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

Fixed reflections, it's pretty!

Signed the binary, I hope it's playing nice with Gatekeeper now (can anybody verify that?

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.

On a unrelated note, no windows maintainer has been found yet. If you know your way around Microsoft Visual Studio, don't be shy!

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!

Meanwhile here's an awesome video for Tron done in Lego to distract you...

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.

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!).

0.80 : more aggressive AI, loading of arbitrary level geometry, reflections on the floor, HUD

: 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

: 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)

Changes to the last official release (0.62) include: