2 posts tagged with "tanx"

In the early days of PlayCanvas, we published a game called TANX, an online multiplayer tank battle game.

To us, it was the perfect illustration of why the web makes such a great platform for gaming.

• Bite-sized fun with drop-in/drop-out gameplay.
• Nothing to download - just follow a hyperlink to stream the game in a couple of seconds.
• True device independence - play on your phone, tablet or desktop.
• Easy social sharing - get your friends into matches by posting your personal game URL to Twitter in real-time!

So we decided to keep developing the game. The first iteration above just had primitive tanks driving around an empty environment. v2.0 brought upgraded tank models, a new UI and a proper level:

And the game's popularity continued to grow. It even hit #1 on Hacker News one lazy Friday afternoon!

By now, the PlayCanvas engine was rapidly evolving and had recently gained support for physically based rendering (PBR). We were desperate to upgrade the game to show off these new capabilities. So not long afterwards, we developed v3.0:

The game also leveraged PlayCanvas' run-time lightmapper to generate the level's shadows.

Not long after the upgrade, we decided to focus all of our resources on developing the core PlayCanvas engine. In the end, we didn't have enough time to maintain the game and so, with heavy hearts, we took it offline.

Until today.

We're really excited to announce that TANX is back! You can play it at:

https://tanx.io​

Or alternatively, you can find the game hosted on Miniclip and Itch.io.

Keep your eyes peeled for a follow up article outlining how we rebuilt and deployed the game's back-end!

One of the most popular WebGL games today is TANX, our online tank battle game. WebGL brings developers amazing new possibilities: lightning fast load times, cross-platform play, easy sharing, incredible performance. It all adds up to instant, pure fun.

But as good as TANX is, we've been working hard on a major upgrade. And we're happy to announce that it's live today! So what's new?

We've added a brand new level. We've moved away from the 'TRON' style graphics and adopted a more realistic style. Beautiful, I hope you'll agree.

All power ups have been lovingly remodeled.

We've added a very sexy shield effect. See it crackle with energy as it kicks in. All done in a special custom GLSL shader.

To turn up the mayhem, we've added camera shake and punchy explosions, built with PlayCanvas' particle system component.

The game even has a new URL. Play now at:

https://tanx.io​

⚠️ Public Service Announcement: TANX is highly addictive. Please take occasional breaks!

Can you believe this game is playable after loading just 2.8MB of data? Massive fun delivered to your browser in seconds.

We hope you love this update. But what do we have planned for the future? Is there more to come? You'd better believe it! Our games team is now working full-time on TANX so expect continual updates over the coming months. Send us your feature requests and suggestions in the comments below!