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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
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.
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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
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.
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.
"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.
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
Start it up, hit enter three times.
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"
inst vote old recent no-files (maintainer)
451 84 347 19 1 (Tim Riker)
...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.
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."
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? ---
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Realistic/good graphics add to the fun by making the game more believable or immersive. It's a lot more satisfying to blow up a tank with a gout of flame, black smoke and mangled bits of tank flying around than to watch, say, a brown box disappear. Or turn into 6 brown rectangles.
Graphics ADD to the fun. They don't create it, but real people often value graphics about as highly as gameplay, so if BZFlag wants to be a "momentuous" project, they need to start thinking beyond those people stuck in the 90s.
im in ur