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BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2012 1:20 am
by JeffM
In preparation for the end of the Mayan calender (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon) we have released BZFlag version 2.4.2.

This is a very minor update with no major features. The primary goal for the release is to have a new package for the Debian maintainers to use in Debian and Ubuntu based Linux distributions.

Some of the features that are included are:
  • Options chat on the left and radar on the right.
    Lagging and leading shot lines on radar.
    Support for Joystick hats in Linux, SDL, and Windows.
    UPnP setup option for servers that can be enabled at build time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPNP).
    Inclusion of the fairCTF, autoFlagReset, and FastMap plugins.
    BZadmin on windows has colors like the Linux one.
The full update list can be found in the ChangeLog that is included with the release.

The source code can be found here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bzflag/ ... rce/2.4.2/

A windows installer can be found here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bzflag/ ... e/download

Please note that we are only releasing a 32 bit installer this time. Nobody used the 64 bit one we made last time since it doesn't really do anything different. You can still build a 64 bit build of everything expect bzadmin if you want.

The Mac OS X build is here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bzflag/ ... p/download

Next week the Debian games team will be working on a Debian package for inclusion in various repositories so at some point there will be packages for Debian and Ubuntu.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2012 10:00 pm
by Avatar
JeffM wrote: Some of the features that are included are:
  • Support for Joystick hats in Linux, SDL, and Windows.
GAH! I've been wanting this since 2.0.0!!!

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2012 10:03 pm
by Zverina
There seems to be a lot of talk about Debian and Ubuntu, how about Fedora?

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Jul 29, 2012 11:22 pm
by blast
Despair wrote:There seems to be a lot of talk about Debian and Ubuntu, how about Fedora?
Fedora already had a package for 2.4.0.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 5:50 am
by Zverina
Oh yeah, it is about 2.4 x_x
Yup, than it is cool.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 1:25 am
by mr64bit
Just a quick question that I've been meaning to ask.
JeffM wrote: Please note that we are only releasing a 32 bit installer this time. Nobody used the 64 bit one we made last time since it doesn't really do anything different. You can still build a 64 bit build of everything expect bzadmin if you want.
If I build it on an x64 machine, is that a 64 bit program then? Just a bit confused because the .exe is placed in bzflag_Win32_Debug.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 1:37 am
by blast
You have to actually set the build target to x64 to build the 64-bit version. Additionally, the 64-bit tools are not included in the express edition of Visual C++, and I'm not sure if they can be added.

The 32-bit binaries were built on a 64-bit system.

my 2.4.2 Debian pkg experience

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 3:11 am
by J_Rey
Well, glad to see the first Debian package out for the 2.4 series now. Since there's more than a few changes, 2.4.2 is in experimental. There can be some major issues with that for users of the current stable version 6.0.5 (squeeze) but should be minimal if running 7.0 (wheezy).

I'm running squeeze and haven't changed it a whole lot from normal except for keeping up with updates. So I added experimental to my sources and then tried to use Synaptic's Force option for the newer version but it kept switching back to 2.0 versions when selecting one-by-one & wouldn't let me select all the bzflag packages at once. So tried aptitude and after going to the bottom of the description section to find the alternate versions then it would let me select them each but then found was blocked by the following dependencies:
libglew1.7
libstdc++6 (4.6 or higher)
libtinfo5 (only required for server)

To get each of those versions of those dependencies then would need to add testing (currently wheezy) to sources also. I did that but then found out that libstdc++6 would need to be upgraded to 4.7 but that would affect dozens of very common packages. So... I didn't feel up for that since I haven't backed up my data comfortably & seems better to just upgrade everything to testing/wheezy then deal with that many of them manually. May try that another day but hope this helps others know what to expect.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 3:36 am
by JeffM
The package is being submitted to backports as well, it just takes longer. We were just too late to get into testing or a security fix for existing code. We are also working on setting up a private repository for people to use until Debian gets it into a stable release.

Experimental is just where everything has to start.

I would not recommend upgrading to testing or experimental just for bzflag, ether build from source or wait a little bit more until other options are available.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 6:05 am
by Zverina
May I ask an Off-Topic Question?

Why is BZFlag written in C++ and not Java for example?

I think that with Java, things would/could have been much easier.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 7:21 am
by joevano
Because it was written in 1992... and java first appeared in 1995. And java wasn't what it is today when it first appeared anyway.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 8:18 am
by Zverina
Agreed, good reason.

As well, Mac did not support Java that much until recently.

Hmm, did not know this game is so old, but it is doing great.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2012 5:03 pm
by JeffM
Java would open up a different set of problems, mostly dealing with speed and OS support/install. The language doesn't really matter, it's how the program is written.

On a historical note, OSX has supported java for a very long time, it even used to be the "preferred" method for cross platform development, but then they moved to Objective C, probably because of how sun was acting at the time.

Please don't hijack threads, if you have a question that is not related to the current discussion then just start a new thread. It is very easy.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 2:18 am
by Sniper752
ok, that has got to be one of the biggest let downs ever! I'm running mac (Lion, and Mountain Lion) and soooooooo want the joystick hats option :(

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 2:24 am
by JeffM
You may be able to build on lion if you have an older version of Xcode.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2012 11:08 pm
by Sniper752
I'd try, but... I have no programming experience and have no idea whatsoever how to do that

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2012 11:13 pm
by JeffM
We do have a task open to make it easier to build on a mac, apple just isn't helping us out very much by changing things.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:03 am
by macsforme
We were finally able to get an official Mac build completed. Link is included in the updated announcement post. Should be compatible with 10.6+ (Intel only). There are no known issues specific to this build right now except the server plugins don't seem to work (also seems like they do not work on the previous 2.4.0 official build). You may have better success building from the command line if you need to run a server with plugins on Mac OS X. This will probably not be fixed under the current build system. We are in dire need of a native Xcode project file going forward in order to be able to support this platform in the future.

Huge kudos to Bulldozer who provided a workaround for a Mac-specific issue which caused a freeze after hiding and un-hiding the application (possibly in our code, possibly in SDL). This fix required us to link against a patched version of the SDL framework included in the application. Pursuant to GNU LGPL licensing requirements, the patch (a two-line change) is available under on our bug tracker listing for this issue at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=d ... tid=103248

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 2:18 pm
by alpha-5H
I run a couple of older macs G4 Dual 1.25 PPC (10.4.11) & G4 AGP 466 ( 10.3.9 / 10.4 server) G3

If it would be useful I can setup these to compile?

Thanks for the continued support!

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 8:00 pm
by JeffM
We have upgraded the XCode project to the current version of XCode that use the apple LLVM compiler instead of GCC. Apple has dropped support for PPC with these versions.

Honestly it's been 3 months since release and you are the first to mention it, so I do not think it's a high priority for us to have a premade build of it. Users who want to compile using the old GCC based system can still build their own.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2013 8:02 pm
by blast
Additionally, at some point we will likely update to using more modern OS X APIs that may not support any of the PPC releases, so you can't count on the PPC platform for the future, not to mention that your OS is full of security holes.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2013 7:33 pm
by alpha-5H
JeffM wrote:We have upgraded the XCode project to the current version of XCode that use the apple LLVM compiler instead of GCC. Apple has dropped support for PPC with these versions.

Honestly it's been 3 months since release and you are the first to mention it, so I do not think it's a high priority for us to have a premade build of it. Users who want to compile using the old GCC based system can still build their own.

:) thanks, it's an old computer I know! I upgraded from my Atari ST !

If it's possible to continue with a working build using GCC then I'd like to look at that. Do you have some links?

not to mention that your OS is full of security holes. ... and it crashes :D but it's more productive for me than XP

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Tue Jan 29, 2013 9:12 pm
by macsforme
Have a look at README.Linux and README.MacOSX for some pointers. If you get a copy of the official 2.4.2 release code, that will also still have the older Xcode project file that builds via autotools and gcc (you can also build via command line). The updated Xcode project was added subsequent to that release.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Tue Nov 24, 2015 10:20 pm
by Aviate
Is the joystick hats option in the latest version? Just want to know before I start using it.

Re: BZFlag 2.4.2 "Doomsday Edition" released

Posted: Wed Nov 25, 2015 12:34 am
by blast
Aviate wrote:Is the joystick hats option in the latest version? Just want to know before I start using it.
Depends on what platform you're using and how it's built. I'd recommend trying out the 2.4.4RC2 we posted recently.