TANKS (Tactical Artillery Nuclear Killers in Space)

The game is inspired by the “Worms” series of games and the online flash game “TANKS”. Players will take turns firing a wide variety of weapons towards their enemies in order to destroy each other. The game contains simple AI controlled enemies and a simple homing missile that uses an implementation of the A* (A-star) algorithm.

Requirements

• Maven >3.6.1
• JDK8

Demo

A demo of TANKS can be found in guides/Demo.mp4.

How to build and run TANKS

IntelliJ

1. Open the project in IntelliJ.
2. Make sure to set the project SDK to JDK 8 (1.8).
3. Open the Maven panel and execute Lifecycle -> install.
4. Run the game by executing the goal Plugins -> pax -> pax:provision.

Console

Open a shell and navigate to the parent folder. Execute the following command:

mvn clean install pax:provision

How to skip tests

mvn clean install -DskipTests pax:provision

How to build a single bundle / component

Open a shell and navigate to the bundle folder. Execute the following command:

mvn clean install

How to run TANKS without rebuilding each time

Open a shell and navigate to the parent folder. Execute the following command:

mvn pax:provision

How to play TANKS

When the game is started, the game window is shown in the middle of the screen. The window can be re-sized if desired. The red numbered boxes in the window represent the following elements:

1. Remaining time of turn shows how much time is left of either the player- or enemy’s turn.
2. Enemy is visualized by a light blue tank. Above the tank the health-bar of the entity is shown. The angle at which the cannon is aiming and the firepower of the last shot are shown below the tank.
3. Player is visualized by a red tank. A firepower indicator, which increases with the amount of firepower is shown to the right of the unit. The health-bar of the entity is shown above the tank. The angle at which the cannon is aiming and the firepower of the last shot are shown below the tank.
4. Weapon is shown directly below each entity, Player and Enemy, and shows which weapon is currently in use.

Game window at startup:

Initially, the game spawns two enemies and a player that is controlled by user-input from the keyboard. The key bindings are listed in the table below.

Key	Action
LEFT	Move the tank in the left direction
RIGHT	Move the tank in the right direction
DOWN	Move the cannon in clockwise direction
UP	Move the cannon in counterclockwise direction
SPACE	Increase/decrease the firepower while held down. Fire the cannon upon releasing the key
1	Shift to the previous weapon
2	Shift to the next weapon
R	Restart the game. Can only be pressed when the game is over.

A tank dies when the health-bar has reached zero health-points or if the tank is moved out of the game window’s left or right boundary. Each tank takes turns and the game ends when there is only one player or enemy tank left. There are three possible outcomes of ending the game. Either the player wins, the enemy wins or no one wins. The last option occurs if both the player and enemy entities die simultaneously.

Game end screen:

Development of new Weapons for the game

In this guide the creation of the grenade weapon will be documented as a how-to.

Creating a weapon component

Run the following cmd with the desired name of the bundle from the parent directory:

mvn pax:create-bundle “-Dpackage=dk.grp1.tanks.weapon.grenade” “-Dname=grenade-bundle” “-Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT”

NB! If you run linux or macOS, remove the double quotes.

After the command has been run, the following output should be displayed:

Preparing the weapon component for OSGi registration

1. Delete all the generated classes

2. Add a dependency on the weapon module

3. Create an Activator class implementing the BundleActivator in the internal folder.
4. Edit the osgi.bnd file to point at the new activator class. Remember to delete the header of the file.

Adding the following line to the .bnd file will add the "weapon"-category to the bundle:

Bundle-Category: weapon

NB! The internal folder is used for private packages. If package is desired to be public, it should be outside the folder. The setting is set in the shared plugin settings. (poms/compiled/pom.xml)

5. Create a class implementing the IWeapon interface

6. Create a class implementing the IGamePlugin interface

   6.1 Remember to remove all instances of the new weapon in the stop method.

   6.2 Remember to add and remove the IWeapon in gamedata

public class GrenadePlugin implements IGamePluginService {
   private final IWeapon weapon = new GrenadeWeapon();
   @Override
   public void start(World world, GameData gameData) {
       gameData.addWeapon(weapon);
   }

   @Override
   public void stop(World world, GameData gameData) {
       gameData.removeWeapon(weapon);
       for (Entity e : world.getEntities(Grenade.class)) {
           world.removeEntity(e);
       }
   }
}

7. Create a class extending the projectile class from the Weapon module
8. Register the implementing IGamePlugin class to the bundle context

@Override
public void start(BundleContext bundleContext) throws Exception {
   bundleContext.registerService(IGamePluginService.class.getName(), new GrenadePlugin(), null);
}

9. Write a sout in the format below for the stop method in the activator class

@Override
public void stop(BundleContext bundleContext) throws Exception {
   System.out.println( "STOPPING dk.grp1.tanks.weapon.Grenade" );
}

Extended Behavior

When creating the the IWeapon implementation, the behavior from the common module will be available. This behavior can also be extended by creating a new or extended EntityParts. For more inspiration, look at the other weapon implementations.

Easy setup using the weapon generator tool

Run the dev-tools/WeaponGenerator.jar file in a shell with the following command:

java -jar .\WeaponGenerator.jar NameOfTheNewWeapon

NB! It is required to have MAVEN_HOME set as a environment variable for the application to work. When the application is done, the new bundle and required files are created with a hint on how to set up common behavior.