Good news, it seems, still travels in two’s. At least that’s what I said last time and it appears to still be true, as today I have two new morsels of news to share.
A lot of you will be pleased to hear that the Linux port of the game is finally done. Now I know what you’re saying. “Vino, Vino, but you said that you wouldn’t release any more version of Digitanks!” You’re right, I lied. What I should have said is that I won’t release any more versions of Digitanks on Windows. I’m also extending the pay what you want sale until the end of the year to celebrate. You can get the Linux version through the same email download link that you originally purchased the game with. The Linux version does have the camera-guided missile unavailable due to problems with a supporting library that Digitanks uses (not my fault, honestly!) I’m a bit disappointed about that, but my options were either to spend a long time debugging code I’ve never seen before or remove it until the author of that library manages a fix of their own. If I hear about a fix, I’ll be sure to make it forthcoming.
Also for those Linux grognards who are about to say, “I can’t run Digitanks because I never run anything on my computer if the source code is not freely available to anybody!” You can hold your tongue because the source code for both platforms of Digitanks is now available on Github. It’s under a BSD license, meaning that you can use it for whatever purpose you want as long as you give credit to the original author (me!) If you want to hack into Digitanks, I caution you, the code contained therein is not for the faint of heart. I am sometimes somewhat of a brute in my programming methods – whatever gets the job done, right? As a result there are some places with ugly or outdated code, and I don’t recommend that anybody use the engine for building a project of their own. But I think it can be extremely useful as a learning tool, as I’ve solved a lot of problems (raytracing, networking, pathfinding, etc) that other people may also need to solve.
By the way, here’s a little something I’ve been playing with on the topic of rendering infinite spaces.