Official forums for BZFlag.org

Things got weird.

Screenshot I (the screenshots are too big and I'm too lazy to shrink them in GIMP or something)

Notice the broken height and direction indicators.

Screenshot II

Eventually everything just kinda bled into everything else (except in the chat and radar boxes, where everything just had a fade tail (or whatever the heck you call it)). I had fired one shot to see if my gun still worked. It apparently did, but the screen did not.

Screenshot III

Note the text up top.

I'm not complaining -- this isn't a glitch report in the sense that I want to have the "problem" "fixed". I think it's kinda funny. But eventually, the server would not let me fly any longer and I plummeted to the ground, which took me about 30 seconds. Apparently, tank johnson has gotten even higher, but I'll let him handle it in the next post.

Bruh I went to outer space. check this out. I kept shooting and turning in different ways and heights and it ended up looking like this

I think I found the edge of the BZ universe

it has to do with the lazy way BZFlag clears the back buffer (or actually doesn't clear the back buffer). When you go too high, the world skyvolume is smaller than the screen thus doesn't draw over the last frame to "erase" what was there before.

It's a holdover from when 3D accelerators were expensive, slow, and optional. It's trying to minimize the amount of screen pixels that get redrawn every frame because in software rendering that is slow. On modern systems (like the last 15 years) it's fast so BZFlag doesn't have to actually do that, but it's an ancient codebase with few updates so it still does stuff the old way.

Hm. Fascinating.

Also, keep the old code. I have a craptop, and that's probably what's keeping the game playable on my system.

No, it's the low polygon counts that is making it playable. Even integrated Intel chip sets on craptops can clear a back buffer .

This is like from the days of Pentium and 486 CPUs.

Also, this kind of glitch is fun to discover. Edge cases are cool.

They say if you stare into the abyss, it stares back. Can you confirm or deny this, Ary?