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Edit 15 Aug 06
New version to dl. (on this post, 3 megs zip file) Please tell me whether this crashes at all for you. It does on my comp now and again, but that might be because my comp is poo. It's still wasd p[] controls

* Control is better- before i used curvevalue which means that amount of turret rotation was linearly proportional to time pressed for. Now did something more cunning and it works better IMO.

* Better explosions have been implemented. Could still be more efficient (use many plains each, and dark+light ghost instead of single alpha), but look quite pretty.

* Cylindrical camera implemented. Not great for speed (a limit where start to see slowdown for given frame rate seems proportional
to product number of explosion plains by number of cameras. Also get differnt z-fight victor for different cams-> ugly. On upside, get 180 degrees FOV without stretching. See snippet in other forum if you want a cylindrical cam in your game.

* fixed the shot velocity corrections due to tank movement. Seems bizarre factor 0.4 nescessary newton->db conversion. Also not sure about how NDB_newtonupdate timestep# command works yet. Seems that whatever time you specify it to advance it's always the same...

* Fixed the jerky tank rotation near aligned with axis. Seems newton control of DB object orientation is buggy. Made own function to rotate db objects given newton rotation matrices.
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New version to download.

Controls are wasd for driving, p[] for turret rotation and firing the gun. the "r" key resurrects and resets the boxes.

Only 1 player. Should be a little bit faster. Big thanks to spooky- now explosion flashes and shadows look OK.

*Explosions now consist of a plane and expanding sphere. I should be able to make much fancier ones later with debris and smoke and point lights, but these are better than before.

*I'm quite chuffed with the shadows under the boxes - they're dark ghosted plains and get lighter as the box gets higher.

*Shadows in the corners and edges of the arena are on the matrix texture- i learn how to do gradients in paint shop pro.

*Made a sky ring instead of using a sky sphere, since the player's field of view never looks up or down. It doesn't look so blocky now.

I decided to leave multiplayer for the mo to get it working well with one player first.


Next i hope to improve the control of the tank and make it less hovercrafty, and get some scrolling tracks (like in the old dbc tank demo ). Also add support for mouse control, and gamepad.

Yay.

I started this a couple of years ago. I didn't finish because i was hella busy (still am), and the keyboard beeps when more than about 3 keys are pressed at the same time.

I\'ll hopefully have finished writing my ghastly thesis in a couple of months, and am due a holiday. Also, we recently got LAN in our house, and i like the idea of making this online multiplayer- is that feasible/realistic?

I had a tinker this evening and made the boxes blow up. No secondaries yet, but the explosions push the other boxes around. When the boxes get destroyed they are `teleported` out of the world- when i tried to actually destroy them, all kinds of wrongness happened... I\'m getting loads of slowdown now, where i didn\'t on my old, supposedly inferior comp.

I\'m using 2 year old versions of DBP and Newton, so there\'s bound to be some debugging nightmares ahead for me, but hopefully they\'ve ironed out the progs a bit in my absence. I\'ve been browsing the net a bit and see that newton is looking pretty shiny- i\'m really itching to have a go.

I\'d like to finsh this with super sfx, `fighting game` style balanced `characters` with a variety of offensive and defensive options, and a tidy front end, nicer models, more environmental interaction- like using boxes/cylinders as shields, or to blow up the other guy, a selection of levels and control options (i got a twin thumbstick joypad ) and nice stuff like that. Just got to finish my Your message appears to contain bad language, please edit it out. thesis first...

controls
p1: wasdrty
p2: ijklp[]
spacebar resets positions

It works for me


I think it is, just that it could be hard to find an opponent in small games.

Just a tought, that making AI would be good idea game seems to be good and playing with AI would intrest me.

If you want to make this superb, terrain with huge hills might be very fun to play with friends (or AI)

Thanks.

I don't imagine it would be the sort of game you would go online and hope that someone else happened to be too- it'd be more a case of someone posting a message say on this forum, and arranging for people to play at a certain time.

AI is fascinating, but that owes a lot to it's complexity. I would like to make AI- but i don't see that being straightforward. I'd rather attempt a simpler AI project first- maybe the player's tank versus loads of AI alien drones- vs an equal AI opponent i can imagine being a really tough job to code. I think i can basically code the rest of the game separately- the AI player just choses inputs based on the game data, so i can try sticking that in on top of everything when i'm done.

Terrain is another thing that i don't think i'll have in this yet- not because it's particularly difficult, but because it requires another degree of freedom to control- ie the gun elevation. This makes a big difference to the gameplay. Maybe i'll change my mind about that though.

I think it's best to keep this reasonably simple and make a fairly finished version, then maybe do a super-spanky sequel.

Mr Tank,

It plays well for me too. Its not very far though. I keep winning or is it losing? Oh, it pretty fun anyway.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks dude. You are probably winning.

Yep still a long way to go.

New version to download in first post.

Here's a screeny. Bizarre thing happened.

Print screen stopped working, so i used get image and save image to get a screeny, but it came out in 2:1 instead of 4:3

In display mode 1280,960, it took a screen 2048 by 1024, which appears to be the same field of view as the output image when the prog is running- ie the pic is stretched. What does this mean?

I made some better explosions using multiple plains, adapting some of my old dbc code. Seems i can have a lot more particles now.

[URL=http://img513.imageshack.us/my.php?image=exppic2ft5.jpg][IMG]http://img51

you can dl it at the bottom of this post. Mouseclick or space to make an explosion, hold control down for a "continuous explosion", kind of like a fire. Mouselook, and the wheel goes in and out. If you notice any wrongness or have suggestions of better ways to do stuff, let me know.

I'd like to do a lot of explosion research and make something amazing, but that would be a bit tangential. Going to tinker some more with this and make it a bit cleaner, faster and more versatile, then i can bung it in the tank game or whatever else takes my fancy.

No time to play it now, but it looks mad good!

I'm making a screen blur and white flash function for when an explosion goes off near the camera, will post it soon...
EDIT:
Hmm, it won't work with 2 cameras because object screen x can't be told which camera to use... oh well.

Thanks Sixty.

Nice idea Nix. It's not too hard to make your own in screen function. I did hear somewhere that the gamma command only works in certain screen modes though. I think it only works for fullscreen exclusive if i remember right. I don't really have a clue about 2d, so i'd be interested to see how to do a fast screen blur.

You got me thinking. I think a screen "jiggle" when a bomb goes off would be cool. Maybe i'll do that.