How to Install

Cross Platform

Zero Install

Zero Install is a system that can automatically download and run the latest version of a software package. We support it for Windows, Linux 32 bit and Linux 64 bit. Head over to the main installation feed for instructions. If you subscribe to that feed, you will get the regular releases by default. Also available: Beta feed, alpha feed and experimental feed.

Zero Install is the most convenient way to get staged builds. For alphas and betas, that means you get new builds six hours before anyone else. To get to the staged releases from each feed, set the Preferred stability to Developer.

To get release candidates, either subscribe to their dedicated feed or subscribe to the main feed and set Preferred stability to Testing.

Steam

Armagetron Advanced is available on Steam as Retrocycles. You can switch between branches the Betas tabs in Properties. NONE gives you regular releases, staging gives you staged releases and release candidates. Alpha, beta and experimental are what they are here.

Steam sadly has no support for install several branches in parallel, on one Steam installation anyway.

itch.io

On itch.io, it’s simply Armagetron Advanced. You can use the itch client to receive automatic updates. The branch name is in the filename and matches the designation here.

Which of these do I pick?

If you already have a Steam or itch client running all of the time, go with that. Both system have incremental updates, meaning that when an update comes out, you only download the bits that are new. That’s neat.

If you don’t have any of those, give Zero Install a try. Of the three, it has the lowest system overhead and makes up for the lack of incremental downloads with raw speed and flexibility. If that doesn’t make you happy, move on to itch.io. Steam is slowest to start up and regularly does self-updates with download sizes in the hundreds of megabytes, so I would not recommend it for this one game.

Ubuntu users can additionally get a version that’s best for their system from the PPA.

Windows Installer

We supply installer executables for each build. Download and execute them. Versions from different branches generally do not overwrite each other, so you can have alpha and release builds in parallel.

Linux

Ubuntu PPA

Is described on its own page.

AppImage

For direct download from the individual build pages, we offer AppImages. They are self contained executables that run on their own and contain all of the data, too. Just download one, flag it as executable and run. Your file manager will have a checkbox to mark the download as executable; failing that, you can use the command line and

chmod +x <name of download> 

More information can be found on the AppImageHub page.

NixOS note: Use the appimage-run wrapper to run AppImages.

Flatpak

Is described on its own page.

Containers for servers

A complex topic, also on its own page. So far, for alpha builds only.

Source

If any of the above methods don’t work for your or you just like to compile your own programs, there is the source tarball. To use that, download it and in some empty directory, execute

tar -xjf <path>/<archive name>.tbz
mkdir build
cd build
../<archive name>/configure
make -j `nproc`

You can run the game directly from the build directory with

make run

Or install it on the system with

sudo make install