At the beginning of this year I took a hard look at the state of Armoured Commander II and decided to start fresh. I wasn’t happy with how the game was developing and I had learned a lot over the previous few months that would be difficult to implement in an established code base. So I started with a new, empty Python file and copied over each element of the game piece by piece, making changes and improvements along the way. Today I’m posting the first weekly in-progress build in a long time because I’m pretty pleased with how it is now coming along. The current game is still very limited but the core elements are in place. Many of the features I was working on late last year haven’t yet been re-added, but they are on their way.

More than anything else with this re-start I wanted to re-integrate your tank’s crew into the game, so I devoted a good chunk of the screen to them, and I went back to a modified crew action system similar to that in ArmCom1. This brings the focus of the game back to the men in the tank, including yourself as the commander, which I think was one of the strengths of ArmCom1. You can see details about your crew in the F3 menu; only the perception stat is used for now, others will be important later on.

The weekly build is available at the usual location. I’ve used a different packager this time from previously (PyInstaller) so if it doesn’t run on your machine please email me and let me know. I will continue to work with the packager options to try to produce a cleaner and more compatible build. If you don’t run Windows you can always download the source from GitHub.

EDIT: I’ve just uploaded a hotfix that should prevent crashes when displaying crew names with non-ascii characters.