Introduction

Tranz Am is a game released about 1983 by Ultimate (now Rare).
It's a simple game of driving across the barren American wilderness in the year 3472 (i.e. it called for minimal graphics and coding, and America seemed cool to a bleak 1980's Britain). The object of the game is to gather 8 cups, avoid obstacles and the Deadly Black Turbos (black cars to you and me). Or, as the review says, 'Transam follows the tradition of quality graphics and original aims... there are four car controls and also pause.'.
The lessons will take us through game configuration, animation, graphics handling, tile maps, collision detection, path-finding and game control to name a few.
Software and Libraries
The tutorial uses the following libraries for development of the game:- Allegro 4.2.
- AXL. A series of modules for helping with Allegro configuration, animation, graphics and game control. The main menu consists of a full AXL explanation. AXL also uses the tinyXML library for XML file handling and (optionally if it exists) FBlend
- Mappy. A tile map engine
Currently a binary version exists only for Windows but works under Wine. However, the source code is available that can be compiled against winelib. Get the editor from www.TileMap.co.uk. A beta JAVA version is available too. Older versions for DOS exist, and possibly an OSX version.
Download
You have a number of options:- Tutorial and libraries only.
- Full system. This is the above tutorial plus extra tutorials and documentation for AXL. There is a binary and source code version available.
Installation
- If you have downloaded the full AXL system, then simply unzip
- If you do not have AXL and have downloaded only the tutorial then simply unzip
- If you already have AXL, remove your existing version and download the full version.
Setup
All the code/binaries for the tutorial are within the 'AXL_Projects\tutorial' directory. It contains the following directories:- bin: the XML files (*.xml) that configure the game, the game's tile map (tranzam.fmp) and the the compiled lessons you make
- bin/gfx: the graphics used in the game
- code: the code for each of the tutorials
- code/libraries: the extra libraries tranzam requires (mappy tile mapping system)
- code/temp: temporary folder, e.g. for storing your partial link files, etc.
For Visual Studio users, instead of loading up each tutorial there exists in the code directory the file Tutorials.sln - opening this will load up every tutorial into the solution window.
Note for Dev-C++ users. When compiling each project, clear out the temp directory (e.g. run the CLEAN menu option) as it tends to reuse old .o files and may give compiler errors.
Manual Project Creation
If you are not using any of the above systems (Visual Studio 2005/VC8, DevC++) or you have moved some files around, do the following:- Create a standard Allegro project/make file
- Add to the compile list all of the axl_*.cpp files from the 'AXl_Projects\source directory (three files)
- Add to the compile list all of the tinyxml*.cpp files in the AXL_Projects\extern\tinyxml_minimum directory (four files)
- Add to the compile list mappyal.c in the AXL_Projects\tests\tranzam\develop\code\libraries directory
Lessons
The lessons are broken down as follows:
- Setting up our game's framework, ensuring it compiles and displaying a graphic
- Loading the map and scrolling it
- Defining and placing the car
- Updating the Car's fuel, temperature, speed and distance
- Adding a menu system and using the AXL Configuration class
- Bringing the Map alive, changing animations, countdown timers
- Adding national and local radar
- Placing and creating Enemy Cars
- the A-Star algorithm
- Applying A-Star to the enemies
- Moving the enemies : unfinished
- To finish : unfinished
Click on Article 1 for the first lesson. The first and last lesson are pre-supplied as Windows executables just in case you want to know the extent of the lessons :)