Possibilities?

[Danege]

Hey there,

Let me first introduce myself. I'm new to the community. Me and a fellow gamer are coming to check the game out. We're looking to start a project, and BZFlag seems to be the best game out there to match our needs.

I played a bit last night, still getting familiar with the game. I will be doing some development to the source code and my friend who will probably introduce himself soon will be doing a lot of map editing and other such graphical things.

I have a few questions:

1.
- Has anyone developed a turret for the game yet? So you can actually drive and look around/shoot at the same time.

2.
- As far as map editing, what are our limitations?

3.
- Can any 3D model be used?

4.
- Can tank models be changed?

5.
- Has anyone tried to add more than 1 tank option? (Large slow tank, small fast tank, etc)



I have plenty more question, which can probably be answered by browsing the boards, but I thought I'd say hello and ask a few while I was!

Nice to meet everyone. I'll also repost this top portion in the General section!

Cheers!

[JeffM]

1) No, it's not part of the game design, as stated in the first post in this forum.
2) There are many, BZFlag is mostly a 2.5d game, you can use meshes in maps but they have some limitations in how things can interact with them. There is a lot of info on the wiki about map editing.
3) If you can convert it to bzw, sure.
4) No.
5) It has been discussed somewhat but is again not part of the core design, see #1.

[FiringSquad]

Regarding the Large Slow Tank/Small Fast Tank...

Check out what happens with the Obesity Flag and the Tiny/Thief flag.

Also, there's nothing to stop you introducing a turret or whatever you want into the code so long as it's for your own personal use.
It is very unlikely though, that it will be adopted as standard by the BZFlag community.
The powers that be here, have pretty much decided that the tank will be a flat terrain vehicle with a turret welded into position, along with a couple of other limitations.
It makes development less complicated and yet manages to produce a game with amazing playability. Sure it's not very realistic, but then again neither are tanks with wings.

[Danege]

Thanks for the info guys!

Sorry for not reading all posts JeffM, as I said I wanted to say hello and I included some questions while I was doing so!

Anyhow, if all goes to plan(when does that ever happen!) I will be working on a turret, shields, more weapons/modules, a new way to select these (not by just running over a flag), more tanks, and many more little upgrades.

I understand that the 'powers that be' dictate what goes live for BZFlag, and I'm not quite familiar with the licensing yet but I will be doing some research. Perhaps a server with these options is a possibility?

We'll see. This will more than likely take me a while as I have to learn the code structure, and do some upgrading on my C++ skills, but I can assure you that whatever I introduce will be hella-fun!

P.S.

Why can tank models not be changed? Large portion of code would have to be revised?

[JeffM]

What you are describing is basically your own fork of bzflag, and that is totally fine. It'll be a slightly different game, but BZflag is licensed to let you do exactly that, just so long as you also release the source code that you modify. We even have provisions in our public services policy to let your fork use the main list server and global authentication system, all you have to do is change your protocol version number to something other then the current live clients so players don't get confused. I would recomend giving your fork a new name, or some variant of BZFlag to ease confusion as well.

The tank models are currently hard coded into the game as C++ openGL calls.

[wassup]

Regarding the Large Slow Tank/Small Fast Tank...

Check out what happens with the Obesity Flag and the Tiny/Thief flag.

Also, there's nothing to stop you introducing a turret or whatever you want into the code so long as it's for your own personal use.
It is very unlikely though, that it will be adopted as standard by the BZFlag community.
The powers that be here, have pretty much decided that the tank will be a flat terrain vehicle with a turret welded into position, along with a couple of other limitations.
It makes development less complicated and yet manages to produce a game with amazing playability. Sure it's not very realistic, but then again neither are tanks with wings.

Wouldn't making and introducing a turret code be considered a cheat?

The reason I say this is because it would be for his own personal use so; a player with a turret controlled tank would be at an unfair advantage, correct?

[blast]

wassup - as JeffM said, "all you have to do is change your protocol version number to something other then the current live clients so players don't get confused". So a client with this modified turret code would only be something that should be done on servers that are specifically set up for clients with modified turret code. Just like how 2.0.x clients do not see and can not join 1.10.x servers.