Tank And Car

A complete but imperfect pygame game suite.

The car game looks like this:

The tank game looks like this:

You can down load everything as tankncar.zip

Both are based on an object oriented suite of sprite managers.

For the car game (not so violent) you will need:

• dumb_vehicle.py - lowest level, contains one vehicle sprite
• joystick.py - only needed if you have a top hat joystick
• vehicle.py - an extenstion of dumb_vehicle that can be controlled by a player
• vehicle_test.py - just tests a single vehicle
• vehicles.py - keeps track of who is running into whom
• effects.py - sparks and explosions (can be run as trial app)
• world_array.py - interprets background image to get boundaries and obstructions.
• vehicles_test.py - the actual game application

plus media files:

• Data/car.png - image of a little car from above
• Data/greenland.png - background (contains collision macros)

For the tank game (no blood but still carnage) you will need to ADD the following:

• projectile.py - an extension of effects.py - again you can run as app.
• tank_vehicle.py - an extension of vehicle with bite
• enemy_tank_vehicle.py - an extension of tank_vehicle with a.i.
• tanks_test.py - the actual tank game application

plus media files:

• Data/Tank.png - an image of a tank (sorry the turret doesn't rotate)
• Data/riverfront.png - the battle ground with frozen river and buildings

Both the vehicles_test and tanks_test program contain help information that give all the key/mouse/joystick actions.

The car game has no A.I. but can have quite a lot of players (not network). Watch the fuel and health monitors fall. Enter a Petrol station before your car stops, but don't run into the bowser.

The tank game can also have many players (not network) but things slow down - particularly the particle effects - once everyone starts shooting. On my 1.7GHz pentium, the optimum seemed to be just one player with one person controlling the vehicle and the other the turret, with maybe 3 enemies. Note: Enemies can only be seen when your tank would be able to see them. Be prepared to die - my helper and I have not destroyed more than one enemy before being blasted. My helper was having too much success with the machine cannon which the driver can fire until I made the blast zone around a dying tank quite deadly.

Room for Improvement

The A.I. is pretty good when it comes to fighting but lousy for navigation - they keep getting stuck. I have avoided using any cheats (pre-programmed routes) etc. The A.I. has even less information for fighting than the players. A laser ranger circles the enemy tanks looking for victims. When it finds one then the turret must turn to the proper heading and then range the distance. On top of that, there is a degree of uncertainty added to the flight of shells - they won't always land in the same place. It seems to be their lack of hesitation that wins the battle.

The A.I. navigation needs a proper test platform and a lot of work. The possibility for a coding competition presents itself - competing programmers pit battalions of their A.I. against each other?

Another feature I'd like to add is split screens, zoom and panning over endless landscape. For the latter I began work on a pyopenGl version with initial success but have proceeded no further yet.

I hope you get some enjoyment from my truly humble efforts. It is only by trying that one can truly appreciate the skill of others.