Twin Forces

Bolo 3D

Bolo3D is a program for the PowerPC macintoshes that let you play Bolo in 3D. Bolo is a tank game written by Stuart Cheshire. Its main claim to fame is that it works really well over a network, including the Internet.

Originally when we did this, we planned on updating Bolo3D every time Bolo got updated. Right after we did this, Stuart Cheshire stopped updating Bolo (and sold the rights to a third party). Since then Bolo3D has just kind of languished.

But peole keep downloading it and playing it, so what the hey!

Bolo3D 0.5 is a very early release of that program. This release only works with Bolo 0.99.7. When 0.99.8 is finished by Stuart, a new Bolo3D will come out that fix some of the problems. In the meantime, you can still play a pretty fun game of 3D tank command.

Much thanks to Bill Haller for providing some interesting textures.

Check out before you download!

Joesph Lo of IBL fame has put together some screenshots of Bolo3D on the Internet Bolo League website. Cool!

Changes from 0.4 to 0.5:

For those of you who have Bolo3D 0.4, you probably want to know what the differences between it and 0.5 are. Well, here they are:

  1. Bill Haller (haller@mhv.net) spent some of his own time to improve the textures over my lame efforts. Specifically, he created new forest, grass, swamp, sea, river, building, damaged building and base textures. He even figured out the overly complicated method required to make textures. Thanks, Bill! Bill and I are working together to improve Bolo3D some more so stay tuned. By the way, feel free to send me suggestions.
  2. I changed the field of view parameter so that everything looks like a more reasonable distance away.
  3. A map is enclosed that is a little more fun to play in 3D then the default map.
  4. I fixed the read me file so it talks about .99.7 instead of .99.6


Download Bolo3D

If you have problems with 0.5, then go back to 0.4. I changed the drawing routines in 0.5, and they don't work on all macs. I'd fix it and move to Apple's Game Sprocket stuff, but since Stuart isn't updating Bolo, why bother?


Download Bolo3D 0.4

To use bolo3D, start a bolo game, then run bolo3D on the same machine.

Bolo3D will come up and present a dialog that lets you choose between the available tanks on your machine.

Choose one, and go. You should be able to use the same keys as your regular bolo configuration.

What you can and can't do:

You will be able to do everything you can do in 2D Bolo except control the builder. You have three ways around this:

  1. Use a cyborg as well. (This cuts down on your performance.)
  2. Set Bolo to "Hide Automatically" and switch to regular bolo when you want to control the builder.
  3. Wait for Stuart to release 0.99.8 of bolo. :-)

For best performance:

To make your own textures:

  1. Draw some textures. They must be 8 bit, use the standard palette, and 128x128.
  2. Save them as 8 bit, UNcompressed, TARGA files.
  3. For sprites, you have to draw 8 different orientations. 0 is facing away from you, 4 is towards you, etc.
  4. For wall textures, run tcgp. Type "filein.tga fileout.bolo" at the command line where filein.tga is your file, and fileout.bolo is the name of the texture you want to replace.
  5. For sprite textures, run tcgk. Type "spritein.tga spriteout.bolo" at the command line where spritein is your file, and spriteout is the name of the sprite you want to replace.
  6. Replace the appropriate files in the textures folder.

Hints:

The T at the top of the screen is your crosshair. It changes to red when you have a pillbox lined up, and in range. This actually makes it easier to shoot pillboxes in 3D then in "Classic" bolo.

Have fun!

Download Bolo3D

If you have problems with 0.5, then go back to 0.4. I changed the drawing routines in 0.5, and they don't work on all macs. I'd fix it, but since Stuart isn't updating Bolo, why bother?

Download Bolo3D 0.4

Comments: Pierce

home
ÿ