8 ms·
BZFlag
- dang 7y agoA thread from 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7902802
- doctoboggan 7y agoOh wow, I played this game a lot about 15 years ago. I was in my teens and this game is the reason I learned linux system administration so I could run my own server. I built a computer with junk parts from my friend's dad's old parts bin and installed ubuntu on it. I struggled with linux then but learned a lot. Some say I am still struggling with linux to this day.
- shadowgovt 7y agoI love that this game is still going on. I had a similar experience; logging onto random servers was an absolute madhouse of learning new rules on the fly.
- WD-42 7y agoThis game, Tux Racer, Chromium B.S.U. If you could get your graphics drivers to work, these were your reward. Learning linux was so fun back in the day! And the fact that you could just apt/rpm install them was mind blowing.
- rzzzt 7y agoGL-117!
- jchw 7y agoOh wow, now THAT was a classic. I remember playing that on an old version of openSuSE... maybe 9 or 10?
- aidenn0 7y agoxboing, crackattack
- brylie 7y agoSuperTux Party is another game in that spirit: https://anti.itch.io/super-tux-party https://anti.itch.io/super-tux-party It's fairly new and made with Godot Engine 3.0. https://godotengine.org https://godotengine.org
- DblPlusUngood 7y agoDon't forget gltron!
- fnordfnordfnord 7y agoBack when I was faculty at a .edu, I installed this game in my student labs and it got a lot of action, despite the availability of much newer games.
- pvg 7y agoI think one reason for this is that the base variant is easy to understand and there's no 'map' to learn making it a great fit for casual, pick-up play. BZFlag is the OG Q3DM17.
- DiabloD3 7y agoAt least you said Longest Yard and not Campgrounds.
- twic 7y agoIn my first full-time programming job (only back in 2008!), we used to play BZFlag at lunch. It was the only fun thing you could install through the CentOS package manager. A year or two later, we had Quake 3, with Lego mods.
- miloignis 7y agoMan I used to love BZFlag - it looks like it's still active, I should get back on.
- theon144 7y agoUnfortunately, due to the OSS nature of the game, it's super easy to cheat :/ The patches to wallhack and autoaim are literally a 2 min google search away, and the compile process is well documented and easy. I wonder what kind of measures can be put into place without utilizing what essentially boils down to DRM?
- sp332 7y agoThe server shouldn't trust the clients. The clients should just send inputs or actions, and the server will do validation and decide what the result will be.
- Arnt 7y agoOne of the patches involved is called 'autoaim'. How will the server know that the human user didn't actually aim that precisely?
- itsthecourier 7y agoIt may send the position the player is aiming at at certain periods, if the player is way to accurate and linear moving to the target you can ban him. Some false positives and stuff should be considered too
- failrate 7y agoAutoaim cannot be solved absolutely by technical solutions. Even if the executable is fully electric fenced and verified matching a checksum, aimbots can just read the video buffer from a different process. In practice, you can statistically analyze player hit metrics and then monitor people who appear to be too good. However, this requires basic customer service which is less likely to come from a free server for a noncommercial game.
- gnode 7y agoI don't expect it would be that hard to make an aimbot look human by throwing in some random variation. It would probably then be difficult (even for a human auditor) to reliably differentiate genuinely good players from "too good" players.
- phkahler 7y agoOne of my favorite variants of this is the rabbit hunt. One tank is white (a rabbit) and everyone is supposed to hunt it. Whoever kills the rabbit becomes the new rabbit, right then and there. Only ever saw 1 or 2 servers running a game this way.
- travisgriggs 7y agoI've been playing this game for a long time now. The crowd has dropped off in recent years. I'd love to see it regrow. What would be really cool, is a reboot form that worked for mobile.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoThat might just be it too. People wind up doing most computing on their phones. A game I used to play as a teen now has most of their users on their mobile apps while old players use their desktops.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wwarner 7y agoProvides a decent platform for competing ai robots https://robocode.sourceforge.io/ https://robocode.sourceforge.io/
- dliff 7y agoI believe this was my first time learning to compile a C++ project. This was 13 years ago; I was 14 years old. Great memories playing with others, chatting, building maps.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Uehreka 7y agoI've made a couple of comments like this on HN before, but whenever you make a homepage for a project, whether it's a game, game engine, software library, command line tool or anything--please start by describing what the thing is in one or two sentences. Here's what I thought when I clicked this link: > BZFlag? Does this have something to do with zipping files? Meh, I'll click and see what it is. > A picture of some 3D rendered stuff, and download links for a bunch of platforms... Is this a game engine? A physics simulator? Maybe if I scroll down I'll find out > Hmm, the project news doesn't tell me much... "A Flying tank", "Tanks with Superpowers"... I guess this is a game where you drive tanks? I'll take a look at the comments. > Ohhhhhh, I see. This could've been fixed by just having an h2 and a paragraph at the top saying "BZFlag" and "An open source tank-based warfare game with online multiplayer, going strong since 2008!" (or whenever the project started) You don't necessarily need to have a tagline like that on every release page or documentation page, but if I end up on your site and delete everything from the URL except "projectname.org", I should be 2 seconds away from a simple description of what your project is. With all that said, people seem to like this game, I may check it out later! Edit: Looks like they added a tagline to the page. It’s clear, it’s obvious, it makes sense. Thanks!
- sb057 7y ago"Free multi-player 3D tank battle game for Windows, Linux, and macOS" is front and center on the home page.
- zamadatix 7y agoThis was added in response to this comment.
- blast007 7y agoThanks for the feedback. I added a short tagline to the top of the homepage.
- twic 7y agoWeb pages? Those'll never catch on if you ask me. The package info seems clear enough: $ dnf info bzflag | sed 's/^/ /' Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:29 ago on Thu 31 Oct 2019 22:24:31 GMT. Available Packages Name : bzflag Version : 2.4.18 Release : 3.fc30 Architecture : x86_64 Size : 11 M Source : bzflag-2.4.18-3.fc30.src.rpm Repository : fedora Summary : 3D multi-player tank battle game URL : http://bzflag.org License : LGPLv2 Description : BZFlag is a 3D multi-player tank battle game that allows users : to play against each other in a networked environment. There are : five teams: red, green, blue, purple and rogue (rogue tanks are : black). Destroying a player on another team scores a win, while : being destroyed or destroying a teammate scores a loss. Rogues : have no teammates (not even other rogues), so they cannot shoot : teammates and they do not have a team score. There are two main : styles of play: capture-the-flag and free-for-all.
- Fwirt 7y agoFor those who enjoy online multiplayer FOSS games in this vein, see also Teeworlds. https://teeworlds.com/ https://teeworlds.com/
- pitzips 7y agoAre you a fellow Tanarus refugee? I miss that game so much. I had the most flags in total in that game!
- winrid 7y agoI played this a lot with my sister on Pentium 3 Linux boxes. Good times.
- sn41 7y agoI used to love playing this circa 2001. It's also great to learn programming games using OpenGL. Great to see this still going strong...
- tiku 7y agoA great game for office Warfare. Low specs so everyone can play.