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How to Play

Alex C edited this page Jul 3, 2026 · 1 revision

How to Play

Modes

  • Solo waves on 10 battlefields — outdoor, city, town, mudpit, castle, gymnasium, beach, island, volcano, baby room — plus a DEBUG: KITCHEN SINK level with one of every enemy type at close range, for fast smoke-testing. Easy / medium / hard difficulty. Day / golden hour / night-ops stealth (headlights trade visibility for detection).
  • ENDLESS TOUR hops to a random new battlefield every three cleared waves and keeps your score rolling.
  • Silly mutators: low-g, underwater, balloon, paintball.
  • Five vehicles: tank, plane, biplane, helicopter, and The Runner (on-foot with arm-swing sprinting).
  • On-foot mode: dismount your vehicle and walk. Sprint by pumping your arms, grapple-swing, and climb — using three pickable items found in the world (grapple hook, climbing gloves, energy drink). Walk back to your abandoned vehicle's seat and squeeze either grip to climb back in.
  • Co-op over LAN: one headset drives + machine-guns, the other runs the turret. Both players render as full Rec-Room-style procedural avatars to each other (hip/head/hand IK, no imported skeletal assets), whether seated or on-foot.
  • Versus: tank duel, first to five.
  • New players get voice coaching and cockpit hints; veterans can switch HELP: OFF in the menu and the tank computer stops repeating itself.

Controls

Thumbsticks (fully working — recommended for now)

Input Action
X / L-stick click Auto start ritual (battery + engine)
Left stick Drive (tracks mix automatically)
Right stick Turret traverse / gun elevation
Right trigger Fire cannon (auto-reloads)
A (hold) Coax machine gun
B Fire rocket salvo
Y Recalibrate seat height

Physical grab/poke (in progress — see Known Issues)

The cockpit is built entirely from real, physically-modeled controls meant to be grabbed and poked by hand — flip the battery master, hold the starter, grab the twin tillers to drive, work the turret joystick, cycle the breech lever to reload, arm the rocket console behind its red safety cover. The interaction logic is fully implemented and unit-tested, but a discovery bug currently prevents the real VR rig from finding controls by hand proximity, so physically reaching for a lever doesn't register yet in a real headset. Use the thumbstick controls above until that's fixed.

Hand tracking

Put the controllers down — pinch = trigger (fire), whole-hand squeeze = grab. There's no bare-hand equivalent for the analog thumbsticks yet, so driving/turret-aim currently need a physical controller — hand tracking alone can fire but can't steer. On-foot sprinting (arm-swing) works hands-free either way.

Playtest tuning

Every gameplay number lives in tuning.cfg, auto-created in the app's files directory. On Quest:

/sdcard/Android/data/com.agilelens.tankcommander/files/tuning.cfg

Edit it, restart the app, and the new values take effect immediately — no rebuild needed.

Performance (measured on Quest 3S)

Golden-hour beach, full combat demo, glow + fill-light on: locked 72/72 fps, App GPU 9.2 ms average of the 13.8 ms budget (v0.6.0). Glow costs under 1 ms on the Adreno 740. Foveation ships at level 2. Foveation, glow, and 40+ gameplay dials are runtime-tunable via tuning.cfg above; autostart.cfg in the same directory boots the game into a self-playing demo scene for hands-off profiling:

[auto]
level="beach"
time=1        ; 0 day, 1 golden hour, 2 night
demo=true
delay=6.0

Getting the game

Sideload the APK from Releases onto a Quest 2/3/Pro:

adb install -r -g TankCommanderVR.apk

Or via the App Lab alpha channel invite link (ask in the repo's Discussions or Issues if you need the current one).

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