Xtank is a multi-player vehicle combat game played in mazes of various sizes and types. You control a vehicle (usually a tank) equipped with the latest in armor and weaponry. Your objective depends on the game you play.

The 1.6.0 release of Xtank has been re-licensed under the BSD 2-clause copyright, sometimes referred to as the "FreeBSD Copyright". Check individual files for the name of the contributing Author(s).

This is the top-level Xtank directory. The subdirectories are as follows:

• Doc Documentation on how to play Xtank
• Bin Programs and shell scripts
• Help Files used by the graphical help system in Xtank
• Todo Ideas for the future, lists from the past
• Mazes Files describing Mazes used in Xtank
• Programs Files for robot programs to load into Xtank
• Src Source code for Xtank
• Util Random utilities used in writing Xtank (largely untested)
• Vehicles Files describing vehicles used in Xtank
• README.md This file

• Get a copy of the source code repository, and unpack it.
• Make sure that you have X11 libraries installed for your machine. Xtank only requires libX11.
• Build the software:
  • On a supported system, just run make

The code is expected to work fairly well on FreeBSD 10, FreeBSD 11, and FreeBSD-current (which is, as of this writing, what identifies itself as FreeBSD-12).

The code is expected to work fairly well on Mac OS X. As of this writing, the code is known to work on OS X 10.11.6 (El Capitan).

To display the graphics from Xtank, you will need an X11 server. The code has been tested using Xquartz 2.7.11, and it works OK.

The code is expected to work fairly well on a modern-ish Linux system. The code has been compiled and tested on 64bit virtual machines, running Centos-7 and Ubuntu 16.04.02.

The 'libX11-devel' package had to be added to a standard install.

sudo yum install -y libX11-devel

A few utilities needed to be installed on top of a 'server only' installation.

sudo apt install -y make gcc flex libx11-6 libx11-dev

No substantial work has been put into making it easy to build this software on other platforms. Hopefully, this will be done eventually, but getting the code relicensed and into a working state was deemed the most important first step.

• The game expects the environmental variable XTANK_DIR to be set to point at a directory that contains the directories:

  • Mazes
  • Programs
  • Vehicles

• These directories are used by the binary to load the Mazes and Vehicles used by the game. The Programs directory is only needed if you are going to dynamically load a robot program into the game. The standard robot programs are compiled into the xtank binary.

• The simplest way to accomplish this is to run the compiled binary like this:

  XTANK_DIR=$(pwd) ./Src/xtank

A mailing list has been created for discussion relating to the code of Xtank, and for help with building/porting issues.

• Subscribe at: [email protected]
• Post at: [email protected]

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