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Hi!!

Didnt know where to post this but it ended up here.

New idea of the game:

Any server any map depending the set ups, playing the game in total darkness. With help of diffrent flags and settings for the server owner.

Bzflag Nightvison - game by night.

Needs new flags, for example:

Goggles - Makes it lighter so you can see,allmost like normal

Headlight - Makes a "long" light in front of you, the way the tank is faceing, hard to hide around a corner when lihts blow your position

Glow - Your tank glows so you can see close around you.

Star - Gives screen short flashings of daylight for a few seconds, works 1 time

Heat - Makes radar show the heat of tanks, makes tanks red on radar. With time settings

Buildings should be set like a radioactive kind of green.



This is just an idea, maybe someone can fill up with flags or settings.
Or maybe is just a bad idea. I only tried to find new ways of the game. Its up to others now to fill in, and the ones that is developing starts to work.

Sniper 50

This idea sounds nice, although it's very hard to implement stuff like this, and usually these kinds of ideas don't work anyways because it makes the game more complicated than it's meant to be. Still, its good to come up with ideas like this that might be used in later versions/plugins.

I think the idea seems a bit too much, and a bit too complicated, but as for the greenish buildings, you can find an old 'battlezone' type server at a-delusion.no-ip.biz:4020.

There's already a way to make things black, with fog.

I think the Heat flag is the coolest, it could make the trackmarks show up bright red, last longer, and let you see a heat signature when a tank is behind a building.

This means the flag has tactical uses outside of the hypothetical heavy fog, but gets really cool when there's fog as well.

The only problem is...this sounds a lot like the Seer flag. You should probably be able to see Cloakers with this right?

I like the sound of the heat flag, maybe when the tanks stopped, you couldn't see them anymore, sounds like fun.

Joe-Schmoe wrote:The only problem is...this sounds a lot like the Seer flag. You should probably be able to see Cloakers with this right?

No, we can 'see' heat because it emits electromagnetic waves somewhere in the infared zone. A cloaked device warps electromagnetic waves so that they pass "around" the cloaked area and not actually bounce off of it.

So realism would say no. In a game it's up to the developers, though.

This sounds like an awesome idea. Here's a few more flag ideas:

Flare: Your shot is super-bright, lighting things up near it.
Dazzle: When you shoot, nearby enemy tanks are dazzled, with a whiteout effect for five seconds. This effect follows your shot, but is a small radius.
Position Giveaway: This bad flag makes you obvious in any amount of fog, looking like there was none.

Perhaps when you pick up the Goggles flag, the screen turns a weird green, but shows enemy positions. A Dazzle flag would white you out for ten seconds, as the light would be multiplied so much that it could be blinding.

Position Giveaway: This bad flag makes you obvious in any amount of fog, looking like there was none.

Trouble is... players can turn fog off for thier client, so you can't really bank on it being specific to the gameplay.
If fog were changed to allow forcing clients to display it then this is quite a good idea.

I especially like the heat sensor flag; how about your entire HUD becomes an infra-red camera? Tank can see heat through walls, heat signature slowly decreasing depending on how far away the object is. The disadvantage would be that you can't distinguish tank colours in the HUD, you'd need tio use radar.

I think that the flare and dazzle flags (or at least the effect the flag gives) have been suggested in earlier posts.

How about this bad flag...

Big Flare: Your tank will shoot a large burst of light constantly into the air. Everyone sees it, even from 1000000000000 miles away.

I suppose you should be able to turn on high beams and blind other tanks!

Glow - Your tank glows so you can see close around you.

That Glow flag could also be viewed as a bad flag -- if your tank is really glowing other tanks will easily spot you.

Nice ideas though. You make it, I'll play it.

Wreckage wrote: Nice ideas though. You make it, I'll play it.

*HEADSHOT*

Anyways, I think it needs a few more features:

The moon: If present, this increases the brightness a tad
Comets: They streak by, but are mainly decoration. It's much more fun when they hit . All of the tanks explode
Stars: Again, decoration. What would be awesome would be if you could get a map of the stars, and they make a "location" for the place (North America, South America, Africa, etc.) Not only could you design the ground to look like where you are, but the stars would be correct for that location!

I'm just throwing out ideas. I can't make any sense of programming that requires huge amounts of typing.

FYI, BZFlag's current starfield is correct with respect to reality (and has been for a long time, that's some of the oldest unchanged code in the game). Why else do you think you can set latitude and longitude in your config file?

The sun and moon are also correct, in size, azimuth, bearing, and phase, relative to the game time and location settings. The moon is already tweaked to round towards full instead of new; the only thing we don't handle is atmospheric distortion, smog, and skyglow, which can make the moon look brighter than it really is.

Then lets put in smog. It makes headlights less effective

the changes your talking about are not trivial to implement. The lighting system you would need would most likely require hardware shader support to implement properly. This would greatly change our current system requirements and outright remove a number of supported operating systems.

BZflag is meant to be a simple game.

I like your idea, I think it would be great. But had you think of this; the beam that shoots a beam far away where your pointing, that would give away where you are if other players can see it too. But it sounds really fun and I know I would play it most of the time!

Here's some more flag ideas:

ShadowCloak (SC) : Your tank becomes harder to see at night, and your radar signature winks out more and more. The server has a specific rate of time, such as one day equals three minutes. It can go from uber to useless, with midnight as almost totally undetectable and noon being useless.

SpotLight (SL) : Your tank automatically illuminates an enemy tank near you with a bright light, but ST and CL foil it, as well as SC

BeaCon (BC) : Your tank flashes brightly, illuminating the area around you AND making your location obvious.

EthernalDrive (ED) : Your tank becomes Eternal, with blurry vision and no radar. Immune to normal shots, but SB or another Eternal tank kills you. Your bullets go through objects, and can destroy tanks. However, shots are slow. To drop, you have to go into a teleporter (auto-activated).

What does that do with night? I dunno, it sounds cool (but complicated). It's kinda like PZ, I suppose it could be modded to that.

And an idea...
ZOMBIE TANKS! (lol)

At dusk, a bunch of rouge tanks spawn and drive around randomly. They do not count toward the # of players, and give no points for killing one. Your base emanates a safe area against them. It gives you a reason to fear nightfall!

Spazzy Mcgee wrote: Trouble is... players can turn fog off for thier client, so you can't really bank on it being specific to the gameplay.
If fog were changed to allow forcing clients to display it then this is quite a good idea.

I especially like the heat sensor flag; how about your entire HUD becomes an infra-red camera? Tank can see heat through walls, heat signature slowly decreasing depending on how far away the object is. The disadvantage would be that you can't distinguish tank colours in the HUD, you'd need tio use radar.

Good point, EXCEPT that for some people, including myself, fog causes bad FPS and makes the game unplayeable.

Cruel dog wrote:

Spazzy Mcgee wrote: Trouble is... players can turn fog off for thier client, so you can't really bank on it being specific to the gameplay.
If fog were changed to allow forcing clients to display it then this is quite a good idea.

I especially like the heat sensor flag; how about your entire HUD becomes an infra-red camera? Tank can see heat through walls, heat signature slowly decreasing depending on how far away the object is. The disadvantage would be that you can't distinguish tank colours in the HUD, you'd need tio use radar.

Good point, EXCEPT that for some people, including myself, fog causes bad FPS and makes the game unplayeable.

There's this old saying: Upgrade or Die. I suppose that includes computers as well.

our current fog should never make anything slower, it causes less things to render so it should be faster. I'd like to know what cards it's slow on.

our current fog should never make anything slower, it causes less things to render so it should be faster. I'd like to know what cards it's slow on.

Will there ever be (or is there plans to have) an option whereby we can force the client to display fog? I once made a map that required fog to play properly - I hosted it to see how it played before releasing it, and people just turned off the fog, rendering it completely unplayable.

IMO, forced fog could open up many new concepts for maps.

yes. 3.0will force fog since it does affect gameplay