Official forums for BZFlag.org

First, thank you for taking the time to try it and give such detailed feedback. 1. What are the plans for long term support? (To avoid it starting and dying a month later.) 2. Will super flags be implemented? 3. How are you solving the lag problem? 4. Will we be notified of any major releases? 5. An...

I'm working on a BZFlag-like game project. At this point, it is more or less a clone of BZFlag, with HiX map and with very similar physics. The working title for the game is "Battleground Sports". You can head to this link to download a very early dev build. Binaries are currently availabl...

I find myself having to defend my opinion on the subject of making caps count matter. The problem with only considering win/loss is that matches between strong teams and relatively weaker teams will be much less likely to be played, as the stronger team will have no incentive to play if points won f...

I'm with the opinion that player rating should not be affected by level of activity. Also, I'd personally prefer that the margin of score difference in a match not be a factor in the rating. Continuing to play a match where you're being soundly beaten just to try to lose fewer points than otherwise ...

I don't understand how you arrive at the conclusion that caps should be taken into account in order to have competitive game play at all . In addition your analogy with football makes little sense as in football the noumber of goals does not result in more points gained. A win always results in 3 p...

I think number of caps should be taken into account if we want a competitive game at all. and as to flag camping and PCs, that's all part of the game, and players who abuse it only hurt their own reputation. Think of it like a football match where a player from the other side is injured and your tea...

My understanding is that points are not given based on absolute win/lose ratio, but instead on the final match score and the average elo of players participating. To take this a step further, I would like to see the system estimate the expected final score and that's where the line should be drawn f...

Agree with Monster. My opinion is to treat a team like a unit and only use team score for calculating elo for both the team and the team players when they play under its name. Players on teams can play freely in mixed (dynamic) teams, but in this case, only their own elo is involved.

I'm very sorry to hear this. T-roy was the nicest person I ever had the pleasure to know among all bzflag players. My condolences to his family.

Here is my take on how the settings should be. I only use mouse to play, so my keyboard recommendations may be off - General: confine mouse: motionbox Input: - keyboard profile fire: q,w (make more than 2 keys configurable?) toggle zoom short: e (down=short, up=medium) toggle zoom long: d (down long...

Video tutorials are great, but in this case I think it wouldn't help a lot, as new players should not be expected to watch a video telling them to change the default settings to make the game playable. I think multiple settings profiles to chose between would probably work well enough.

I don't know about Snap packages, but there is Appimage which I tried a few times and find pretty good. Also https://portablelinuxgames.org/ has so many games bundled using it.

What about keyboard repeat function? it is probably available on all systems.

I would also like to use this, so I need to know if it's considered a cheat.

Mouse speed isn't a BZFlag setting. As for zoom, you mean radar zoom levels? Those are shown in the key binding screen and the help menu. I know, but I think informing new players of the possibilities in a helpful way would be a good idea. For zooming, I use one key to toggle between short range an...

It is my observation that the default settings work against new players while seasoned players get the advantage of both experience and enhanced settings. Let me explain: - Shot lines are lagging and short by default, when virtually every experienced player has changed them to long(even longer than ...

I tried to test this, but there are a few issues: - I can't run it multiple times on the same machine, as the first instance grabs the mouse even when it doesn't have focus. - There is no way I found to run a server (without gui) from the command line. A public server should be hosted so players can...

Ok, I'll bite. I think to make the game attractive it obviously needs to get new features and to fix the decades old problems. And for it to happen 1-The barrier to entry for contributors has to be lowered quite a bit, and 2- The game should be developed by people who actually play it, occasionally ...

ccb, I have concluded that the change to game play introduced by altering bullets speed would throw many LU players off. Perhaps if it is a new game, or as you said, on other maps, this might fit better. IMO, that leaves us with the only other mean to improve the situation, that is showing the lag s...

I consider this suggestion rejected. Thanks for your time.

Actually we are used to a lot of variation, since tank velocity is added when determining shot speed. If my understanding is correct, a tank moves forward at 25 world units/sec, and backward at 12.5 wu/sec which means the slowest shot is 87.5 wu/sec and the fastest is 125 wu/sec . For this mod to ha...

The tank indicator would be visible on the radar. I do not see why it would be hard to identify the source of bullets in this case. Perhaps in a situation where there are 4 or more attacking tanks this would be an issue, but this is a rare situation.

There are two possibilities
- Mark tank differently based on its current lag. The result is that bullet speed from the same tank can vary if there is a lag spike
- Fix the bullet speed for every tank based on long term average lag, ignoring any in-game lag variation

Exuro, yes, this is how it works. In reality the variation is not too great, as it fluctuates between 0% for very low lg and around 8% for very high lag (500ms combined)

blast, I have read the documents you shared, but I have not found any thing that change my mind on the subject. The methods applied in these cases if taken to BZFlag will lead to either or both of: 1- Jerky movement on the client, as the server will often disagree with the client and the client has ...

I meant that death calc should continue to be done based on client side detection, having it any other way will adversely affect enjoyment of the game. BTW, I think that bullet speed increase is not very different from spawning a bullet in a more advanced position, the only difference being that in ...