Xtank for the 21st century
| Xtank from Kernigh |
 |
| Genre |
Top-down action |
| Browse sources |
Trac |
More than 10 years ago, players gathered in university computer labs, playing a multiplayer game called Xtank on computers with the X Window System. Tanks battled and traded shots. Robot tanks joined some games. With one hand, each player controlled the throttle and brakes with the X C V keys with another hand, the player used three-button mice to shoot, aim and rotate.
But Xtank's community evaporated, few remember it, and it is difficult to build and install onto today's computers. Thus this is the home page of Xtank from Kernigh, an attempt to port Xtank to modern computers.
Current status: Xtank from Kernigh is not yet complete. There is some working code in a Subversion repository, but some difficulties remain. For example, the game uses a fixed window size that is larger than many computer screens.
Xtank from Kernigh
The project that lives in a Subversion repository. If you have Subversion on your computer, then you might download the sources this way:
You may browse the sources using Trac. Note that Xtank is NOT free software, see Xtank/Copyright for details.
Requirements for a build
To build Xtank from Kernigh, you need a modern Unix system or clone (such as any typical *BSD or GNU/Linux) and X11. The build also requires CMake and strongly recommends GNU pth.
CMake is a cross-platform build system, more portable than imake. The Imakefiles in the Xtank did not support most modern architectures, so Kernigh removed them. Obtain CMake:
GNU pth (GNU portable threads) is a threading package that allows you to play Xtank against robots. If you do not have GNU pth then you can still play xtank, but robots will never appear in the game. (Note that xtank supports other sorts of threads but the code for that is too old to work.) Obtain GNU pth:
Many OS vendors provide packages for both CMake and GNU pth, but you probably have not installed them yet.
Xtank Manual and Guide
Xtank from Kernigh needs some documentation! Kernigh has started a new Xtank manual under the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License. It is not easy to write a new manual for an unfamiliar game, so the manual is extremely incomplete. That manual lives on a MediaWiki here:
Xtank history
TODO: move to Xtank Manual and Guide
Xtank dates from 1988; a site at the University of Maryland (USA) distributed several versions of Xtank, up to 1.3f, until about 1993. Xtank became popular enough to have two Usenet newsgroups, rec.games.xtank.programmer and rec.games.xtank.play, with several persons creating robots, vehicles and mazes for the game. About 1995, someone at the now-defunct Pix Technologies Corporation made a 1.4d version. But the community evaporated and the Usenet groups. No one maintained the Xtank code; meanwhile the old Unix flavors and abnormally large X11 screens (required by Xtank) went out of service.
Despite that, a few players remembered Xtank. In 2001 and 2004, Quozl ported Xtank 1.3f to Debian GNU/Linux, creating the Xtank north variant, and distributed binaries for i386. If you have Linux then Xtank north might be your choice.
You may edit this wiki page. The text is in the PublicDomain.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.