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The GLtron Homepage
This is GLtron-0.70
by Andreas Umbach.
This program is released under the GNU General Public License.
About GLtron
The first version of GLtron (0.1) was written on a rainy afternoon in
June 1998, as an exercise for the computer graphics course at the
university. After that, nothing happened.
One year later I was cleaning up my /home directory a little bit, and stumbled across the sources. I had recently discovered a website devoted to linux games
called The Linux Game Tome.
I thought: "well, clean it up a bit, make sure it compiles cleanly, and
put it on a webpage", which I did. Version 0.2 was created (0.1 was the one
written for the course). It was less than 5 kbyte. I got a few comments by
E-Mail, and generally people thought that it was nice for such a small
download, but probably a bit too simple.
Over the time, I improved it, released / announced / got feedback and released
again. People started contributing small patches. I added textures, I received
a soundtrack, a lightcycle model, better textures, tons of ideas etc.
Now that you read so much about GLtron's history, you're probably curious
what's it about. Well, as the name suggests, it's inspired by the movie TRON.
Or more exactly, by all the games that where inspired by the movie TRON.
You steer a futuristic bike, called lightcycle. Combat takes place in
a rectangular arena. Your bike leaves a trail behind, which is like a wall.
The goal is to force the other players to drive into a wall. The winner is
the last player alive.
I'm determined to continue working on GLtron from time to time for a while,
at least until I can play some of you guys online! So keep that
feedback coming! Tell me what
you like, and more important, what you don't like and what you want added to
the game. Check out the ideas page too.
News
Another beta is available here: GLtron-0.72-beta-8.dmg
Changes:
- Fixed reflections, it's pretty!
- Signed the binary, I hope it's playing nice with Gatekeeper now (can anybody verify that?
So I picked the project up again. Since OS X is my main development platform now, I'll publish beta versions for this platform first (Keith Kaisershot VRTron has agreed to help with the win32 version, so of course there will be a Windows port eventually). Announcements will be on Twitter and sometimes here as well.
Here is the latest OS X build: GLtron-0.72-beta-7.dmg
New features include:
- Arbitratry amounts of opponents, you can play against 20 Ais or more
- Differently shaped arenas. Square, Ring, Triangle shapes are included, I'll publish some documentation on how to make your own levels in the nearer future
- More than four directions. Really anything is possible, see the Tri-Three and the Three-Six levels on how to go in three or six directions
- Lots of others small changes and fixes I most probably forgot about.
Your feedback is appreciated!
Well, I got my first build to compile and run (sort of). It looks kinda funny and there's still loads of graphics stuff hidden inside #ifndef OPENGL_ES ... #endif that needs fixing, but still, it's progress...
On a unrelated note, no windows maintainer has been found yet. If you know your way around Microsoft Visual Studio, don't be shy!
Yes, the project has been revived! As announced on Twitter (follow for more frequent use), there's a beta for OS X (Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks). I'm sure there's quite a few bugs (which you'll hopefully help discover), and apparently a performance issue with the explosions, but I'd like your feedback!
Since my primary development platform is now XCode, it would help a lot if someone else could build and maintain the Win32 binaries. I'll help getting you started, but familiarity with Visual Studio is a must. Fortunately, the project isn't too complex, and for most of the dependencies (SDL, SDL_sound, mikmod, vorbis, libpng, zlib), there exist prebuilt binaries, and lua5 and lib3ds are built-in.
If you're interested in building the win32 binaries (especially the beta version I'm going to release over the next months), please drop me a line!
Yes, I've been neglecting GLtron. Yes, I want to pick it up again. Sometimes I even browse through the code, find something that annoys me, and fix it (or at least write // TODO comments). Anyway, if you want to notice when I have another update (or just hear about some progress now and then), just follow me on twitter. I promise this will only contain GLtron related tweets and you'll probably won't get one in months to come :-)
Just a small update: I've recently began to unearth the code, and port it to OpenGL ES (yes, I own an iPhone now...) in whatever spare time I had. The port of the graphcics code is almost complete now. I haven't touched the rest yet.
Meanwhile here's an awesome video for Tron done in Lego to distract you...
With as much going on as always, development has been slow the last few months again. In particular, there's an annoying bug that when you increase the number of players *after* a game has been running, the game is going to crash a while later. As every programmer can tell you, this so called 'memory corruption' is the most difficult bug to track down, because the actual error is in a completely different piece of code then the one the program's crashing inside. Also, there is no way to tell if the bug is new or has always been lurking there below the surface, and just now decided to rear its ugly head.
Instead of 100% focusing on the bug, I've been looking a bit at the whole of the code, and started to identify pieces of code I liked and stuff I don't. While this won't make the bug go away in the shortest possible time, it'll lead to better code in the long run.
I'm considering to put up a my latest version, clearly label it 'alpha quality' (which means broken), so the enthusiasts can tinker with some of the new features. If you like that idea, also check out the GLtron Wiki at berlios.
I finally got rid of the '4 player limit'. The result can look like this...
Development hasn't ceased entirely, but in general has slowed to a crawl. Between family (two kids), work, and unfortunately also certain other distractions (hint: it involves raiding Karazhan) development on GLtron has become very sporadic. On the plus side, I have recently written a mostly working (at least it's playable on LAN) prototype for network play (even though it's just 2d, and *gasp* written in Java - but I wanted to rewrite it from scratch so it's not hindered by any old nuisance & crap inside GLtron's codebase...). I guess I should take the time and fix the remaining issues (mostly to do with logging on/off and better support for handling disconnecting players).
I'm dad (46cm, 2600g - she surprised a bit by being three weeks early, but she's doing great so far...) again. With two kids around, there's not even time for WoW anymore. Still, I'm not totally killing off GLtron, since quite a bit of work went into it during the last two years. The engine is starting to resemble something I'm not totally embarassed of, the option of tons of user-created content (arbitrary arena shapes, custom models) is just around the corner, and I've gotten rid of the '4 player' limit, so you can battle hundreds of AI opponents now. All I'd need to do is tie of a few loose ends, and make a release. Oh, and I've gotten myself one of those shiny new cell phones (Sony Ericsson M600i), and it seems to be powerful enough to run GLtron. Ah the possibilities...I'll stop rambling now
Pablo Veramendi got GLtron running across 12 monitors. Amazing.
Ok, to keep you posted about the current development, I've started a development diary...Feel free to comment in the forum.
It looked easy enough...Pop in the DVD, click on 'install', done. It all went smoothly, until the very end, when it said 10..9..8..7 seconds to reboot, and then, *the machine froze*. Duh! After a while, I hard rebooted the machine (by pressing the power button for a few seconds), and the installer resumed...*at the beginning of the installation*. SIGH. Oh well, it says 'About a minute' now again, so hopefully it'll work this time...
Update: It worked alright this time. "Expose" is great. Installing XCode 2.0 right now...However, 256 MB of RAM is definitely not enough. Hopefully I can canibalize a PC somewhere.
A kid's a *lot* of work, but when he smiles and babbles, I know it's worth it. Still, he's starting to sleep through the night now, and I hope to get back to doing some more coding eventually (also on Mac OS X, see below)
Last Friday, Apple released Mac OS X 10.4, called "Tiger". Today I bought my copy, and I'm looking forward to installing it and giving XCode 2.0 (the new development kit) a try...
I'm dad (53cm, 3770g)!
General news: I've been updating the beta a few times and most bugs (especially the flickering HUD thingie) are fixed. I usually announce the updated beta's in the forum.
Mac OS X news: I've made an effort to day to learn my way around ProjectBuilder, so I can build the OS X binaries myself. I'm still running 10.2 (Apple denied my request for a free copy of Panther), so no X-Code here. The good news first: I managed to build an OS X version. The bad news: It has an annoying bug (two cycles crash instantly, when you start the game, so all you can play is one-on-one). I haven't figured out the ProjectBuilder Debugger yet (probably should have used gdb from the console), it keeps complaining that it can't find the source files. So, it's running, it looks good, it has a bug that I haven't fixed yet (I have still no clue why it behaves differently from the win32 version).
Thanks for your patience...
Just to counter some rumours, I'm going to release the current CVS as a playable 'beta' version for the upcoming 0.71 release (win32 only, sorry for that, didn't get it to compile on the mac, and Darrell seems away). A few people have already tested it a bit, so I don't expect many problems. In about 4 hours, I'm on a plane to the Maledives (yay! vacation!), so I wouldn't be around to fix them anyway :-)
Among the new things are:
- Ring & Tri levels (try to make your own!)
- head's up display
Feel free to post to the forums about this, and the more adventurous might want to tinker with the new scripts in levels/ and the scripts/ directory, most notably square.lua, tri.lua, ring.lua and hud-config.lua.
Have fun, - Andreas
Oh, I almost forgot: 0.71 beta for Windows
Status update:
- AI: Lennart Lopin is working on some genetic algorithms to improve the bot parameter set, to make it a little more aggressive (and successful!). Probably not going into 0.80
- HUD: It is partialy done, here's a preview of the speedometer. I just need to finish the framing of the other HUD elements, and sort out some issues with different screen resolutions.
- Reflections: Works fine, looks great (see HUD image above, very subtle effect). Might be nice to have a second texture (or use the alpha channel) to actually have only part of the floor tiles reflective.
- Arbitrary geometry / arena shapes: Works fine, but the level format is not very artist friendly. I need to finish the integration of the .3ds support first. Will probably include a sample 'ring' level in 0.80 though, but without .3ds support.
- Bump mapping:I'm trying to finalize the 'shader' framework, but this still needs some time to mature a bit.
All in all, it's coming along ok, I just need to find some more time for the project. It's probably best if you just subscribe to the Announcement mailing list, I'll let you know when the release is here.
Another issue: I seem to have accidently deleted some mail recently, so if you didn't get an answer, please try again. I'll 'high priority' all GLtron mail I get from today until August 1, and try to have it answered ASAP. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks for the patience and your continuing support!
Yay! Rahel & I got married on July 3! Since we postponed our honeymoon until October (for various reasons), that leaves me with plenty of time to catch up on all the stuff that accumulated while we were preparing for the wedding. Oh, and after that is done, I might have some time to answer all the e-mail about GLtron, and to post to some threads in the forum, and maybe, even do some coding. Yay!
The roadmap says: 0.80 (scheduled end of March 2004). It also says: the release dates are only optimistic guesses.
The current state is:
Arbitrary level geometry is supported, we have (kinda) neat reflections on the floor, and I've been thinking about how to integrate this with custom models.
What's missing is the AI improvements (it still plays quite an evasive game, and only tries to cut you off when you get too close to it), the HUD, and the tools set. Without tools, it's kinda ugly to design new levels (you need to be good with a text editor).
Unfortunately, I don't have much time right now to devote to GLtron. There's a few things that proved to be quite a distraction. Luckily for you, the skiing season is over now (although I enjoyed the snow and the sun :-), but there's the wedding to prepare...(that's right, I'm getting married this summer!).
I've updated the Frequently asked questions section
a little, it was hopelessly out of date. If you have some time to spare and
want to help me a little,
you can submit your own questions/answers
to help make the FAQ section a bit more complete.
Happy new year! Also, please note, that I have put up a roadmap towards the 1.0 release, and listed all the features I definitely *want* in the upcoming releases, and some of the 'optional' additions too. These include:
- 0.80:
more aggressive AI, loading of arbitrary level geometry, reflections on the floor, HUD
- 0.90:
hole in the wall (escape the arena to win),
integration of models into 'levels/artpacks',
floor/wall bump mapping,
shadow volumes
- 1.0:
LAN play, team based gameplay, GUI enhancements (mouse support, better game setup)
Finally, GLtron 0.70 is ready for release, and available for Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, Windows and Linux. Grab it from the Download Page.
Changes to the last official release (0.62) include:
- New AI that actively tries to cut you off
- Two new Gameplay modes (that can be combined):
Booster (where you can accelerate using a limited 'Turbo' supply), and
Wall Acceleration (where you speed up if you get close to an enemy cycle's trail)
- better handling of .ini file (versioning & protection against partly
written files), a simplified GUI, and various other bugfixes
Also, a lot of changes were done to the code, to simplify further improvements. You can expect e.g. arbitrarily shaped arenas soon, or the long awaited 'escape through a hole in the arena wall' feature.
[ Home ]
[ Download ]
[ Development diary ]
[ Artpacks ]
[ Screenshots ]
[ Documentation ]
[ Frequently asked questions ]
[ Plans, possible improvements ]
[ Developer information ]
[ Links ]
forum (hosted by sourceforge)
Hosted by Sourceforge
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