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Review: BZFlag 3D Tank Game
GonzoJohn writes "LinuxOrbit.com reviews the 3D Tank game BZFlag. 'Have you ever been walking down the street, minding your own business, and suddenly look down to find something you hadn't expected? It might be money, it might be a decoder ring, it could be anything. But the almost universal reaction is pleasurable. 'That's a nice surprise,' you think as you stoop and pocket whatever good fortune has dropped in your path. The same thing can happen in the strangest places. For example, a recent post on our message boards inquired, 'What's your favorite flag in bzflag?'. Not being familiar with the game, I had to ask "What's bzflag?' Little did I know that such an innocent inquiry would result in an almost indecent obsession with a very cool game.'"
If I looked down and saw something I hadn't expected, I think I'd close my zipper.
linux games need better names. bzflag sounds like a compression utility or something. i bet we'd all be playing it if it was called something like 'armoured smashing-fist 2000', not bzip2.
http://www.bzflag.org/
The best flag is the laser by they way.
I wonder why the "wide angle" flag is considered bad. Yes, it might not be easy to interpret the image, but if you become used to it, the fish-eye certainly gives you an advantage.
I'm not surprised about the addiction. It was so good for its time, even in its single-player mode, that the military took a look at it to train its troops.
Based on Atari's BattleZone, it remains my favorite Video Arcade game.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
There used to ba a game exactly like this. It was for the Macintosh if I remember correctly. I think it was called Spectre.
i became hooked on this game in school... a bunch (usually 8 or so) guys would stay after class to play until the kicked us out. this went on for the better part of four months.
but the best flag, imho, is stealth. guided missles are pretty good, but invariably, everyone teams up on the dude with missles. stealth allows you to act as an assasin - picking your targets on your own terms.
some would say this tactic is 'cheap' - i think cheap is getting missles and jumping onto the highest building and firing constantly. stealth isn't 'cheap', it's 'tactical'. 8^)
The undernet linux channel went through a brief period of bzflag addiction two or three years ago. Great game. Took a bit of fiddling to get it to work correctly with my 3DFX card at the time. Hmm... I should reinstall it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I LOVE this game, I came across it a month or two ago while looking for 3d games that me and my house mates could play, even on low spec / linux machines. I wasn't convinced when I first loaded it up and had a tank which could jump and very simple graphics, but then we started playing.... I have to say this thing rocks, multi platform, network play, LOTs of players on line a once, serious good fun.
I do have one gripe though, some of the flags are REALLY anoying if playing with only a few people, homming missle being one of them. All the person needs to do is get on top of a high platform, and thats it, everyone is dead and stay that way until he decides to drop the flag.
Having said that a lot of the flags are great fun, narrow and wide still make me laugh :). I would like to see the ability to choose which flags are included in the game.. a nice options menu where you can change what's allowed - like the one worms had to allow you to customise the numbers of each type of weapon.
I was refreshed to find this came.. it has one major thing going for it - good gameplay, it just goes to show that you can still have fun without needed in GeForce 4 graphics card :)
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
It ran Quake pretty well, too...
The CS Department at my school has a 24 hour access rule, meaning that when a good game of bzflag starts, nobody has to leave. These games start very randomly. If a bunch of people are sitting around the lab working on stuff, all there needs for a game is for one person to *cough* and say "bz." The next thing you know, there are 5 to 10 people signed in, with the first person starting the server. It is an amazing phenomenon.
As far as flags go, here are the best flags:
- Guided Missle - This flag is the best flag for longevity. Right click and then fire, you just killed someone.
- Laser flag - instant death from across the board.
- Stealth - When you are not on someone's radar, they get really pissed.
- Cloaking - It is hard for them to shoot at what they can't see.
- Narrow - You become two dimensional in a 3D world.
- Shock Wave - Everyone within a certain radius of you becomes no more!
There may be more flags, but those are the best on the version that we play with.BZFlag is an excellent example of a game which places gameplay above graphics. THe graphics are certainly not like Q3A, but instead made mostly of simple polygons. There are some interesting effects (such as the smoke from the Guided Missile) but clearly the focus is on gameplay.
:)
The gameplay is simply excellent! It is amazing how such a single game can produce such varied gameplay. For example, several friends and I have been playing BZFlag with max 1 shot delay and good flags only. Of course, each of us developed our own strategy and all was fine until we decided to increase the max shots to 5. Interestingly, all the strategies we used went to waste since they actively took advantage of the 1 shot reload delay. With 5 max shots delay, different flags became more important (ie SuperBullet is vastly more useful in 5 max shot delay).
All in all, this game is very addictive. Highly recommended
Ahimsa Paramo Dharma Nonviolence is the highest form of religion.
Damn, here is the first page, thats all I got:
BZFlag: 3D Tank Shoot 'Em Up That Deserves Attention Part 1
Published by LinuxOrbit.com: April 4, 2002
by John Gowin, LinuxOrbit Editor-in-chief
Have you ever been walking down the street, minding your own business, and suddenly look down to find something you hadn't expected? It might be money, it might be a decoder ring, it could be anything. But the almost universal reaction is pleasurable.
"That's a nice surprise" you think as you stoop and pocket whatever good fortune has dropped in your path.
The same thing can happen in the strangest places. For example, a recent post on our message boards inquired
"What's your favorite flag in bzflag?".
Not being familiar with the game, I had to ask "What's bzflag?"
Little did I know that such an innocent inquiry would result in an almost indecent obsession with a very cool game.
What is BZFlag?
BZFlag is a 3D multi-player tank battle game. You can fight other tanks by yourself as a Rogue (some game servers don't support Rogues) or join a team based on your tank color (Red, Green, Blue, Purple). The object of course is to kill other tank opponents by shooting them, a fairly straightforward scenario for a first-person shoot 'em up type of game.
The "flag" in the title of BZFlag refers to the white flags found scattered across the battlefield in the game. To pick up a flag, you merely have to run over it with your tank. Each flag grants the owner of the flag special abilities within the game. That's where some of the strategy of game comes in. Certain flags bestow powerful gifts to the bearer while other flags are designed to specifically combat the bearer of another flag. Not all flags grant a bonus either. Some of the flags hamper a player for a fixed amount of time before they automatically are released. Because the flags are indistinguishable to all players, it is chance that determines whether you pick up a flag that will make you powerful or shackle you with a burden.
In order to excel at the game, it pays to know your flags. Here's a quick rundown of the flags available in the game, with a description of what they do, what they're best used for and what they're helpful against.
First the "good" flags:
High Speed
Boosts your speed by 50%. Good for overall use. Can escape Guided Missiles if used to drive perpendicular to the missile path.
Quick Turn
Boosts turn rate by 50%. Good for close combat but no major advantage for combating other flags.
Oscillation Overthruster
Enables tank to go through buildings. You cannot back up in or into a building, nor can you shoot while sealed inside a building. You must be completely inside a building to be protected from normal shots. Vulnerable to Shockwave, Super Bullet and Steamroller in close quarters. Good for ambush attacks, but your tank always returns to ground level since you sink through any obstacle or building you jump on.
Rapid Fire
Increases shot speed and decreases range and reload delay. Good flag for overall combat, no major bonus against other flags.
Machine Gun
Increases shot speed and dramatically decreases range and reload delay. Good only for close combat. Real close.
Guided Missile
Arguably the most coveted flag in the game, Guided Missile enables shots to guide themselves when locked on an opponent by right-clicking your mouse on an opponent in your view window. The missile can be re-targeted at any time during its flight (with the right mouse button). This allows the player some control over the missile's steering. Vulnerable to the Stealth flag since missiles can't be locked on.
Laser
Gives your tank a laser cannon, with effectively infinite speed and range. Just point and shoot. Laser reload time is doubled from normal weapon. One downside is that you have a decent chance of killing yourself from extended reflections of the laser due to its infinite range. Great for long distance kills, but likely you will eventually become your own victim. Used carefully, very powerful. Good against Guided Missile thanks to its extended range.
Ricochet
Causes shots to reflect off walls. Many servers have ricochet enable for the entire battlefield, so this flag does nothing on these types of servers. On non-ricochet servers, you can practice your billiards skills by shooting around corners off border walls.
Super Bullet
Enables shots to go through buildings. Kills Oscillation Overthruster carriers inside of buildings as well as "zoned" Phantom Zone users. Great for unsuspecting opponents on the other side of a building or wall.
Stealth
Tank becomes invisible on radar but is still visible out-the-window. Prevents Guided Missile from locking on the carrier of the flag. Great overall use, especially against opponents not facing you.
Cloaking
Tank becomes invisible out-the-window but is still visible on radar. Good for hectic battle due to invisibility, but Guided Missile can still lock on you. Jumping while using this flag is more effective.
Invisible Bullet
Radar of opponents can't see your shots, so it's an excellent flag for all around battle and for those not facing you.
Tiny
Your tank becomes much smaller and harder to hit. Good for head to head battle due to reduced size.
Narrow
With this flag, your tank becomes paper thin. It's very hard (but not impossible) to hit a "Narrow" tank from the front or back. However, the tank is as long as usual so hitting it from the side has normal difficulty. Good for head to head battle, but try not to jump while turning.
Shield
Allows the bearer to absorb on hit from an opponent, but the hit ejects the flag immediately. Since the flag may not disappear when it ejects, you may want to wait around for it to fall to the ground so you can grab it again, but the shield flag flies for an extra long time (longer than the normal reload time).
Steamroller
Possibly the least desirable of flags (other than Ricochet and Jump when server settings make them useless) this flag enables your to kill other tanks by driving over them. The downside is you rarely get close enough in normal game play.
Shock Wave
Makes your tank shoot a shock wave in all directions rather than shells. Any tank caught in the wave is destroyed (including tanks on or in buildings). This is a good tactical flag against Guided Missile an Oscillation Overthruster users. The downside is the shock wave has a short range, so even an opponent without a flag has an advantage. Try not to jump with this flag either.
Phantom Zone
Driving through a teleporter send the bearer of this flag to the Phantom Zone. A "zoned" tank cannot shoot, but can drive through buildings and cannot be destroyed except by a Super Bullet or a Shock Wave. Also fun to use to taunt or distract unseasoned opponents who might waste time firing at a "zoned" tank.
Genocide
This is a dreaded flag in team play. When the bearer of Genocide kills any tank on another team, all members of that team are destroyed as well. A good way to rack up the points or kill a Guided Missile user by killing off the weakest member of his team. No battle advantage in head to head or Rogue competition.
Jumping
This allows your tank to jump, but is useless on "jump" servers. Great for servers without jump enabled for all since high-ground can't be reached without jumping. Identify
Displays the identity of the closest flag in the vicinity. This flag is good for finding a flag you want, but don't get too distracted "flag shopping". This flag offers no battle advantage.
Then there are the "bad" flags:
Colorblindness
This makes all tanks appear black, both on radar and in your view screen. Be careful you don't shoot your teammates.
Obesity
This flag causes your tank to become very large and easy to hit. Makes teleporters unusable due to enlargement.
Left Turn Only
This prevents your tank from turning right. Only thing to do is drive in straight line or circle left until the flag times out.
Right Turn Only
Same as left turn except the opposite direction.
Momentum
This flag gives your tank a lot of inertia. Stopping and turning become exercises in physics. The overall effect is less response for all movements.
Blindness
This blanks the main view screen, but your radar still works. It is effectively impossible to detect any tank with Stealth, but shooting a Stealth with Blindness is the stuff legends are made of.
Jamming
Disables the radar but you can still see out your main view screen.
Wide Angle
Ever wonder how a goldfish perceives its owner? This flag gives you some idea. The bearer sees the battlefield through a distorted fish eye lens in the main window.
Go to Part 2, Strategy and more!
Sig you!
Have you ever been walking down the street, minding your own business, and suddenly look down to find something you hadn't expected?
Yes, an open manhole cover. But I'm feeling much better now.
The official BZFlag website dosen't ist the OS X version, but you can find the port Here (3.2MB)
There are too many cheat clients for this game. Just showing up in an arena is like asking to be bungholed.
I haven't played this game, but it reminds me of the insanity that came out of Bolo freshman year. hordes of people descending on the Mac lab to team up and beat the crap out of each other in little tanks.
wow that was fun.
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___________________________
I'm not a geek, but I play one on TV.
Haven't played the game
Though it sounds like it is cool
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We used to have BZFlag tournaments in the CS dept at Stetson. Order a couple of pizza nad then go in rounds of 6-8 for 20 minutes. Then take the winners and play a final. Winner usually got like 20 bucks or a free pizza.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
It's not an options menu, but you can configure the available flags when starting the server. Check the man page.
On casual inspection, the following appears to remove phantom zone and guided missiles:
bzfs -f PZ -f GM
If you play this game make sure to set UDP instead of TCP in preferences. TCP is just to slow, and the lag will make the game intolerable.
badness 10000
I would love that programs would be called like this '3d tank game bzflag' so we know what it is.
and something that was in the news PAN the newsreader is going to change its name, would you know its a newsreader from the name ? i wouldnt, would 'Newsgroup Reader PAN' be a better name ? you can always replace the PAN with any other fantasy name, but please lets make program names logical, so users will understand what it is..
Just MY opinion =P
...yet you post both a link to a review and to its homepage on Slashdot? One thing's for sure; having now had their servers crushed beneath the onslaught of half a million battle-tank-desperate nerds, the guys associated with this game sure don't love you.
1 - Download 1.7e2
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Bzflag Home Page
Game Den review
SourceForge Page
Game Dudes Review
It was an "official" event in the Linux section of Xuventude Galicia.net (only spanish and galician, sorry!), a LAN party born about 3 years ago here in Galicia (Spain). And there was another "almost official" tournament in the Arroutada Party (the mother of the galician LAN parties). I even partaked in this one (I was only a spectator on the Xuventude's one), and though I was quite The Ultimate Killing Machine in the "training games" (being first almost all the time), I only was the 3rd on the oficcial game. Man, do I suck :-/ ;-)
Anyway, everyone had a fun time, as I've been told :-) The game is very network-friendly, and very addictive. Some game balance problems that people tell happen because they allowed too many "special options", IMHO. We just played with flags, and no other option (i.e.: no jumping, only 1 shot each time, and so on). That way, game is quite balanced, though if you get the Guided Missile flag, the Stealth flag or the Laser flag, you can be the ruler of the game for a long time :-)
The Laser flag is my favourite, and specially fun when you play with shots being all ricochet. Well, at least it's fun until you kill yourself for firing straight against a wall. Ouch :-)
Stealth flag is fun, yes, but Real Men (tm) play guided by their radars, and not their eyes (Or was Stealth the flag that didn't show you on the Radar? I don't remember now :-m) Use of The Force and any other special powers is also encouraged, or course :-)
Anyway, speedwise it sucks in my P2-366 Compaq Armada 3500 :-/ I think it's because of the graphic card, but haven't looked at it deeply. Well, it absolutely rocks in my Athlon 800 with GF2MX, at least ;-)
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On the "Decks" server, ricochet is turned on and Laser is your best friend and your worst enemy (as you can indescriminately torch off friend, foe, and yourself with a badly placed shot...)- I usually can rack up 10 or so kills if I'm on a low ping night there with the laser. If you're on an arena that doesn't have ricochet turned on and has a LOT of obstacles- Laser's mostly useless as it takes too long to recharge.
Guided missiles are my preferred one.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This is really a gem of a game but I urge people setting up servers not to do the easy thing and hike up the shots to 10 or something and allow jumping.
The game is *much much* more fun without jumping, though it doesn't immediately seem so. You start to learn how to drive correctly and defensively and it is a much richer experience.
Games with and without these options can be described as follows:
With jumping and lots of bullets: You spend most of your time jumping up in the air dodging other people's sprays of bullts, spinning around and landing in directions you just don't want to land in.
Without jumping and lots of bullets: You actually can play cat and mouse. When your opponent's 2 shots are gone and you've dodged them, you can release at will. Much more interesting game. The other is just silly, but that's how people tend to start and they never learn better.
X-Windows - This program was a real disappointment, and then AOL invented the internet and I was able to get my pr0n from lots of places, so I didn't need it anymore.
It's actually called "The X Window System".
Finally, I've found someone who knows about that game!
:)
I went to military college, and we had an Apollo lab... do the math
I don't suppose you have a copy of the C-X Windows source, do you?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The analysis of Cloaking is missing one crucial bit of info: cloaked tanks are immune to Lasers. (Makes perfect sense, but most developers would've missed that.)
Cloaking is of limited use otherwise - skilled players use the radar at least as much as the viewscreen, if not more.
BTW, my favorite config: all good flags, all bad flags (15 seconds or 1 kill), 3 shots, jumping. (The fewer shots you have the more the strategery of the game shines through. BZ can't compare to Quake for adrenaline-pumping click-festiness, but the cat and mouse of stealth vs. gm can't be matched by Quake.)
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
I'd like to reccomend another game very similar (yet superior) to bzflag. It is called Wulfram II. It follows the same concept of a tank game as bzflag does, execpt it involves teamwork, bases, and much more strategy. Unfortunately, it is only available for win32, although if you send the author enough money, he'll speed up his port to unix and osx. The game is free, although donations of as little as $4 per month are highly encouraged. All in all, i'd say this game is everything that bzflag is and more. It combines a little action, real-time strategy, teamwork, and more into one great game.
The graphics aren't GREAT, but they're still nice, and the game runs on most pcs, and the graphics are still signifigantly better than BZFlag. People with a voodoo2 or 3 can play using glide, which produces really nice graphics. Unfortunately a 3dfx driver update broke glide support for the game, and it can only be played wiht dated drivers (completely broken on voodoo4/5).
A last note is that the thing that sets this game apart from others is it's incredibly realistic physics and gravity, etc. I have never seen a game with more realistic physics, etc. The sequal being worked on by the underpaid independent developer (yes... one developer) will be even better with the addition of an advanced lighting engine. (by physics, i'm talking about how a pulse shell arcs, how tanks are dragged to the ground, etc.). These phyiscs also help combat lag, as the server uses a vector-based coordinate system, which greatly reduces bandwidth to help 56k users (such as myself).
Go out and pay it! http://www.wulfram.com
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Then they upgraded to Windows 2000, which runs games like Starcraft just fine. They did break the sound drivers, but that's okay.
What's even nicer is that the G3s and G4s that they buy have very gamer-friendly specs. One organization on campus has reserved computer clusters during off-peak times to play games like UT in there. Runs great.
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In my graphics course here at Algonquin College (Ottawa, ON) we learned OpenGL on SGI O2 workstations. These things were amazing. There'd be 15 of us all in this room playing BZFlag and yelling and screaming cause we'd be having such a good time. Often we'd miss other classes cause we just didn't want to stop playing, it's THAT addictive. Strange that it's not popular on other platforms.
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Yeah, but remember how annoying it was in Point Blank that you couldn't shoot up hills reliably (or at all IIRC). And the Plane was nearly impossible to use (plus it was easily shot out of the sky by those dammable missiles on the hovertank (or was it just a light tank?).) Still, it was plenty fun to play nonetheless.
I read the internet for the articles.
sounds as addictive and fun as xpilot used to be when i was in school. i wonder if there's still a big community at the Uni playing xp these days or if they've all moved up to quake and it's brethren. i haven't played any really good networked games since xp (and that includes all the hours of q3 arena, etc i've put in in the last year or so)
xp was introduced to me as "asteroids, but you get to kill other people" and i thought "now that sounds fun"
and addictive. dang. i spent more nights staring at little blips on the computer lab screens than i care to count. as i got more into it, i even started designing my own ship outlines - and even started to see other people copying them.
I was Delta Clipper (after the NASA project) and occasionally Happy Fun Ball (tm) due to my tendency to bounce around the screen, rather than actually try to navigate...
no flags, but there were little powerups (i forget the term we used for them) that would bestow invisibilty, speed, bouncing or multiple shots, mines, guided missiles, and loads of other stuff i never really learned how to control - the game used just about every key on a Sun keyboard, plus meta+key combos.
man, what a fun game. (http://www.xpilot.org/)
so, what's this about tanks? is there a Darwin/OS X port? can i play on my ibook? i'm about ready for a new addiction...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
As one of the developers, here is some information about what's going on currently:
1.8 will look very little like 1.7. The user interface is fully customizable (through xml) and worlds will be completely custom. The network code is also being completely rewritten to reduce lag. 1.8 is in CVS HEAD for anybody who would like to try out the new features.
Also, a CTF (capture-the-flag) league is getting going. If you're interested in doing team battles and tournaments, take a look at http://bzflag.org.league/
BZFlag is also on OPN - feel free to drop by and make a suggestion or three.
um, no.
I don't remember the switch to NT stopping us from playing Starcraft. I believe a few guys in Morewood (or was it shlag) set up a windows share with a hacked version of starcraft. Drag and drop to the desktop, then run.
Or did I miss something in your post?