Official forums for BZFlag.org

Hello all,

Over the last few weeks I have been playing BZFlag with a few colleagues at work. The project we work on has quietened down somewhat and we were after something to entertain us while we had little to do. One of the guys found BZFlag and we've been playing against each other for the last month or so.

I play on my 1st generation MacBook, another guy sometimes plays on his laptop using Ubuntu, while others play on laptops running Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7. We often use another laptop running Ubuntu to run the server.

One thing we found was that the server wasn't as easy to configure as we would have liked, the config file is brilliant, but changing it means opening it up, finding the bit to edit, then relaunching the server.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on a project that I call the BZFlag Server GUI Tool. It's literally only just gained basic functionality, but it allows one to graphically configure most aspects of the config file and launch the server.
It is largely OS independent, written in Java (in know, not the best language on the planet, but my next choice was Perl...They are the two languages I know well enough). The GUI could do with some work on Linux and Windows, some of the code isn't the cleanest and still needs comments, the wiki on the Google Code site is horribly empty, but the app itself works well enough for basic use at the moment.
It is my hope that the app will grow to include all options that bzfs supports, plus do things like map rotation.

Thanks for making such a great game, and I should really get everyone onto a public server sometime!

Ben

IIRC, there was a server GUI on windows in the web browser? but that may have been pre2.0? But, sounds great! Good Job!

MDSKPR wrote:IIRC, there was a server GUI on windows in the web browser? but that may have been pre2.0? But, sounds great! Good Job!

There was a web browser based GUI, but it seems t o have fallen out of use, according to the project page:

Please mind that this software is pretty old and probably outdated.

I've had a look around and found a couple of things for Windows, but seeing as I don't own a Windows based machine it was little use to me. I wanted something that was easily made cross-platform compatible.

Anyway, I hope if anyone tried it they can let me know about any bugs via the Issues page on the project site Any bugs, niggles, or feature requests are most welcome!

There are also a couple launcher tools written in C# in our source repository that can be run on Windows (through the .NET Framework) and on Linux and OSX through the mono project. The newer one is "StartBZFS" and the older one I had been writing is BZFSLauncher, and both are under /trunk/bzflag/tools/ in our SVN. I even ran the same .exe on my Nokia N800 which runs a Debian-based Linux.

forquare1 wrote: It is largely OS independent, written in Java (in know, not the best language ...<snip>

Actually in this case I think Java is a good choice, because it does work on the three main platforms the game runs on (Win/OSX/Linux). I've (twice) half started a similar thing myself (in Java) but never found the time to get much further than the GUI. As a server owner, I would definitely find a use for a nice server config tool.

Grans

blast wrote:There are also a couple launcher tools written in C# in our source repository that can be run on Windows (through the .NET Framework) and on Linux and OSX through the mono project. The newer one is "StartBZFS" and the older one I had been writing is BZFSLauncher, and both are under /trunk/bzflag/tools/ in our SVN. I even ran the same .exe on my Nokia N800 which runs a Debian-based Linux.

Nice, had I known of such tools I probably wouldn't have started my own. It would be a good idea to have the wiki updated to point to such tools

Grans Remedy wrote:

forquare1 wrote:It is largely OS independent, written in Java (in know, not the best language ...<snip>

Actually in this case I think Java is a good choice, because it does work on the three main platforms the game runs on (Win/OSX/Linux). I've (twice) half started a similar thing myself (in Java) but never found the time to get much further than the GUI. As a server owner, I would definitely find a use for a nice server config tool.

Cool The hardest bit cross-platform wise is to do the differences such as "Documents" vs "My Documents", and "C:\Program Files\BZflag" vs "/Applications/BZFlag" vs "/usr/games/bzfs".
Today the office is empty, so I shall be updating the code and documentation

forquare1 wrote: Nice, had I known of such tools I probably wouldn't have started my own. It would be a good idea to have the wiki updated to point to such tools

Grans Remedy wrote:

forquare1 wrote:It is largely OS independent, written in Java (in know, not the best language ...<snip>

Actually in this case I think Java is a good choice, because it does work on the three main platforms the game runs on (Win/OSX/Linux). I've (twice) half started a similar thing myself (in Java) but never found the time to get much further than the GUI. As a server owner, I would definitely find a use for a nice server config tool.

Cool The hardest bit cross-platform wise is to do the differences such as "Documents" vs "My Documents", and "C:\Program Files\BZflag" vs "/Applications/BZFlag" vs "/usr/games/bzfs".
Today the office is empty, so I shall be updating the code and documentation

The code has been in the SVN system for a while but it was never part of a release ( since v3 is stalled ).
Most development talk happens on the IRC channel so that would be a good place to discuss stuff too.

Grans Remedy C# has the same properties using mono and is installed by default on windows ( the most common OS we ship for)

JeffM wrote: Grans Remedy C# has the same properties using mono and is installed by default on windows ( the most common OS we ship for)

Well, a C# winforms app might build in MonoDevelop (Mono on Linux & OS X), but it wont look like a Linux or OS X app. Further, there is no visual GUI builder for winforms in MonoDevelop for Linux or OS X (as far as I know) so no easy tweaking of the UI on those platforms.

Java/Swing just does this stuff better, at this time, IMO.

It may just be that I have had bad experience with Mono apps and that I was taught Java, but IMO C# apps don't run as well on Linux/Mac as they do on Windows.
Java might not be fantastic, but I find it has a more consistent experience across platforms, IMO.

Grans Remedy wrote:

JeffM wrote: Grans Remedy C# has the same properties using mono and is installed by default on windows ( the most common OS we ship for)

Well, a C# winforms app might build in MonoDevelop (Mono on Linux & OS X), but it wont look like a Linux or OS X app. Further, there is no visual GUI builder for winforms in MonoDevelop for Linux or OS X (as far as I know) so no easy tweaking of the UI on those platforms.

Java/Swing just does this stuff better, at this time, IMO.

The same can be said for a java app, they tend to look like crap on windows.

There is also a GTK.net implementation on all the major platforms if you want the UI to look the same and use a free toolkit.