Battle Tanks 

Our game now have Ukrainian localization. Thanks to Vadim Nehay.

This localization will be included to the final release 0.8.xxxx. Now it can be found in SVN.

By the way, we are wanna appeal to those who have translate our game to their languages. There are a lot of new phrases that need to be translated. We would appreciate if you renew your localization.

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!

You could listen it online or download all files here.

What's your favourite tune?

• Batterie
• GameBoy
• Karbofos
• Nostalgy
• Utrennik
• Quadris (bonus)
• View Results

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By the way, we’re assembling stand-alone server for the internet game. Stay tuned. There’s a chance releasing battle tanks within week.

Uranium mines affected us: there was no release for four months. But we struggle as real heroes and patriots. We’re preparing another «most featured» release powered by arm uranium.

We added the team modes to our neat arcade, even Capture The Flag! These modes are playable on each deathmatch map. 95% of code have been finished, just a few more testing is remaining. And as always there is a brand new map!

Linux geeks could grab code from svn right now (beware of bugs!).

I wrote a complete 3d-sound library recently. It’s as abstract as possible, so you can freely use it in your projects (LGPL license). Still very experimental and subject to change, but already usable. Or maybe wait for release. Anyway feel free to contact me.

Next targets are playing via internet and MacOS X port. Thank you for your attention.

Hope next release will gladden Mac users too :)

Next release for Windows will use DirectX instead of OpenGL. It will enable hardware acceleration for users w/o vendor drivers or with exotic video cards. Anyway it’s 2–3 times faster than glSDL implementation. Maybe I’ll write my own OpenGL proxy-renderer for SDL sometime, who knows? 

Among various improvements and fixes, this release contains new, incremental network protocol using 2–3 times less data than older one. 

Also I wrote prototype of the free 3d-sound library (HRIR, HRTF and other cryptic stuff), I hope I’d finish it in 2–3 month.

Battle Tanks editor is available in SVN. Read README-editor.txt !

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.

Annoying xmas-mode could be switched off by --no-xmas command line parameter. Or by waiting for 7th of January :)