This is Atomic Tanks, a multi-player game similar to worms which involves firing enormous weapons to try and destroy the other tanks.

Note:
When you upgrade to a newer version, the versioning system will try to keep as much of the data in tact as possible. Currently AI weapon-preferences will be created from scratch and previous AI weapon-preferences overwritten. All this means is that the computer players may choose different weapons from the ones they did before.

To play you will require the allegro libraries/dlls, available for download from http://sourceforge.net/projects/alleg/
Under debian there's a package "liballegro4a" which you can install (if you have suitable permissions/access) with:

apt-get install liballegro4a


The allegro home-page is http://allegro.cc


To install the binary distribution under linux:

	gunzip -c <name-of-atanks-dist-file.tar.gz> | tar xvf -

which will install it in a directory called atanks in the current directory.

To play, cd to the atanks directory and enter:

	./atanks

To install the binary distribution under windows:

	Unzip the zip file into the desired directory (e.g. C:/games/atanks) using the zip utility of your choice (probably winzip).

To play:

	Open up a Windows-Explorer window or bring up an MSDOS prompt.
	Find the directory (at MSDOS prompt cd to the directory or in Windows-Explorer use the mouse and click).
	In MSDOS run Atanks.exe, in Windows-Explorer double-click on it.

It is now possible to run the game from any directory as long as you specify the location of the data files using the --datadir command-line option:

/path/to/atanks --datadir /path/to/dataFileDirectory

It is now also possible to select different screen-sizes from the command-line:

atanks --width <screen or window width> --height <screen or window height>

although your system must be capable of the resolution or window-size you specify.

You can specify the colours using the --depth switch:

atanks --depth <16 or 32>

Where 16 provides 65536 colours and 32 provides 16.7 million. You may find 32 is slower and it will take more memory.
24-bit would have been available but for some reason caused odd glitches so is left out for now.

The default (running atanks with no command-line options) is equivalent to:

atanks --width 800 --height 600 --depth 16 --datadir "."

For more info see http://atanks.sourceforge.net or http://sourceforge.net/projects/atanks

Tom Hudson (tom@singular.org.uk)
