Merry Christmas

Dear community,

as you problably noticed, it has been quiet around the development of Battle Tanks. The sad truth is, our time available for this project and our motivation to work on it are not what they used to be. So we were faced with a decision to make. Battle Tanks exists for almost as long as the Frozen Throne expansion of Warcraft 3 (which makes it almost 12 years old). So seeing it simply die is not worthy of the game.

So we decided the following:

christmas-928322_640We will make Battle Tanks Open Source

Ideally this would mean that everyone would contribute towards a new version by submitting his / her work to a central repository. The proprietary nature of the Warcraft map files makes this harder than I’d like. So for now, we will only make the map available for everyone, so you guys can see what the map looks like in its current form.

If anyone has questions or suggestions regarding this map feel free (and encouraged!) to voice them (Forum).

The aim – at this time – is to take the input of the community and maybe continue the development in a way that is feasible.
Of course, if someone wants to make a mod or use parts of the code for his own project, he / she is free to do so – it’s open source after all. But we would still like to get credit, if substantial parts of the map have been used (as you can see in the code itself).

Anyway, we hope the map helps some of you and maybe some of you help (the development of) the map.

Battle Tanks 8.80 (2.4 MiB, 6657 downloads)
Bytes: 2.518.306
CRC32: 3AEEB8DC
MD5: 93FF0850AF74771BFF50E58812E3FFF5

The BT-Team wishes everyone a merry christmas and happy holidays!

Posted in Map

GProxy++ and you – recover from connection loss

TL;DR; install instructions for GProxy++.

About GProxy++

Did you ever noticed joining a player with

Player [name] is using GProxy++

and wondered what is this all about? Or did you ever saw someone causing a time out/lag screen while asking to wait for him because GProxy++ is trying to reconnect?

GProxy++ is an reconnection tool for WC3 and Ghost++ bot. It restores lost connection.
A connection is dynamically established via multiple server/routers in between you client and your target server; the route might even change from time to time. Those connections are not necessarily stable and various reason might cause an connection loss. That’s not uncommon and mostly unnoticed since new connection are immediately established by most applications.
Sadly, WC3 has no such a features and an connection loss causes a player drop. This is where Gproxy++ helps.

If you lose your connection to the bot
WC3ScrnShot_030711_134804_03

GProxy++ recovers your connection and let you to continue to play the game
WC3ScrnShot_030711_134807_04

The original GProxy++ software rerouted Battle.Net connection the LAN interface of WC3, it is a little bit inconvenient to use but has some other features.
A more convenient GUI version was created. It direclty injects itself into WC3 and provides the normal Battle.Net features.
We fixed a small bug with this GUI so you won’t disconnect from Battle.Net by entering an invalid game name.

Installation

In order to work the GProxy++ requires the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86). Probably the x86 version satisfies the requirements. But just in case there is also Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x64) for 64bit Windows. If you are unsure install them both (the 64bit version will fail to install if you do not have an 64bit Windows).

To install the GProxy++ GUI Version you need to download this zip file:

GProxy++ Gui Version (fixed by Velocity2k) (93.8 KiB, 2132 downloads)

Simple extract those three file from the zip file to your WC3 installation (probably C:\Program Files\Warcraft III\).

That’s it. Now you have to start the gproxy.exe which will start WC3 and should change your Battle.Net gateway (magnifying glass symbol, next to the Battle.Net button) to its own.
Ensure no firewall will block GProxy++ and GProxy will relay every Battle.Net connection and restoring your connection to ghost bots (if possible).

For easy access you might want to create an shortcut and change its symbol like this (a German Windows 7)
shortcut