Dish: Making the Game Tank Battle - C# Game Programming - page 346

Sometime in the early 1980s, something arrived at my local arcade that would change
my perspective on video games forever. It was the game that really fired up my interest in
virtual reality: Battlezone .
Battlezone features vector 3D graphics and one of the most amazing arcade cabinets
any 80s kid could encounter. Instead of having to stand and look at the screen to play,
Battlezone had a viewing goggle that looked rather like binoculars. Since it was a goggle,
the player had to place his/her head to it and vision was taken up entirely by the game.
Battlezone was a single-player game, with enemies controlled by artificial intelligence.
Just as with the original game Tank ! , its control scheme used two single-axis joysticks to
simulate control of individual tracks; push both sticks forward and the tank moved for-
ward, pull one back and one forward then the tank would turn. The viewpoint was first
person, from inside the tank. When a projectile hit the player's vehicle, a vector-based
screen glass cracking effect was displayed in front of the view as though the window of the
tank had been hit. At that time, Battlezone was the closest thing possible to being inside
a computer game. In the early 1980s, it was a truly mind-blowing experience; 3D vector
graphics were new, and the submersion level offered by the game, its control system, and
its goggle-based arcade cabinet were second to none.
The design for the example game Tank Battle plonks itself down somewhere between
Tank ! and Battlezone . The action takes place in a maze, with a number of AI-controlled
tanks driving around the game world trying to blast each other into oblivion (see
Figure 13.1). The camera view is third person, behind the tank, with a fixed turret firing
projectiles forward.
Its overall structure difers a little from other games in this topic, as seen in Figure 13.2.
This game may be found in the example games project, with its scenes in the Scenes/
Tank Battle folder named menu_TB and game_TB.
Its prefabs are located in the Prefabs/Games/Tank Battle folder.
The most important thing to note about it is that there are several elements extremely
close to those from the other example vehicle game in this topic, Metal Vehicle Doom . he
tanks are, in fact, the exact same car prefabs except for the fact that the tanks have invisible
Figure 13.1 The example game, Tank Battle .