Bill Witts wrote this as
his first non-trivial Java program back in 1996 as a challenge to write
BattleZone, the once well-known Atari arcade game, in 24 hours. In the
end, it took 32 hours. Bill wrote the original Atari-approved Quicksilva
BattleZone game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum back in 1983-84, and it took
perhaps 15 months in total, so this is a quite favorable comparison of
Java versus Z80 machine code (although it helps that your computer is probably
2-3 orders of magnitude faster than a Spectrum...).
In order to avoid adding more hours, we have left out the demo screens and the other frills. For instance, all controls are keyboard based - clicking the mouse restarts the game. Keyboard instructions are on the intro page. Remember, you're driving a tank, and the controls drive the caterpillar tracks independently. Don't stay in one place for long, kill everything that moves, and watch the radar!
You may notice the occasional delay as the browser loads new program modules, sounds, etc. The applet is packed up as an archive, so good browsers will load the code in one go, but older or non-conformant browsers may have to load modules one by one. Netscape 4.5 and IE4.0 and higher handle it all just fine. By the way, source code is not included - no sizeable code written in a day is pretty, and we wouldn't want to offend anyone. Just enjoy the experience!
Click the button when the applet has loaded: