenAL must be built without MMX support. There’s no performance penalty on modern platforms. Also you could remove __MMX__ related code by yourself, as I did for debian packages.
3. As a temporary solution — you could switch off sound with --no-sound command line argument or set disable-music/sound in ~/.btanks/bt.xml.

Good day dear friends! We proudly present the anniversary 16th release of our funny network arcade. In the new version, we have changed… well, everything. Have a look!

First of all, we have released the jerk scripting based on LUA (blames to its inventors).Then, the game balance is fully recalculated:

• Weapon destruction ranges are reduced.
• Playing as trooper, you can throw grenades and carry nukes (don’t try that at home!)
• Rocket launcher can now carry the rocket trooper-beware of angry launchers!
• Troopers teleport to their carrier if cannot find path.
• Ther submarine launches nuke missiles.
• The player can capture empty cars, drive them and USE HORN! When you are in the civilian vehicle, enemy units will not bother you.

Third, we have added The Arena. This is a coop map where you can test almost all weapons against almost all enemies. (BTW, try a new monster on Arena-the Acid Slime.)

Oh well, and of course we have added some killer machines: a bomber helicopter and Chinook that lands troops-they will both hunt you (see them on Arena). Also the new land unit is introduced-a buggy with MG turret; this is the only unit that can shoot down the helicopter. Beware of falling helis!

Also there are changes to deathmatch; we have added there a respawn in random place. And the new sountrack is composed-specially for this release!

The BT team wishes you the Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and offers the Sensational Christmas Discount on Donations: you get 5¢ discount on all donations made before 7th of January next year!*

* — not applicable to donations made through Sourceforge

This release primarily was targeted at multiplayer improvements and playability even on poor connections. Added UDP connection for faster player response, paintball map was redrawn from scratch and millions fixes. Check it out!

BTW, we’ve got first snow here. Today.

Full changelog available here.

Another bugfix release + Italian translation. Key features for this release are:

• Added new simple map : paintball. You can test almost all weaponry available in game there.
• Removed velocity parameters from sound engine, it’s not needed for 2d arcade, really. Improved cannon sounds.
• Make nuke harder to escape.
• Various AI fixes:
  • AI is able to travel via teleports (very basic support, they threat teleport as some kind of the bonus).
  • Blacklisting of unreachable objects.
  • Improved weapon balance calculations for infinite weaponry such cannons and machine guns.
  • Improved torus map handling and various small fixes.
• Game could be started from the read only environment like cdrom or network drive.
• Ported build system to vc80 compiler. Added manifests, upgraded installer.

We are waiting for the feedback from the Vista users regarding openAL and installer issues.

Legendary Miriam Ruiz built Ubuntu (maybe Debian) packages for i386, ppc and amd64. :)

http://www.miriamruiz.es/weblog/?p=100

Packages are available for download here:

http://users.alioth.debian.org/~baby-guest/games/

First of all, after several days of hardcore debugging I “fixed” openal for debian-amd64. (Removed mmx support on x86_64 arch). Debian packages available here.

Also, btanks were added to gentoo. :)

0.5.4739 is bugfix and multiplayer enhancement release. Several major features and fixes:

• You can join network game in split screen mode.
• Added optional time limit to deathmatch map.
• You can talk with other players by hitting ENTER/RETURN key.
• UTF-8 everywhere! You can use diacritics from French or Germal language without transliteration.
• Several new cheats :)
• Tuned global messages (about new tasks, game over or checkpoints ) to avoid mixing with menus or map background.
• Once again troopers don’t shoot through the walls.
• Multiplayer errors do not shutdown game anymore and many many other multiplayer fixes.