Tank Body Problem

185 points•jimbooonooo•2 days ago•54 comments•

#body #tank #tank body #body problem #tank body problem

54 comments

I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago, and have always enjoyed that game. here is my implementation using a circular world with basic orbital dynamics added. in theory it works on mobile as well, but is best intended to be a PC browser game.

in the interest of transparency, this was generated on qwen 3.8: 27b, so you should consider the "my implementation" loose at best.

I'd love feedback on what works and what doesn't.

some weapons, such as the laser satellite and the peacock feather have additional actions that can be commanded after the initial launch. for instance the laser satellite will shoot a laser in whatever the current orientation is, and the peacock feather will split up into multiple feathers when pressing the space button or the fire button again.

enjoy!

zug_zug1 day ago

The shot timeout is the biggest issue for me. There's nothing worse than lining up the most crazy indirect shot and have it just disappear as it comes in.

The math on whether a shot is in escape velocity should be trivial for an AI to add. The only other degenerate cases would be some sort of orbit. My recommendation would be if the shot hasn't landed in 5 seconds, see if it's making progress, and if unclear, accelerate time until it is clearly making porgress (by 10x) and timeout at 60s world time.

kbelder1 day ago

You could add a very slight velocity decay due to air resistance, perhaps stronger nearer the surface. It should make a stable orbit impossible.

jimbooonooo1 day ago

I like the rate of time increase, that's a clever mechanic. it reminds me of lemmings!

ulrikrasmussen1 day ago

Really fun idea. Some immediate feedback:

* Moon is moving too fast, has too much influence.

* Movement breaks the game as you can just move up to the opponent.

* The timeout is frustrating. I can line up a shot that actually looks like it is going to be a direct hit just to have the game remove it as it starts descending towards the target.

SubiculumCode2 days ago

Loved that game...and there is definite potential here. It seems like a player can just move right next to opponent and fire? That doesn't seem right?

jimbooonooo2 days ago

good catch, thank you. I will update so that you're limited to like one to two tank lengths per turn.

rikschennink1 day ago

I think the moon gravity is a bit much. It would be cool to use the gravity of the moon in your attack, but I think that would require it moving slower and perhaps some prediction logic where you can see where the moon will be if you fire now?

I've built an iOS game (https://eveofimpact.com) years ago (an earth vs asteroids kind of thing) and I ran into similar problems where gravity was too strong, and trying to use gravity to your advantage was very tricky and unpredictable making it less fun. I eventually decided to just make it play a more "decorative" role.

edit: Forgot to say awesome job :)

jimbooonooo1 day ago

yeah, a friend of mine and I were kind of laughing about how difficult the moon made things. on the opposite side of the pendulum, without the moon gravity, it would only take two or three terms to defeat the opponent, but I agree, toning down the moon a bit and coming up with future artillery path prediction might be more fun

alexpotato1 day ago

> I grew up playing scorched Earth on Windows 3 just over a thousand years ago,

I remember taking a computer science class in high school and, IIRC, we didn't even have Windows, it was just DOS.

This would have been the mid 1990s.

shoo2 days ago

cool, i played a fair bit of scorch

misc feedback

  - dominant strategy seems to be drive to point blank range & fire. needs some playtesting & rework to make it interesting for 2 players.
  - how do you bring up help for a reminder of what the controls are once the game is in progress?
  - the arrow keys for controlling the turret are unintuitive. i'd expect left & right arrows to change the barrel angle, like in the original scorched earth, but here they change the power level
  - the visual trajectory preview doesnt seem useful whenever the moon is involved as by the time you fire, the moon has moved the trajectory is wildly different to whatever the preview showed

one perspective i've heard some game developers talk about when prototyping a new game is focusing on trying to improve the length of time a player can have fun before they get sick of it. is it fun for 5 seconds? what could i do to increase that to make it fun for a whole 30 seconds? for 60 seconds?

jimbooonooo1 day ago

Great feedback, thank you! I am working on incorporating many of these fixes

isoprophlex1 day ago

You can just roll up to the other player and shoot them in the face?!

rossy1 day ago

I know sometimes obvious things miss us, but there's a 99% chance that a human author would have realised half-way through implementing movement that it broke the game.

Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.

bruce3434341 day ago

Took the words out of my mouth. The trajectory indicator isn't predictive either, making it pointless. A single playtest would have made this obvious and maybe even a single prompt would have solved it.

jerf1 day ago

I see so many posts on programming reddits now asking for "brutal feedback" (which I see so often I suspect it must also be a 2nd-tier Claudism that only comes up in this context) with a commit history an hour and a half old, and my "brutal feedback" I want to give is have you actually tried using your code?

I, too, have an AI, and I, too, have manifested a lot of stuff off of a single prompt. That first pass is generally pretty worthless. Amazing in its own way for what comes out from how little input, how quickly the amazing becomes banal, but still, pretty worthless in practice. I don't think there's anything wrong with "vibe coding" but you should definitely expect any product of it that is going to be worth a darn is going to require much more than 30 minutes of QA to be actually useful, even something as simple as a little caching library or something. And this won't change from AIs getting better in the future; it is a fundamental information theory problem about just how far the prompt can be expanded even in theory into a working program.

This is not targeted at the OP, I'm just commiserating with you. This program does not correlate with my own experience with one-shot vibe coding, which is that I generally can't go literally 5 seconds without hitting an issue of some sort. I've spent weeks on an app for my kids and I started to measure my progress by "how long I can use it before I hit an issue". I considered it a bit of an event when I hit five minutes. It's hovering around 15 to 20 right now, but I've still got a ways to go before it is "indefinite".

MarcScott1 day ago

I think it was on the Astra launch site, they had a car racing game authored by codex. I played it once and was quite impressed. I played it a second time and realised that I could just hold down the accelerator, not bother steering at all, and beat all the AI opponents every time. The game was pretty but pointless.

jimbooonooo1 day ago

this was a known feature actually, to allow me to rapidly gain XP and unlock additional weapons, although I agree it shouldn't have made it to the " production" version, whose phrase I am using very loosely here.

that said, I strongly agree about the AI slop sentiment, the lack of thinking on the Creator's part. I am a huge type II fun person who generated a lot of personal satisfaction by struggling through software, hardware, and mechanical development throughout my career, and it is pretty disappointing to see what looks like the loss of that due to AI. I have great concern for the long-term stability and growth of our civilization to be honest. it reminds me of hg well's journey to the center of the Earth talking about the morlocks who are maintaining machines that they no longer understand how to build, or for what purpose they actually exist..

diatribe aside, I do appreciate all the feedback and I acknowledge I sent this out early, and without comprehensive testing.

mozzaa1 day ago

Player 2 hates this one simple trick

Bigpet1 day ago

Player 2 probably also hates that he can't switch weapons unlike Player 1.

philipallstar1 day ago

Real-life tank tactics are very viable in this game.

moffkalastabout 13 hours ago

Yeah P1 wins every time, movement should be limited to like one tank length per round or something.

olliepro2 days ago

Moving L/R is OP

ivanech2 days ago

Yes you can drive up to your opponent and hit them point blank

jimbooonooo2 days ago

Good catch, fix in progress. I am also working on adding a single player version and a leaderboard.

stephbook1 day ago

I've always enjoyed "Space Tanks." Beyond the whole gravity stuff, it was FUN. Silly designs, bouncy weapons, upgrading tanks..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Tanks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8yvSl9j9yU

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