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So maybe you get most of that. I've been thinking about this for 18 months, so I'm gonna go ahead and answer my own post.

The problem with progressive mode is there's no limit on the total of ALL player's "flag level" that may be acheived. This is how it'll be.
Three players have GM's Or Lasers, all the others can only progress by kiling each other. If two players on the same team can get Laser and GM at the same time, forget it. It places a premium on having all players at a comparable skill level. This is where defender mode comes in. By having many flags pop out of a "Level 7" tank when he's shot, it creates an incentive for players to team up against him.

In Progressive, when several low-level players team up against a level seven tank, only one player gets the kill, and progresses one level.
In Defender, when several players team up against a level seven tank, there are several flags lying about the scene of the kill, this creates a new fight to grab the flags before anyone else can. This is why ANY flag must act as a shield. The total flag potential at any one time is number of players plus one. Players with no flags do not progress by shooting each other. Players with low level flags are rewarded for making a kill against a high level player because they have a good chance to advance at least one level.

A-Delusion: That... is REALLY awesome! At first I was like, huh? But when you described how it would be played, that is a really neat way of doing it. Question; is Defender built on top of the progressive concept? Using progressive, just adding the defender idea? Kudos...

Another way, maybe, would be kind of like "Phoenix" in which you rack up money for kills, and then you buy weapons and/or defense. This could be used in matches or something...

I like most of the ideas presented here... they're all pretty cool, and would definately change bzflag. Though I do like it as it is now. I guess change is good sometimes, though.

Good day.

its a nice idea but i got a better idea to change your flag. using a command might be long and in BZ, you can't lose time because you can get killed. there should be a key to change flags like the mouse wheel or Shift+left/right arrow. You should see in the bottom of the screen your inventory and little square around the flag your using. U have to move to take ur flag. it would help.

Delusion, that seems nice, but I'd take the whole score as the deciding factor, not just kills. If a player has a really high score, give them less powerful flags, and if their score is lower, give them more powerful flags. I'm not saying eliminate powerful flags from good players, but they need them less, so make the chances a lot lower of them getting say, a GM or L.

Well, that's all my dream. I don't want to hijack L4M3R's post.
You can see the current application of his of his Ideas on his "Compound" server, It's pretty cool the way it gives you flags.

i tried to play on Compound but its very laggy on my computer. im going to try somewhere else soon.

Trepan gave L4M3R some hints on how to change the object groupings on the Compound, It should speed it up signifigantly.

Spazzy Mcgee wrote:whenever you pick up a flag, it is added to your arsenal, so if you 'drop' a flag, you can change back to it by doing a command - untill you die and your arsenal gets reset. thoughts?

What an interesting idea....

DTRemenak wrote:

Spazzy Mcgee wrote:whenever you pick up a flag, it is added to your arsenal, so if you 'drop' a flag, you can change back to it by doing a command - untill you die and your arsenal gets reset. thoughts?

What an interesting idea....

On my to-do list (well, something like it)

L4m3r wrote:l4m3r.servegame.com:4200

l4m3r did you mean port 4300

Matt? wrote:l4m3r did you mean port 4300

No, that was a different server, a long time ago.

The compound does have assigned flags, though.

l4m3r.bzflag.bz:4300

We've made some progress on a server using progressive flags. First test was last night.
Keep your eyes on the server list.

A-Delusion wrote:We've made some progress on a server using progressive flags. First test was last night.

Ah, yes, but it's very, VERY buggy. I'd like to see the source...
(Unless it's all confidential stuff. )
((Yes, yes, I do know a teeny bit about Python.))

A-Delusion wrote:What do you think?

Yesterday I tried "progressive" and I, as a bad player, didn't like it very much. I need good flags to be able to hit others. The best I could reach was level 2 and that was even more frustrating than playing on a standard, crowded server.

In the "defensive" format, you'd have to make the flags spray out in all directions. Otherwise it would generate large piles of flags and you could gobble them all up at once.

Very cool idea though

Thief could be a veeery useful flag in this scenario.

Imagin:

A gm camper is owning everyone
a thief comes charging in at high speed and steals the gm. That could be you with thief.

Also, thief should be more common as it allows people to change flags

BTW this ^ post is in refernce to the earlier idea of superflag spawnwith

Very helpful thank you so much.

What ever happened to "The Compound"???
It had a flag setup like the one described, just not as advanced- could you play off the programing already in place?

BTW: L4M3R made the coumpound (or did you just host it?) so why is this a new topic or is this an old topic and I'm just going crazy?

I like it- only thing is someone could stand in one place and be able to never die because everytime he is shot, he displaces three flags, so he will automatically get one then he has a new shield so then when someone shoots him he justs drops his flag and puts out three more and picks up another- for 1- the number of flags around him would increase rapidly and second- he wouldn't die

Most of these ideas are going to become very difficult to code and I seriously doubt any of the devs with want to code this. My idea is simple. You start with a flag and in maybe 2 or 3 HARD places to get, there are a few thief flags and that way, it minimizes on the "well thats not fair he got that flag blah blah".

I put progressive mode on BattleZone Vectrex, at a-delusion.no-ip.biz port 4020.
Combined with rabbit mode I think I got it tuned pretty well. Hunters start with steamroller, as soon as you become rabbit you get a shield. Another kill gets you a random choice of 3 flags, then you need 2 more kills to get SW, 3 more kills earns you a GM... and so on.
I had teamkills giving you bad flags, but took that off for rabbit mode.

Oh yeah, all the bugs have been worked out. It works great. Of course you gotta have two players to test it. It's fully configurable. I can control which flags you get, how many kills it takes to get them.
The plugin has been made available, and I'll help anybody who wants to use it.

Dark Zodiac wrote:Most of these ideas are going to become very difficult to code and I seriously doubt any of the devs with want to code this. My idea is simple. You start with a flag and in maybe 2 or 3 HARD places to get, there are a few thief flags and that way, it minimizes on the "well thats not fair he got that flag blah blah".

Actually, I don't think anything yet mentioned would be "very difficult". Scattering flags would admittedly be a bit of a PITA, but it's certainly doable with the current proto.

Furthermore, A few of the ideas have in fact been implemented.

This thread isn't an enhancement request- it's a discussion for specialty games and servers. The great thing about server plugins is that we don't need to rely on the devs (who you seem to LOVE to bag on) to add server features. Furthermore, it allows server owners to create customized specialty servers without intensive coding or knowledge of the BZFS codebase.

But don't fprget it was the devs that exposed the API's for the plugins in the first place.

Optic Delusion wrote:But don't fprget it was the devs that exposed the API's for the plugins in the first place.

Of course. And we are grateful for that.

I'm in no way trying to downplay the developers' importance, either- my point is that by creating an API they gave us an easy way to modify the server ourselves.