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Text File | 1992-07-04 | 22KB | 388 lines

Tank Wars Release 3.2 Copyright 1990, 1991, 1992 Kenneth Morse All Rights Reserved ----------------------------------------------- NOTE: This game requires a VGA or MCGA video system to operate. Your computer must be capable of 320x200 resolution with 256 simultaneous colors. Revision History V1.0 October 28, 1990: (116K) First Release V1.1 November 5, 1990: (90K) Speed Upgrade Minor bug fix. When a 5Meg nuke exploded, player 10s trail would flash due to a palette overlap. Major speed upgrade, CRI's are now travel 10 times faster, and players die faster too. Code size greatly decreased. BOMB2.RAW rewritten to enhance compression. This release was made mainly due to the fact that I recently discovered numerous techniques to optimize code. V1.2 November 16, 1990: (111K) Program Enhancement Graphics files BOMB1.RAW and BOMB2.RAW no longer necessary for operation, see addition to BOMB.TXT. The tanks now fall at a decent speed during setup. BOMB.ICO added for MS Windows 3.0 users. Three new types of death have been added, death by dirt, fading away, and nuclear meltdown. We finally have tank on the title screen thanks to Chris Sparks. A new computer intelligence has been added, Twanger. This ones a killer. Bug fixed that caused the program to hang if you hit somebody with a ball of dirt and tracking system. Command line parameters are now documented. V1.3 November 23, 1990: (121K) Program Enhancement More code changed from TP to ASM, causing some noticeable speed increases and some smoother movements. If the only people playing are computer intelligences, the game will attempt to go faster in certain places that were slowed down for user convenience. Twangers will no longer pick on the players on the left first, they now shoot towards the easy kills. There was a fundamental error in Lobbers strategy, preventing him from accurately shooting to the left, this has been corrected. Computers can now buy and use weapons. Currently they only have the simplest of algorithms, but they're much more dangerous. A new menu option and command line parameter has been added to select weather computers are allowed to purchase weapons. V1.4 November 30, 1990: (111K) Code Optimization & Bug Fixes For this release, I basically went through all the code line by line looking for places to trim down, speed up, and correct the code. This reduced the size of the program, and increased the speed by a almost unnoticeable amount. Some people noticed that very rarely the bomb would continue to travel, regardless of the dirt in the way until it hit a tank. This happened when power was set to exactly 800, and has been fixed. The amount owned of certain weapons was not showing up on the weapons list. Sorry for this oversight, that too has been corrected. When playing a many-player game, there is no longer a 60 pixel margin on each side that caused the edge players to be side by side. The direction arrow was not being updated when the tank would change direction by way of changing the angle, this is now fixed. TP version 6.0 arrived, so it has been re-compiled. With the new system kernel it shrunk by 10K. There was also a minor change in speed, but almost unnoticeable. V1.5 December 4, 1990: (112K) Program Enhancement All keyboard handling is now controlled by the program, BIOS is still accessed at times but not as often. This has caused a dramatic speed increase in angle and power selection, it now requires quite a delicate touch to change either by 1. This also game me the ability to add the next few additions. A sound toggle has been added. Pressing Ctrl-S at any appropriate time will turn sound on or off. A Mass Kill command has been added. At any appropriate time you may press Ctrl-M. You will be asked to confirm. If you say Yes, all players on the screen will die after the current players turn ends. This will end battles between computers that can go on for hours. You can now exit the game at almost any time. At any Appropriate time (As defined in the Documentation) you may press Ctrl-Q to quit the game. At most of the non Appropriate times you can press Ctrl-Break to exit. If you wish to increment/decrement anything by 1 while using the keyboard hold down ALT while pressing the appropriate key. All palette handling had been taken out of Turbo's hands and are now controlled directly by the program. Hopefully this will cure the ATI problem. A new parameter has been added. Keyboard and mouse handling was going too fast on machines with fast video cards. If you are having trouble selecting your angle and power add the parameter SPEEDxxxx to the command line. See documentation for further information. V1.6 :(K) Bug fixes and Switch additions. The keyboard was locking up during the purchasing screen on some computers. In fact it was not locking, but somehow the computer was convinced that the a control key was down, misinterperating everything. I believe this is fixed, but if not simply press each ctrl, alt, and shift key once. The keyboard was too sensitive on changing weapons and guidance systems on fast computers. Fixed. The palette switching routines have been rewritten again. I now talk directly to the video chip when doing palette rewrites. This may not work on all computers. Add the H- parameter to the command line to disable the new code. Some people like the suspense of watching their tanks fall slowly. To please these people the FALLDELAYxxxxx parameter has been added. The default is 0, and it works just like SPEEDxxxxx. Some mouses were not being detected, and some mouses were registering that weren't there. M+ and M- bypass mouse identification and force it one way or another. Slight oversight, the mouse pointer was not initialized to an arrow on loadup. Although this is the default for most mouse drivers, there have been problems. Fixed. It seems that some computers will lock up when using my new KB handler. A command line switch, X+- has been added. X+ enables the driver, X- removes it. V2.0 January 21, 1991:(K) Major Additions. The main menu has been created to full graphics. If you have played V1.5 the all the new options are mentioned here so don't bother rereading that section of the docs. The player selection screen is also full graphics. You may want to read the docs for this one, or you can muddle through like a true game player. Background images have been added, nothing like GIFs or the like, but interesting none the less. A new menu item has been added to reflect this. Select NONE to play as before (the default), the screens are labeled A, B, C, etc.. You can also select RND which includes all screens. Command line parameter /BKb has been added for background selection. Now when players move around between rounds their colors remain constant. This was a tricky bit of programming, so I expect some oddities, (some people don't have to worry, their colors are screwed up enough already). The palette routines were changed again. Maybe this time...... The status screen is now graphics, and the colors of the names now truly reflect the color of the players. Weapons purchasing has been improved significantly (in addition to graphics) you can now select weapons, and deselect them. For those not wishing to read the docs I must mention that DONE automatically does a PURCHASE. Included are two defenses, to protect you from vicious computers. V2.5 May 17, 1991: Lots o' new stuff Even when no mouse was detected I was still attempting to read it. This prohibited anyone from selecting menu options with the keyboard as the mouse buttons were always reading as pressed. Fixed. More tricky hardware programming. Those background images that can give you such a headache, Now your worst nightmare has come true, they move. By default the screens move a full speed. The new /P parameter toggles them on or off (+,-) or can select a delay time (0..999). A corresponding menu option has been added. The moving screens can, and will slow down the speed of the game. This will make some of you happy, as you complained the game was too fast. For those others, increasing the delay in rotation (/P) will allow more processor time for the game. /P10 moves the screen slowly and has almost no effect on the game. Added an option to rotate the palette more crudely. Add the command line parameter CRUDE to put this into effect. With Crude on I don't wait for a retrace to send info to the screen. This means the main reason rotation slowed the game is now removed. /P0 with CRUDE has almost no effect on game speed. The side effect is light snow, barely noticeable on mine, but you'll have to find out for yourself. The final scores are also displayed on the text screen after the games has terminated in case you didn't see them. Finally, a new weapon. High powered lasers have now been developed. They replace the CRI 4/ND's. The icon on the weapons strip is obvious. Twanger, Lob and Shoot, and Rifleman are now capable of buying lasers, and using them with some logic. Twanger's weapon selection strategy has been improved. How many times have you seen him plant a 5meg nuke on a target less than an inch away. No more.. The ATI bug has finally been swept under the rug. This will allow those irritated users to now play the game with ease. (If this is untrue please tell me) Energy shields now should protect you from exploding opponents debris. Computers can now buy defenses. Have Fun..... You can now select a computer from the menu by pressing the highlighted key. There is now a small indicator on the weapons selection screen indicating what weapons are available and what ain't. Red you can buy, black you can't. Wind level is now selectable. The new options goes from None to Gale, and Random. The /Wn option is included with 0..4 being None..Gale, and 5 is random. Two minor glitches fixed. When a sonic blaster was fired the shot would not clear itself from the screen. When a shot landed outside the screen it sometimes caused 4 random pixels on the screen to be blacked out. Fixed.. Lobber no longer spends countless hours drawing funny lines all over the screen for no reason when too many shots are out of bounds. As suggested by many users, the number of weapons you begin with has been lowered. You now start with only 3 normal weapons per game to play, 10 hand grenades per game, and 100 lead balls total. Again, I always use a mouse so this bug escaped me. When selecting Crumbles with a keyboard and using BOMBFX, you were allowed to go negative numbers. The max number of games has been increased to 99. When the mouse was forced off, it was still appearing, but not acting. Now solved. Pressing Ctrl-P will now bring up a status screen indicating game number, and other information. It will work any time Ctrl-Q and Ctrl-M would. WARNING: It seems that whenever you use this option while demonstrating the game to anyone from IBM it will hang the system. A whole new program has been added. BOMBCFG.EXE creates a file named BOMB.CFG which holds the setup defaults, and most anything you would pass along on the command line. I contains in depth descriptions of every option available. Anyone familiar with the TP IDE will find this program very familiar looking. BOMB will not run without a proper BOMB.CFG created by BOMBCFG.EXE in the current directory. If the shot goes off the screen, in the direction the wind is blowing, and no guidance systems are activated, BOMB will stop the shot knowing it had no chance of re-entering the screen. V3.0 : May 31, 1992 A few more backgrounds added, also initial display of these backgrounds has been speeded up. You can now obtain more detailed statistics from the game status screen by clicking on the players name, or pressing his number. Team Play has now been added. A new Team Status screen has been added to reflect this, and you can also obtain detailed stat's as above. Explosions now vanish from the inside out instead of from the outside in, for those who cared. For those who discovered it, the "Magic 800" has been changed, it was 1000-Power*2 for those who never discovered it. After detonating, a sonic blaster now clears itself from the screen. Lead Balls now take off 5 men when they hit directly. This makes them only slightly less than completely useless. You now have the option of selecting random colors for the backgrounds instead of the Red-Green-Blue pattern. Also pressing CTRL-R will change the color pattern. (Pressing CTRL-R is not recommended for use on the blue or starry screens). When selecting player names, the color of the player is displayed in the text box. All CTRL Keys now work almost all the time. Previously only during specific procedures could they be received (ie. during explosions, but not during computer targeting, etc). Now they are linked into the keyboard handler, and work anytime the main game screen is active. Some stuff I forgot to write down... Sorry... Palette rotation speed may now be altered from within the program during a round. Press F3 to slow it down, and F4 to speed it up. A few backgrounds have been added or altered. A help screen, F1 (should have put that in a long time ago. If a game is taking too long, (ie >15 round or more) the computer will start to take steps to end the game, currently it enjoys playing Zeus (You'll see!) A new defense, a repulser. These make you very hard to hit, especially if your enemy is above you, but one good hit or fall and the repulser is ruined. A new computer intelligence has been added. Wind Master (for lack of a better name) is now the equivalent of a windless wit who knows how to compensate for wind. Extremely accurate in any windy condition as long as the walls do not get in his way. A new weapon, the long awaited MIRVs are here. I have removed the Fire Kills option, now fire always kills. See Bomb.TXT for details. I have also removed the eXtended keyboard and /X options. Tank Wars now Requires the use of its internal keyboard handler. If this creates problems please see Bomb.TXT for details on finding a solution. A boss screen, just press F10. To exit press space bar to return to your game. Alternatively, if your boss just won't go away you can press ESC and Tank Wars will drop to DOS, attempting to save your game under the name 'BOSS'. You can now obtain a complete list of command line parameters by typing "BOMB H". V3.1 : June 20, 1992 -- Bugs, Bugs, Bugs.... Evidently removing support for older keyboards was a bad idea. Its amazing how many people there are playing Tank Wars on souped up XT's with old BIOS. Although the old keyboard code has returned, it is significantly smaller than it was before and should work better. I didn't realize it, but abandoning an overlayed structure shot the memory requirements through the roof. The overlay system has now returned. The boss screen was saving all 63K of video memory when F10 was pressed, this made 63K unavailable to the rest of the system. Some video systems will allow you to change video modes without erasing the graphics image, and the flip back. When this is the case only a small portion of memory needs to be saved, you can specify and test this amount in BOMBCFG. Thus allowing more memory for Tank Wars. The speed of the laser is now a separate parameter. When sorting the team score screen, teams with equal wins, but less points would rank higher. No longer. After exiting BOMBCFG the shift keys could be "stuck" down in the computers eyes, causing 6's to come out as ^'s etc.. You may have noticed parts of V3.0 going as slow as a snail. This was the first time I tried to link in Borland's math coprocessor routines, these doubled the speed of the game when using a coprocessor and slowed it down to quarter speed for those not. V3.2 : July 4, 1992 -- More Bugs.... I forgot to link VGA256.BGI into BOMBCFG as I did to BOMB. The result is that when you pressed TEST it looked for C:\LANGS\TP\BGI\VGA256.BGI. I doubt it was found there on any other system than mine. It is now linked in. The way I handled memory allocation changed in V3.1, and had one flaw. It didn't ensure that screen buffers were created on even paragraph boundaries. This caused incorrect double images to appear at times (most noticeably when WindMaster is targeting). Tank Wars only allocated mouse buffer memory if there was a mouse present. But it always tried to release that memory. End result, if you didn't have a mouse the program crashed when you tried to exit. Some devices that use IRQ-2 (such as mice and MIDI controllers) lock up when using the Vertical Retrace palette interface. No way around it, just either select Timer interface or None.