Battle Tanks is a GPL’ed multiplayer game with original cartoon-like graphics, cool music and inspired in the old arcade games. You can choose one of three vehicles (tank, Shilka, and rocket launcher) to try to eliminate your enemy using the whole arsenal of weapons you have available (four types of ammo, six types of rockets, landing troops, mines and so on). The game supports keyboard as well as a gamepad.

There are ten multiplayer maps (seven for deathmatch and three for cooperative mode) in different locations (city, village, forest, desert,…) and a game world that reacts on player. Roads have traffic, buildings can be destroyed, weather effects are simulated, etc.

I’m not usually into packaging war games, but I think this is cute enought to make an exception, and in any case I don’t think playing it will hurt anyone, apart from some prides, if they find out they’re not as smart and quick as the enemy.

I hope that the game enters Debian repositories soon, but meanwhile you can find some packages for the game already built for SID for i386, powerpc and amd64 architectures (the source for the packages is here).

There are sound problems on ppc at least. Music and effects are “garbled”, we only hear like “psssshhhhhh”

Hi Corsac,

That seems a known issue with OpenAL, so we’ll try to correct it ASAP.

Thanks!

Hi Miry,

thanks for this. If you need more testing on bigendian arch, please ask.

Arr, the page on mentors.debian.net with the source package is missing

Yup, Simon80, I deleted it there now that it is in Debian oficial repositories, you can get it from there: http://packages.debian.org/btanks

[...] At the time of writing, most distributions don’t ship Battle Tanks in the repositories, so you may have to find a pre-built package. For Ubuntu (I’m running Gutsy for this tutorial), download these two files (builds courtesy of Miriam Ruiz): [...]