Official forums for BZFlag.org

During the mid-90's, I visited a friend at Columbia (actually Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) who had a few SGIs, and I vaguely remember a Battlezone-like game. As I recall it was played on a tan square, not too big, with something like dark blue pyramids. Since I'd done a port of Battlezone to th...

The original Battlezone had a low-frequency engine rumble, which shifted in frequency a little based on your tank's speed; this might be a nice addition to the game. It could add some computation to the clients, especially if you can hear others' tanks, and echoes and such are done right. But it mig...

I'd love to see a flag that would increase the range of bullets, and perhaps their speed too, so that one could hit targets at long range (without the overkill, sometimes literally, of Laser). This is distinct from Laser in that other players could see the shots and have time to avoid them, and the ...

I like the symmetries in it; Dutchrai's got a point, that it may be for experts. On the other hand, it'd probably be good for lots of players, there being lots of structure to get involved with. I didn't check the block count, if it's high that might create a lag issue - but at first glance it didn'...

I think the Bzmapper conditionals at the hands of the server admins may work, if a little awkward (basically using it as a kind of preprocessor before bzfs). I suppose it depends on how far one wants to go in integrating things, and providing one interface rather than two - functionally, it's the sa...

I think you might have misunderstood me - I want the finished map (whether produced by BZmapper or by hand) to stand alone, and have features in it turned on or off by the server admin, without any changes having to be made to the map file. Alternatively, it may not be too far a stretch to suggest t...

I was working on a map for the current map contest, and it occurred to me that it might be nice if I could leave some choices to the server admin, so that the map would adapt itself to his requirements. He (or she) might want to pass in a, say, a "sparse" flag for better performance; or mo...

This applies to the map contest - I meant to reply on that thread, but haven't slept enough recently to get it right. One thing - if possible it might be good to allow submitters to include a paragraph describing the main themes or ideas in the map (this could be included in comments in the map file...

This may seem a weird sort of 'enhancement', not being technical, but it seems to me we need more players. For a game of this quality and availability, I would have thought that there would be thousands of people at any one time - not only aren't there, but sometimes it seems (subjectively) that the...

The other day I tried BZFlag in "Windowed" mode on my PC (Windows 2000 machine). It occurred to me that it might be nice to have significantly smaller windows, each in observer mode on (collectively) all games that have active players. I picture a sort of grid of these, similar to the bank...

It would be nice to have the tanks on radar (currently small colored squares) rotate to indicate what the real tanks are doing, and perhaps have a one-pixel or so addition to indicate barrel direction. Of course, perhaps the limitations in the current display are right for game balance, but it seems...

The hepcat one; it isn't all the time by any means, but it certainly happens. If I play for, say, 20 minutes, I might have somebody pop up in a very advantageous position 2 or 3 times during the game. Seems about like half the time I'm trying to get the enemy's flag back to our base somebody shows u...

Recently I've been playing CTF a lot, and have a few thoughts. 1 - several times when I've grabbed the enemy's flag and headed home, I've picked a route on the safe side of a line of my teammates, who can defend the homeward path - a good thing I think, finally getting towards some level of useful c...

[quote="Patlabor221"]Other then the fact that the client would have to disconnect and reconnect to a new IP or port. If your talking about on the same server, same connection, then why not just bump em to observer and silence em. and if you can detect that on the server, why not just boot ...

I agree, amazing map. Could you send me the map file, just so I can see what some of the objects look like?

I'd like to sign up for testing, too. With family stuff going on the evening it'll probably be slightly on the later side, U.S. East Coast time (say, 10 PM). And other times I may well be available, but it's hard to say in advance. It'd be great to be able to help out in some way.

That's understandable, so just take it as something for your amusement. However, there might be a small seed of something useful lurking in there - the ability to take a running server and migrate it from one piece of hardware to another, with minimal game disruption. This is something I'd love to d...

When half asleep the other day it occurred to me that if Star Trek fans can have successful conferences, and random hackers can have successful conferences (e.g DefCon), it might be great to have one for BZFlag people. First it'd be fun to meet people I've only seen virtually, and to talk with some ...

Years ago I thought of a hack for the real world, mainly tongue in cheek: nasty leaders of various countries would be drugged, kidnapped, and moved to identical surrounding somewhere in the U.S. (with their assistants and staff paid to be part of this), so that they could continue to do whatever it ...

Agreed, up to the point about cheaters: they shouldn't set the agenda. If it comes to that in practice, other solutions are available - requiring some sort of authentication via certificate at connect, with banning applying to that, for instance. I think it would be a mistake for the lowest (un)comm...

This sort of is tied to the discussion of sun, moon, lighting, and shadow, but I didn't tack it on to that thread because it really goes in another direction, beyond issues of illumination. Imagine local conditions which change strategy: for example, a fog bank (or quiet snow storm, or louder rainst...

Yet it might be just as interesting if the game stayed true to nature - real shadows (though of course not on both sides of a building), and in darkness either illumination objects (local lights) to cast light, or... headlights. You turn them on, and you light up your visual cone, and see well there...

While I haven't yet played on it, I like it a lot - simple, clean, yet with enough structure to be interesting. What server is it running on? Is it still up?

In my last map (posted in another forum) I included a representation of Stonehenge as it is now. I didn't put in the heelstone, and it got me thinking: how accurate is the sun movement in the game? Now I admit this is probably silly, and nobody will likely care - but I at least am strongly affected ...

I've attached the same map with a small modification - in one place where you were supposed to be able to jump up a set of surfaces, the last height was too high.