17 Bit Software 2: Collection B

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Text File | 1992-03-12 | 19.2 KB | 519 lines

DevWare note: (Note that this game requires your Amiga to have the Fatter Agnus chip which gives you 1 or 2 megs of chip ram--NOT the 512K version of Agnus---the game WILL work if you only have 512K of chipram, but you will not be able to view the bottom portion of the screen.) AMIGA TANX ~~~~~~~~~~~~ Produced by Gary Roberts. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Version 1.1 ( See changes ) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Tanks! a Short Overview. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Do you remember that great game called "TANKS !" which appeared on several machines many years ago.? You don't.?,where have you been all this time.? Many an hour was had by kids and adults alike playing this simple game at college and at work. Its one of those games, you either love it or hate it. I am afraid I don't know who created the original Tanks,so I can not give them any credit. ( If somebody knows who it was then please contact me, I can then give them credit.! ) Anyway Tanks is a 2 player game only ( Although I have known a few people who play in on their own! ),each player is given a tank to control on a landscape,the idea is to take it in turns to shoot at your opponent. ( See.? I said it was simple ). You have control over the angle of the tanks barrel and the velocity behind the shot. The winner is the person who scores a direct hit on their opponents tank. ( Cooo, now there is a surprise.) Thats the basic idea behind the original Tanks game, now here is my version. Amiga Tanx. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Amiga Tanx follows the same lines as the original game,but with just a few variations. a) Randomly generated Landscapes. b) Two main types of Landscapes. c) Variable gravity. d) Variable wind strength and direction. e) Targets to hit. f) Objects which affect the flight of the tanks shot. g) Full Stereo Sound. h) 50 frames a second screen update. i) Parallax scrolled play area. j) Over 100 colours on screen. ( Honest ! ) I could go on ,but I won't. Starting Tanx ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Pretty straight forward this bit. The Tanx game takes up around 400k of chip ram,so if you don't have 1 meg chip ram or own an amiga A3000,you will have to close all windows and make sure you have at least 400k of chip ram free. NOTE: if you only have a 512k amiga,then tanx will not run from Workbench. You will have to boot the disk and run Tanx from the CLI Tanx can only be run from the CLI,but due a to a lovely program called ICONX, you can run it from Workbench. To run Amiga Tanx,open up the Tanx window and double click on the Tanx Icon. A CLI window will appear and Tanx will proceed to run. If any errors occur then a nice message will appear on screen. Tanx can be run from the CLI alone.To do this you must make the "Tanx!" directory the current directory before running. Eg. CD df0:Tanx! - To change directory. If Tanx cannot find or load the file "Tanx-Title.Dat" then it will not run. It looks for "Tanx-Title.Dat" in the current directory. If you wish to transfer the Tanx Game to Hard disk or some other media,then you require the following files from the Tanx! directory. Tanx ( And the associated icon files if you wish ) Tanx-Title.Dat "Tanx" is the main program,while "Tanx-Title.Dat" is the title image. As long as both files are in the same directory, Tanx will run. So you can transfer the game to Hard disk or some other media. The game is OS friendly and returns the Operating system intact upon exiting. If other programs are running, they will be stopped whilst TANX is playing, but on exiting TANX, they will continue to run with out problems. Playing The Game ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When the Tanx title appears, press the left mouse button, after a few seconds the Main Options Screen will appear. From this screen you can change many game parameters. The parameters will be explained later on. To Play a game simply move the mouse pointer and click on the PLAY Icon situated in the top right of the screen. After a few seconds you will be shown the Landscape on which the battle is about to take place. ( The Landscape is about 2 screens wide. ) A control panel,then drops down from the top of the screen. From here the current player can control his/her tank and scroll around the landscape. The current Players name is displayed and their tank is brought into view. The following Icons are displayed in the panel. Velocity - Represented by bar bells. ( What else? ) Clicking on the arrows underneath will alter the velocity of the players shot. If you hold the left mouse button down then the velocity will rise slowly,hold down both left and right mouse buttons and the velocity will rise quickly. Velocity can be in the range of 0 to 199. Angle - Represented by a 90 degree angle. Clicking on the arrows underneath will alter the angle of the tanks gun barrel. Click with the left button alone and the value will change slowly.Hold down both mouse buttons and things will wizz along. The angles are in degrees. Values are between -90 and 150 Negative angles will fire the bullets downwards. + 90 degrees will fire the bullets straight up. Fire - Represented by a rocket on a red button. If you are happy with the angle,velocity and tanks position,then click on this to fire your bullet! Quit - Represented by a white flag. Clicking on this during any point in play will quit the current game and return to the options screen. Scroll Land - Represented by a small landscape and tank. Click on the arrows will scroll the Landscape Left and right, and up and down. this will enable you to pick out your target ( The other players tank ). Pressing the left mouse button will scroll slowly. Hold down both buttons and it will wizz along. Move Tank - Represented by a Tank ( Suprising huh.? ) Clicking on the arrows below the icon will move your tank. Tanks can only move on their flat plain. They can not go up or down hills or ride over craters. When you fire the bullets, they will fly given your angle and velocity. The bullets are accurately calculated using a projectile forumla,so they will act as if in real life. Each player takes it in turn to fire a shot. the first player to hit their opponents tank wins.! After a game has been won. A status screen is displayed. A tally of the games won by each player is displayed. From the Status screen you can play another game with the current parameters or you may exit to the Main Options screen to alter the parameters. - See Next section. The current tally of the games won by each player is only cleared when you change the players name from the main options screen. - See next section. Game Parameters. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As you may have seen from the Main Options screen there are lots of parameters that you can change. A) Wind Strength. B) Wind Direction. C) Gravity Strength. D) Landscape generation. E) Objects. F) Sound. Also on the Main options screen you will find the following Icons. ABOUT - The current version of the game and who wrote it! QUIT - Quit the game. PLAYER1 - PLAYER2 - The two player icons at the top left of the main options screen enable you to alter the players names.Simply click on the icon under the players name. You may type in 3 letters from the keyboard or move your mouse left/right and click to leave a character. PLAY - Play a game with the selected parameters. I will run through each of the parameters and explain what they all do! To operate any of the options,simply move the mouse pointer over the switches ( little boxes with black or red lights in them ) and press the left mouse button. A) Wind Strength. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Pretty obvious this one. You can introduce wind affect into the game. Wind affects the flight of the bullets and makes the game a little harder to play. The wind strength and direction is displayed during the game, at the bottom of the screen. The flag denotes the direction,whilst the meter and number ( from 0-9 ) denotes the strength. The options under Wind Strength are as follows. 1) None - No wind affect at all. The default option. 2) Light - Light wind.A small breeze blows and has a small affect on the bullets flight. 3) Medium - A brisk wind blows across the landscape. This wind noticeably affects the bullets flight. 4) Strong - Definitely gale force conditions now. The wind is very strong and the bullets are very much affected by the wind. 5) Random - The wind strength is randomly chosen during the game.After each players shot the wind can change strength with this option. NOTE: With options 2-4 the wind strength is chosen at the beginning of a game and does NOT change throughout the game. With option 5. The wind strength is randomly chosen, and DOES change during a game.So watch the wind meter before taking a shot.!!! B) Wind Direction ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This option rightly alters how the wind direction is generated. 1) Same. - The default option. The wind direction is chosen randomly at the start of each game and does not change during that game. 2) Random - The wind direction is chosen randomly at the start of each game,but it can change randomly during a game so watch out!!! C) Gravity Strength ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ No prizes for guessing what this does. Different gravity strengths require different tactics. All gravity is chosen at the start of each game,and does NOT change during the game. 1) Light - Light Gravity,makes the bullets feel very light. When fired they will tend to float along. 2) Medium - This is the default option and is equivalent to the earths gravity. 3) Strong - The bullets feel very heavy and drop like an elephant wearing several lead anvils as ear rings. 4) Random - The Gravity is randomly chosen from the above. D) Landscape Generation. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There are two types of landscapes. Mountains and Foothills. For each type the landscape is randomly generated,so no two landscapes will be the same. During landscape and object creation,a small message appears on screen informing you. - See the Known Bugs Section.!!! 1) Mountains- Steep mountains with large valleys. This makes hitting tanks quite tricky. Lots of cover. 2) Foot Hills- Shallow valleys with small hills. Tanks are easily spotted and not to difficult to get at. 3) Random A Totally random landscape is generated. Watch out!! some bizarre shapes can be generated with this option. E) Objects. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These are not for the faint hearted.! 4 types of objects can be placed on the landscape. All the objects are placed randomly on the landscape. NOTE: See the Known Bugs section !!! 1) Targets. - These can be destroyed,if you hit a target you will get a free shot the next round. 2) Fans - These can not be destroyed. These blow ( What else do fans do.? ) very hard in the direction they face. If the bullets fly into range of one of these expect strange results.! A fans wind strength is usually stronger than a strong wind. A fans strength is randomly chosen. 3) Pushers - These strange objects look like pulsating red pyramids. ( With an arrow going up and down) When ever a bullet flies over them it will be pushed upwards very hard. 4) Pullers - These look like a pair of jaws opening and closing. These have the opposite affect of the Pushers. When ever bullets fly over them they will be pulled down very sharply. F) Sound ~~~~~~~~~~ If you wish you may switch off all sounds during the game. All the sounds are digitised and played in full stereo,so why should you want to switch the sound off.? Some other things I should mention, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ No two games of Tanx will be the same. Most of the parameters I use to generate landscapes and object positions are randomized as much as possible. ( This was right pain debugging the code! ) The tanks are randomly positioned on the landscape, players are randomly assigned tanks to use.The player that goes first is also randomly chosen. So don't complain if your mate always goes first!! Tanks are limited to moving on their "flat plain" only,they can not go up mountains or over craters. But you are able to "Tunnel" your way into a nearby mountain. Simple position your tank about a tanks width from the mountain or hill,set your angle to -4 or -5 and velocity to over 100. The explosion of the bullets hitting the land,will remove a hefty chunk of land.repeat this a few times and you will have created a tunnel.Drive your tank in for cover!! But your tank must be able to fire out of it! Try setting the landscape to Foothills,wind to strong,gravity to light. Fun ain't it.? Be careful not to shoot yourself.!! It is best to start of with the default options, no wind,medium gravity and no objects. As soon as you find this to easy,introduce wind and different gravity strengths. Finally try switching on the following and playing for the hardest level. 1) All objects on 2) Random Wind strength 3) Random Wind Direction 4) Random Gravity 5) Random Landscape. Have fun!!! Technical Information. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Due to the nature of the system and how the game operates,this game does not multitask. Sorry!!!. When you exit the game it will return the system exactly as it found it. To achieve the 50 frames a second,The system must be taken over. Sorry! The actual game runs in low res 320*256 and in full PAL overscan. Screen update is at arcade speed (50 frames a second) 6 bitplanes are used to produce dual playfields. using the copper over 100 colours are displayed on screen. The options screen and status screens are all in 32 colours. Full stereo sound is used. Turn up the volume and increase the bass to annoy the peeps next door!! Over 100 k is used for digitised sound,280 k of graphic data and 20k of code. The game was written using an Amiga A500,with A590 Hard drive,3 meg, 2 drives and monitor.It was written in Assembler using the brilliant Hisoft Devpac 2.14 and took about 1 month to write. Dpaint III was used for graphics. Audio Master II was used to digitise the sounds. Pixmate was also used for conversion of IFF images to RAW bitplane files. The game will run on all Amigas,that includes A3000's and accelerated Amigas. If the game does not run on your setup,please contact me and I will try to fix the problem. If you come across any bugs or have some new ideas for the next release again, please contact me. My Address. Gary Roberts 17 Tudor Close, Birchwood Drive Alderholt Near Fordingbridge HANTS SP6 3LY ENGLAND. This is Version 1.1 of TANX. Thank you for playing it.! Gaz Robertz 1991. Known Bugs. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The only bug that could occur is during the generation of Object Positions on the landscape. i.e. You have 1 or more of the object options switched on. I have tried to keep the games parameters and randomized as possible.This way no two games will be the same. The landscape is generated randomly. Several points are generated and these joined together to form the land. When it comes to generating the object positions,the program sits in a loop. It generates random positions for the objects.It then checks to see if the newly generated object positions are actually on land. ( We don't want targets floating in the sky now do we.? ) If they are not on land then it generates some more random points, this loop continues until all object positions are on the land. Now in theory,the computer could sit in this loop for ever,generating random points which do not lie on the land. ( This has never happened during the 2 weeks of play testing ). Because of this I have provided an "exit" function. Whilst the object positions are being generated,a message appears on screen telling you so. You can exit out of this by holding down the left mouse button,this will bring you to the Main Options screen. ( Don't worry the players scores will not be cleared ) During the 2 weeks of play testing the longest it has taken to generate a landscape with all objects switched on is 11 secs. If it takes longer that say 30 secs to do so,then I suggest you exit and try again. I do appologise about this,but I think the importance of randomizing parameters as much as possible outways the importance of this bug. I hope this bug does not annoy you. Thank you. Updates ~~~~~~~~~ Original Tanx completed 14/02/91 Change Date 25/07/91 1) Fixed bullet collision bug. Bullets sometimes hit the tanx, but passed through not registering a hit. 2) Negative wind values were being generated. Fixed. 3) Randomizing routine made faster. Generating of landscapes is quicker. 4) Keyboard routine reworked. Last update 25/07/91