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BZFlag goes Platinum
morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless."
How is this momentous? It's a free game. It's small. People play it at work. If it generated any sort of income for the creators, it would be momentous for them. But for the whole open source movement? Please. The only thing the top downloads shows is that people would rather pirate good windows games than bother downloading free mediocre games.
schild
editor, f13.net
it looks really nice, even on BeOS (I did the port :P), though MESA doesn't make it much playable yet (well it gets better on a 1.5GHz box :).
I sure hope the gameplay is good, cause the graphics look like they date from the 80s Era. Sure, graphics ain't everything and its a major achievement for the open source gaming community... but couldn't they hire an Open-GL guy / artist? 6 polygons trees... and the tanks themselves look like LEGO blocks.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Some would call it "artistic". But yes, the graphics do suck.
I am trolling
They do, but no worse than your English.
I could tell the exact moment when the story went live (I was looking at the subscriber preview), when an image suddenly stopped loading halfway through.
With friends like Slashdot, who needs test load generators?
What about all the distributions that bundle bzflag, most do. Im curious what kind of totals there would be if we could count all the people including those who use things like apt and install it from debians repository, or redhat, etc.. Im willing to bet the actual total number of bzflag installs is much much higher than 1 million
http://interserver.net/
http://bzflag.org/screenshots/bzkitty.jpg
My father is a computer science professor, and I remember going to his lab some days and playing Battle Zone against his grad student's on SGI workstations. Good times!
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
I *knew* there was something wrong with that wget script I wrote. Forget to actually increment the loop variable...
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
emerge bzflag
"All it takes to fly is to hurl yourself at the ground... and miss." - Douglas Adams
It even went into fedora: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/001nov04/features/f edoracore3/#multimedia-fun
"While Alan Cox was studying for an MBA, he couldn't help but provide extensive quality assurance testing of BZFlag, which is now included in Fedora Core 3. BZFlag replaces Chromium, which now enters Extras."
Artistic? If I want to play a tank game I'll go play DesertCombat. That's a free Windows mod for BF1942 and they seemed to have been able to come up with graphics that blow this away.
does it also count evyerone who does cvs up every 2 days and waits for an hour for the beast to build ? :)
The graphics look similar to those of the original MechWarrior that I used to play on my Dell 386sx16 laptop back in 1990. What the hell is great about thing?
Hey, for those who don't like the graphics, they're not all that bad, especially if you take the time to fine-tune the many graphics options. To me, BZflag is all about the gameplay. Fancy graphics are for short-lived games that try to impress (sell) by looks alone, or for people who just want to impress their friends, play for a week, and try something else. There are MANY people that have played this game almost daily for years (myself included). For a game so simple to control and start playing, it has many challenges for a real tanker to master.
All you Sarge users say it with me:
apt-get install bzflag
Long live Schrodinger's cat...
If it generated any sort of income for the creators, it would be momentous for them.
It's a big resume booster for the maintainers.
how does one go about finding other living organisms to battle?
Once you start improving the graphics, where do you stop?
You don't. Duh...
0 1 - just my two bits
"Closed" games can afford touches such as artists and writers. In theory I have to applaud the OSS developers for having the chutzpah to take on such an dauntingly hopeless task as making an OSS game; but the quality speaks for itself.
Before someone decides I'm an anti-OSS troll, let me say that OSS has made some wonderful servers and if it weren't for the free tools I'd have never been able to try my hand at programming. It's as simple as the fact that quality art and quality writing don't grow on trees...as we can plainly see.
It takes $$$ and lots of it to create a Halo, a Counterstrike or a Sims. That's just how it is.
Stepmania has moved so far beyond DDR at this point. Above and beyond all the new features they added to the main DDR game (constant scroll modifiers, mod-scripted courses, mines, etc.) it supports practically every other rhythm game in existence. Add expandability into the mix and you have a game that outdoes the official DDRs on almost every level. Even that screenshot is a picture of Magic Dance mode, which was only available in one specific version of DDR, and is greatly improved upon by the additional modifiers in Stepmania.
I've moved on.
A lot of things have already been revised for the next release. There are now mirror floors, rain, snow, and arbirtray rain like raining frogs. There are meshes so everything isn't a triangle or block anymore. Objects can have arbitrary textures and alpha transparancy, as well as environmental mapping. Many new flags have been added such as the wings flag that lets you "fly" for a period of time. Many other goodies are thrown in there too. Keep in mind though that bzflag is not focused on graphics, but rather gameplay. The game has an extremely low entry level for gamers (as far as skill goes), but its very hard to master. Tim Riker (the project leader) has been know to say, "Easy to learn, hard to master". Also, the community built up around the game is incredible. Graphics are overemphasized in today's games, try it out sometime, its tons of fun to play.
-Steve
I think this one of the differences between a commerical game and a free game. I can see why BZFlag is so popular; I can also see why it isn't more popular.
Actually Counterstrike started as an independent team making a mod for no money out of sheer love for the game.
I have to ask, why count those? For a person that downloads the latest version for every release, is every such download counted? If there were ten versions, one person could be counted ten times.
Idownloaded it. It is very bad. Bad gameplay, bad graphics. Bad bad bad.
Why does these open source games seem so out of date. Graphics that are 10 years out of date (not even as good as Doom) based on a 20 year old game.
I'll stick with Xbox games from private companies, because even though it is closed sourced they are at least FUN!
Wake me up when we have OSS games with 1'000'000 downloads every few weeks or even every few days and that probally short after the release, not with games that are a decade old or older. As long as it is something that is only happening every few years and with rather ancient games its actually not much a good sign for OSS gaming, not even much of a start. Especially when the quality of OSS games still is rather low, no matter how good the gameplay is of BZFlag, nethack or any other OSS game actually is, the overall impression of the games is often rather low[1]. Nobody can tell me that under all the 1'000'000 downloaders there wasn't a single artists which would have been able to produce better art and improve the overall look of the game a lot. So either the tools for creating art are missing, the project coordination is flawed, the game isn't good enough that anybody cares enough to improve it or maybe those Linux folks are really a whole bunch of non-artists types, but maybe its just that OSS model of games isn't all that much attractive to artists who knows.
Overall OSS gaming still has a long long long way to go, 1'000'000 downloads might sound nice, but don't really tell you much at all about the overall state of OSS gaming.
[1] "low" as in "I have seen better art on my C64", not as in "can't compete with latest multimillion dollor blockbuster game"
Just downloaded BZFlag and jumped right in. Needless to say I got wasted. Looks like a lot of fun. I'm impressed by the OSS community. Wonder what the latency spike on the bzflag.org website was along with all the mirrors holding the game?
"bad graphics" and "not fun" shouldn't be the same idea. Admitedly the game ain't your typical run/shooter like say halo... but neither is solitaire....
If anything this game proves that the average "pr0 g@m3r" is nothing more than a low IQ mongrel looking for the next visual stimuli...
Yeah sure some flash is good but not if you sacrifice game play.
For instance, doom3 looks beautiful. It's also a horrible game. Way too repetitive and really didn't have any "new" game elements [e.g. think of board game rules] that make it stand out from all the other FPSes.
You don't need a TFLOP rated game to have fun. You just have to engage the persons creativity/thought process in a positive way.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Since when do good graphics have to be realistic? I think BZFlag has appropriately simple graphics that work well for the game. It could probably even get away with BattleZone-style line graphics.
True story.
inst vote old recent no-files (maintainer)
451 84 347 19 1 (Tim Riker)
The other two are also heavily based on other games. bzflag - Battlezone (natch) and Tux Racer - Pen Pen Tri-Icelon.
But, as they say, all games are Pong.
### It takes $$$ and lots of it to create a Halo, a Counterstrike or a Sims. That's just how it is.
Halo and Sims, yes. Counterstrike, absolutly not. Counterstrike started as a simple mod, no big $$$ involved in the beginning, only later it got commercially developed but even then I doubt that the cost where very high. The amount of content required for CounterStrike is rather low, a few quite small levels, a few models, thats it, really nothing if you compare it to a 20h playtime game. They reused the HalfLife engine, which in turn is based on the Quake1 engine (which is together with Quake2 GPL since quite a while) so no money involved there either. Counterstrike did the gameplay right, thats all, I doubt that it needed very much money for that.
Doom was very fun. Used to play it via modem with my firend. Hours of gameplay. BZFlag has poor gameplay, bad controls and documentation. I don't mind lesser graphics but this game is NOT FUN.
...but Desert Combat was done as a portfolio piece for a startup game dev shop with 9 employees. In other words, for $$$, not as an open-source project. Keep in mind which kind of free you're talking about.
It's funny that I downloaded that game very near to the 1,000,000 mark. I wonder how close I was.
SBC stands for Stupid Bell Company
AT&T stands for All Telephones Tapped
### Once we get decent open source game engines, development environments, and media, the floodgates will open.
Don't get your hopes too high on the floodgate-theory, even the mod-scene, while it certainly produced some impressive stuff is in most part build out of little additions to existing engines and existing artwork, only very few mods actually manage to stend fully on its own with both gameplay and artwork.
The advantage of $$$ is that it can buy you a team of people working fulltime together on a project, without that you will only have a bunch of hobby programmers, most of them getting distracted by RL issues after a year or two. So chance that they will really be able to produce a game and not just a small modification are rather low.
Tux Racer - Pen Pen Tri-Icelon. Best as I can tell, Pen Pen preceeds TR by only 4 months. Are you sure that TR is a Pen Pen clone?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I was going for HL2, but this kicks the shit out of that and everything else I've sene this year.
Um, yes, I am being sarcastic.
Yes the graphics aren't the greatest.. and I needed a good video card to bump them up.(nvidia 5200 works fine on windoze)
The gameplay is awesome. I've been playing this for a couple years now and I love it. Trying to find babels low lag server today... to no avail. That one is my absolute favourite map and it's a ctf. It works through my firewall with multiple hosts inside too.. Kinda fun chasing my wife around a map.. she doesn't know the game well and doesn't know about the hunt key ;-)
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
The only thing is takes to create video games is code, not $$$.
No, it takes artists, writers, designers, musicians, testers, etc. The code is only a small part of the overall thing. It's been shown that coders are willing to release their work for free, but to date, it has not been shown that all the other people required to make a good game are willing to do the same.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Latest new from tux racer in the tux racer's news site is from 2001. It can be called very well "dead". Yes, lots of downloads, probably because there're no lots of better options..
shown that * coders are willing to release their work for free
* some
And the debate will rage on about which of those two types is exercising common sense. But we do know which type produces more games that more people play.
You can play on a single shot, no jumps, no rebounds minimal map one to one against an opponent for an ultra skilled game, to magnificent free for all, frag fests with 10 shot (or more) speeded up maps.
The careful positioning of a few blocks make for killer rebounds, and ace sniper points, and great team action in "capture the flag" mode.
Download it and now and find out for yourselves
No, the only thing that matters for a game is gameplay. People play games like card games, dungeons and dragons, pong, pacman, frogger, joust, and legend of zelda because of great gameplay. All of those games have lousy graphics and sound.
The supposed "need" for artists, writers, musicians, etc., is only because of the past ~5-10 of advanced graphics, but they are not required to make a great game.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Funny, Counterstrike was developed on someone else's engine and at first it was done for no cash beyond internet advertizing, and just out of the love of what they were doing.
There are artists and writers out there who volunteer to help make great free (as in beer usually) games, but they want to see their work widely appreciated, and the install base of a single major game with a moddable engine on windows is larger than the entire linux gaming community.
There just isn't an open-source equivalent to say, the HalfLife2 Source engine, and people whose primary concern is creating a great game that lots of people will play are going to look to that rather than what's going on in the OS gaming world.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I am quite sure that Tuxracer is not a Pen Pen clone. The major source of inspiration when I remember correctly was Nintendos 1080 snowboard game on N64, the Mario64 race-against-a-penguin levels might have been another source of inspiration. Actually I have never heard of Pen Pen before and I have read the Tuxracer mailing list in its very early days, so unless I missed something I doubt that Pen Pen played any role in the Tuxracer development.
When I joined SGI in 1997, BZFlag was an institution. The IT group in the MIPS Group would play it at lunch every day. Shooting your boss with something that looked like a photon torpedo (if your box had good graphics - I had a dual-proc Octane with very nice graphics) was very cool. It was a fun thing to do and felt like part of the culture there.
There was a program, at least inside of SGI, that was a sequel. You could be a plane or one of a couple of types of ground vehicles, and it had voice chat. It was fun and the graphics were better but things were pretty grim by the time I found it, and there wasn't a lot of game playing being done.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Yep, even if TuxRacer was only a freebie to debug and sell "usual commercial game", I'm thankful to Sunspire Studios they've let out this homely piece of work under the license that allowed to create OpenRacer and PlanetPenguinRacer!
This is offtopic, but your sig doesn't work at all.
/. sigs. Try logging out, you'll find they disappear.
For a start, they moved to sco.com instead of www.sco.com after the virus (if you don't remember the virus, you must be lucky enough not to have to deal with windows boxes).
Also, Google doesn't read
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
BZFlag is a very fun game. It's not pretty, but then, it's about 13 years old.I have a great deal of fun with bolo, nethack, and xpilot as well and their graphics are even more dated!
There was an attempt to fork Bzflag and use an updated graphics engine called OGRE but it turns out that the bzflag code isn't very modular so it has stalled.
:)
Don't take my word for it though...
I think open source games are on the cusp of a major breakthrough because of the maturation of third party graphics and physics engines like OGRE and ODE. I'm helping with a project that has been running for a little under a year and we've released a pre-alpha already because we didn't re-invent the wheel.
I think a lot of people go into these open source game projects without an understanding of the amount of work involved. It's sad because a lot of great ideas and great code are lost when developers become overwhelmed with the details. Flight/driving simulators are much easier to create in an open source environment because of the lack of a plot requirement so you'll probably see them first. My point is that as soon as flegling OSS game devs look to open source middleware first then hand code things only when necessary, we'll see a lot of great stuff in a very short amount of time. An entertainment singularity
"Some good news from down under! Primed Games have won the Best Indie Game award at the Australian Game Developers Conference with their Mario-kart inspired title 'Scootarama', which is based on OGRE, ODE, RakNet and FMod. It's especially impressive considering they only had 12 weeks to come up with it with a 10-man team."
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
pretty apps can be nice but what is more important than that to many bz players is the easy learning curve, tremendous competitiveness amongst the league players, and most importantly, the community, people for the most part are friendly, fun and always willing to help new players. Im not, but most of them are :)
On the issue of graphics, when you first play you
think wow, the graphics are a little basic.
As you gain skill however you will find yourself
taking every step possible to becoming a good player, one of those is to turn of all the enhancements, turn off shadows and enhanced radar
so that you may see enemy bullets more clearly, this is after all a tank war!
after all, if they keep updating the programs, does it count as a new download. I mean, if they did let say, 100 updates, then only 10,000 different people downloaded it.
...by 3 people.
I mean, it's cool and all that it's reached the 1,000,000 download mark, but it's not like it's a finished product that recieved all the downloads.
I'm not trying to knock this or anything, but it reminds me of the crappy advertising that seems to be accepted by people. Like the monitor size bullshit, or the Mega-BIT/BYTE crap. Or using months instead of years to make it look like you worked somewhere longer.
Yes, BZFlag has had 1,000,000 downloads...
Be seeing you...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The operating system means nothing.
Of course, all games have a target audience. Right now, Linux is not deployed widely enough to be worried about.
Of course, nothing is preventing from being used (many games get linux compatibility, through ports or emulators).
It's a platform.
Period.
but thats because its typical Linux shite: terrible documentation, terrible presentation, stupid bugs and complete lack of attention to detail.
Like what?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But then, isn't HAVING FUN the reason why you play, not wanking off to pixel shaders?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
### "bad graphics" and "not fun" shouldn't be the same idea.
While that is true, its a rather bogus argument. Sure, graphics are not a replacment for fun, but a good game can only get better when the graphics, sound and music play along. There little excuse to let the whole presentation of a game down, just because gameplay is half done. Sure there is always a lack of man-power and artists, but with 1'000'000 downloads you for sure will find somebody if you just search a bit. Last not least, with better graphics we could also finally get rid of all those "Hey, gameplay is ok, so its ok that graphics suck", no wonder some people disagree with that.
Well, we'll be the first to hear how the 12/10/2005 build is from you, won't we?
A lot of people seem to think that you have to make jaw dropping graphics, pixar quality cutscenes, or amazing music in order for a video game to be "successful". I argue that that's not it -- graphics and sound are secondary to gameplay consideration. They might help, but 1. they don't make up for crappy gameplay, and 2. great games with crappy music and sound are still great games.
So, my plea to open source game makers is this: Make great games. If you do, maybe the game will attract great artists and musicians. If not, hey, we still have a great game!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Yes
Speaking on behalf of all the
Pong kicks ass.
http://request-header.info
wow, how dare someone crit. the game you love. the gall of such people. We all know that only sure path to improvement of a product (be it free or not) is via pure adoration and no contrary opinions allowed.
In my experience with many open source projects it is exactly this kind of attitude from its current base that cause it problems with wider adoption.
Sure, this game may not want/need wider adoption - but attacking anyone who doesn't love the project seems pretty symptomatic of 90% of all Open source projects.
Its too bad. Sad really.
oh, and the graphics do suck and weather you agree or not - alot of games are judged by their pretty pictures before someone will go through to trouble of trying it. If the graphics don't shine - people will whine.
Funny you should mention that...
.sig...)
(see my
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
That's Debian
"Sure, this game may not want/need wider adoption - but attacking anyone who doesn't love the project seems pretty symptomatic of 90% of all Open source projects."
/dev/null is for. Take it from a long-time musician: any time you do something in public, some wise-ass is going to yell "YOU SUCK!", but two years later when you're the next big thing they'll be saying "I was there back when...". OSS advocates need to exercise greater maturity in this regard: software isn't disposable pop music, its the basis of business infrastructure worth billions of dollars, and making an impact in this world takes a business-like attitude rather than the "I'll take my ball and go home" approach we see far too often.
This is true. Look, if OSS is to progress beyond the interested amatuer phase (that is, actually be adopted by governments and business so we can all benefit) the chip on the shoulder has to go, and developers will have to start thinking in terms of what other people might want from the word go.
Of course that isn't easy, considering the needs of others might be put a dent in some egos and it involves extra work, but you can't realistically expect everyone to have to learn coding in order to adopt your product. Microsoft wins* in the public mind because they do market research before offering a product, include features that the clueless ask for, and provide it in a neat little (ok, big) bundle that even a retarded monkey can install. Remarkably little OSS matches Microsoft's for sheer convenience (gaaah! I can't believe I wrote that!); until this changes, it will be the fringe dweller.
Some developers are terrific, and if asked will either add a feature, or explain politely and logically why a feature won't be included; this professional attitude is highly commendable (hi, Murat!). There are a lot of mindless comments (this topic contains quite a few), but that's what
In short: the customer is always right, which is why OSS has no customers, because for OSS the developer is always right. See the problem?
And yes, BZFlag's graphics are primitive by today's standards, but then the game play of most FPS games is hardly any different (run around, shoot, pick up weapon, shoot some more), so without new graphics there's nothing to sell. I regard the continuous need to spend $XX on new software (+$XXX on suitable graphics card) to be little more than a con perpetrated by lazy game designers attempting to hide their lack of original ideas. At least BZFlag isn't pretending to be new, or asking for money for the same old game...
*Not that I use any of their bloated, buggy rubbish.
As is the network design. Before you all go apeshit rating me down, the open source games Netrek and XPilot are examples of smart, clean and original designs that build simple elements into emergent gameplay complexity. BZFlag in comparison is derivative and less than the sum of its parts. The only thing that it has going for it is that it throws polygons rather than bitmaps or polylines at the screen.
Now that I think about it, it's actually kind of sad that far superior games have been eclipsed by something that boasts only eye candy, and awful eye candy at that.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You are now the third least awful FOSS game!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How do they count how many people have downloaded it? Hit count on their sf site? If so, then I suspect the actual number of times this has been downloaded will be much higher.
I apt-get nearly all my software, and the only server that process hits is my apt mirror. I don't know, perhaps it periodically sends stats back upstream?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Tanarus -- 1997.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I agree that Open Source gaming is "on the cusp". I think the bottleneck is that the Developers (coders) keep trying to write content for their games. Most open source games have great potential, but lousy content. To make things even worse, creating content for most games is such an arcane, laborious task, that good artists and writers are scared away.
There are scores of modders and amateur level designers out there just waiting for an engine that is easy to mod...
I haven't fallen in love with the same guy with modified source code always having a guided missle flag whenever he wants, but Capture-the-Flag with no super-flags and no jumps is actually quite fun. Not only does it take more brains than reflexes, but its strategy often parallels that of football or rugby as far as defending or attacking a flag carrier goes. Very fun indeed.
Miserable failure
It's a free mod, but you have to own BF1942 otherwise Desert Combat is so much wasted drive space.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.