RCWeb Tankwar
Tankwar is a shared-screen multiplayer tank arena for RCWeb. One browser becomes the battlefield, while every phone becomes a control deck for its own tank. Players steer through a maze of cover, fire across corridors, and keep respawning into a fast-running deathmatch where the scoreboard can change every few seconds.
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The Game
Tankwar is built as a continuous arena fight rather than a fixed round game. Every player gets a tank, a score, and a place on the live scoreboard, while the whole room shares the same map, bullet field, and wall layout. Hits score points for the attacker, destroyed tanks come back after a respawn delay, and the action keeps rolling without stopping the whole room.
The battlefield itself matters. Arena walls create lanes, chokepoints, and cover, so movement is about more than driving straight at a target. Good positioning lets you peek shots around corners, break line of sight, or survive long enough to re-enter the fight after a bad exchange.
If no one is playing yet, Tankwar can keep the screen alive with demo tanks that roam, dodge, take cover, and fire at each other until a human player joins.
How To Play
Open /tankwar/ on the shared screen. Players scan the QR code to open /tankwar-control/ on their phones in the same room. The phone controller gives each player a movement pad and a fire button.
Use the analog pad to steer your tank. The tank rotates toward your input direction and moves with variable strength, so you can creep carefully through tight cover or surge across open space. Hold or tap fire to shoot down corridors and punish exposed tanks.
Getting hit destroys your tank and gives the point to the player who landed the shot. After a short respawn delay, you return to the battlefield and can start climbing again. Because everyone keeps coming back, Tankwar works as a sustained room deathmatch rather than a one-elimination contest.
Powered By RCWeb
Tankwar uses RCWeb's room-based WebSocket layer to split the game between one display and many phone controllers. The display and all phones join the same RCWeb room using the rc values injected by the Java server. The display publishes a QR code with that room already selected, so players can jump directly into the correct arena.
The display owns the live simulation. It tracks tanks, bullets, walls, respawns, demo opponents, and score updates while resolving movement and projectile collisions for the whole battlefield. Because the shared screen is the single source of truth, every phone sees the same cover, the same hits, and the same scoreboard.
Phones communicate with the display through comms.js and RCWeb function calls. A controller streams analog movement and firing state, while the display sends back registration, score updates, respawn messages, and status pulses for that specific tank. The result feels like a dedicated arena shooter cabinet, but it runs on RCWeb's lightweight Java backend and vanilla browser apps.