Ultra Tank-chan! - 1.0.2

Ultra Tank-chan! is a large-scale multiplayer space-combat-sim in the vein of Volition's FreeSpace series, with some influences from Bandai-Namco's Ace Combat games. It is notable for the number of players it supports (96 over 6 teams), its drop-in/drop-out multiplayer design, its low system requirements (it runs extremely well on an Asus eee 900, the baseline target, which is even more impressive when considering that the entire game was written in Python), and its quirky, likely unique, art style, which has been described as "an epic space battle in a lava lamp."

Background

This is my first real game, created to satisfy an in-joke, and the first time I've ever worked with 3D in, well, any programming context, and I forced myself to go from concept to release in exactly two months, so please let me know if I overlooked something basic along the way.

Accessing stuff

The full source, divided into neat client and server archives, as well as guides for setting up, playing, and min/maxing the game, and even gameplay videos for anyone who's just casually curious, are available through the project homepage.

Maturity

This game is fully playable, provided you have friends, slaves, or happen to be capable of using a keyboard or gamepad with your feet (or, if you're really keen on trying it, you can find me on synIRC as flan). It is also very stable, with no known issues at this time.

Supported platforms and interfaces

Works as described on Debian, Ubuntu, Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. Plays best with a gamepad or joystick, but a keyboard is fine, too.

Just make sure you have the pre-requisite packages before attempting to run the client. They're all pretty common, but not often pre-installed with distributions.

This is mostly a balancing update, necessitated by a frequent absolute lack of energy in 1.0.0/1.0.1, which ground combat to a halt. Combat now slows down, rather than stopping, forcing you to choose between trying to get those last few shots in or running and risking giving your opponents time to heal.

Other changes:

• The server GUI now loads and saves settings
• MS-2 and MS-3 are no longer near-clones
• An issue that was preventing indicators from updating smoothly was identified and corrected
• The 25%-stagger effect on subsystem recovery was removed; in turn, subsystem damage was recomputed so it's more of an issue
• Packets were capped at 1/0.0675s (or the PING-derived throttle speed, as before), which won't make a difference over the Internet, but which will reduce CPU overhead when connecting to localhost, and in some fast LANs, without noticeably degrading gameplay