Q. Who are the developers of Tanky-Tank?

The creator, lead designer, and lead programmer of Tanky-Tank is Walt Destler.

We are all students and former students (some graduated Spring 2007) at the University of Maryland. Most of us are current or former residents of the Anne Arundel Hall dormitory. Our majors include computer science, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and theater.

Q. Is Tanky-Tank a class project?

Nope. We're making it just for fun.

Q. How long has Tanky-Tank been in development?

Since Spring 2005.

Q. What is the history of Tanky-Tank?

When Tanky-Tank was originally started, it was never intended to become a serious project. Walt (lead programmer) was working on a multiplayer Tetris-style game at the time and started "Tank Treader" as a side-project merely to learn multiplayer network programming.

But a couple of Walt's friends, Rich and Dave, became more excited about Tank Treader than anyone was about "Tetrik" and offered to use their artistic skills to contribute to the development of the new game. Realizing the benefit of enthusiastic co-developers, Walt soon switched his development focus to Tank Treader and mostly forgot about Tetrik. Soon after the switch, Rich, Dave, and others convinced Walt to rename Tank Treader to "Tanky-Tank" -- everyone was already calling the game by its new name anyway.

The first few versions of Tanky-Tank were very simple: The landscapes were bare grass and the player could only choose one type of tank (later to become the Assault Tank), which had only a single cannon. Soon water, mud, and lava tiles appeared, but they did not artistically blend with each other, making the maps look very artificial. Over time, a custom "tile blending" engine was developed to make the maps look more professional. Different types of tanks arrived as well (the Siege Tank was the first tank in addition to the Assault Tank). Along with better-looking maps and different types of tanks, team play, doodads (powerups), and A.I. bots were implemented. The latest improvements include internet multiplayer, trees, and highly-detailed explosions.

In Fall of 2006, Alex moved into Anne Arundel Hall as a freshman at the University of Maryland and quickly became the fourth core developer.

Q. What programming languages and libraries does Tanky-Tank use?

Tanky-Tank is written in pure C# on the .Net framework. The 3rd-party libraries used are SlimDX (on Windows) and Tao (on Mac and Linux). All of the components -- the graphics engine, network engine, GUI library, rules deserializer, etc... -- were written in-house. While it may sound unintelligent to "reinvent the wheel" as opposed to using pre-existing libraries, Tanky-Tank is intended to be a learning experience.

Q. Why not C++, the industry-standard language for developing games?

C++ is the industry-standard for several reasons. First, developers already have huge existing codebases written in C++, and so to discard those codebases would be extremely unproductive. Second, programmers at professional game development companies are most familiar with C++, and so retraining the programmers for another language would also be unproductive. And third, there is a vast amount of existing resources and support for programming games using C++.

So why does Tanky-Tank use C#? Because we're not a professional game-development company and thus have no existing codebase or programmers that need to be retrained. And because, when starting from scratch, C#, the .Net framework, and DirectX are easily the best (though far from perfect) platforms on which to program low-budget games for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is putting all their immense power behind these platforms, and their support for them is unequaled.

Q. How can I contribute to the development of Tanky-Tank?

Only official Tanky-Tank developers may contribute to the core codebase, but if you have made your maps, game modes, A.I. bots, tanks, or other assets, please send them to us! They will be reviewed and, if of good quality, included in a future release.

Q. What is "Übertankenschweisenhouser?"

"Übertankenschweisenhouser" is the name for the soon-to-be-upcoming German port of Tanky-Tank.

 

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