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."

Comments

Momentous?

[schild]

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.

Re:Momentous?

[pronobozo]

"If it generated any sort of income for the creators, it would be momentous for them."


If I had created anything that was downloaded a million times I'd sure be proud and I'd surley remember it forever.


Takes a lot to get a million downloads of anything.

Gameplay?

[FiReaNGeL]

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.

Re:Gameplay?

[cosmol]

The gameplay is addicting. Basically its all about positioning your tank. Since the tank doesn't move very fast you have to think ahead. Also the shots are pretty slow so you have to shoot out way ahead of a moving target. Newbies will get outsmarted by more experienced players, but will get enough lucky shots now and again to keep them interested in playing.

There is a lot of opportunity for team strategy, especially in CTF mode. Many server operators tweak the map/rules to yield some interesting play possibilities.

Yeah, it's fun. The graphics look like they date from the 80s because they do! Actually I turn the graphic settings down from the default.

That's amazing.

[b00m3rang]

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?

Re:That's amazing.

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's amazing.

Have you ever felt the all mighty power of god within you, as if you where him, with the power to do anything, tranquilly floating in the everlasting, vibrant, stunning, spectacle of the universe, feelings of absolute pleasure, and total bliss enriching, and surrounding your every breath, while a million stunningly beautiful virgins pleasure you for eternity. No? Well you don't need to, because you've seen an image stop loading when it got slashdotted.

Is this really anything close to an accurate count

[detain]

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

bzkitty

[KillerHamster]

http://bzflag.org/screenshots/bzkitty.jpg

Gameplay rocks!

[menotume]

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.

Re:Gameplay rocks!

[LeiGong]

Isn't this what people with ugly girlfriends tell themselves to make themselves feel better? "Sure the hot chicks are hot and look great, but they re all dumb I'll get bored with them. On the other hand my ugly girlfriend has a personality and I won't get bored with her." Nevermind the fact that there are plenty of great looking games/women that can look amazing but are also fun to play with. Blanket generalizations like this are pretty ignorant.

OSS builds your CV

[tepples]

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.

Re:OSS builds your CV

[csbruce]

It's a big resume booster for the maintainers.

"Macroeconomic cost of personal projects to world GDP: $1.25-billion."

Yeah, that'll look really great on a person's resume.

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:ok, so now that i have it

[menotume]

Start it up, hit enter three times.

Re:Is this really anything close to an accurate co

[gnalle]

The Debian popularity contest, rates bzflag as number 66. It counts the number of computers, who that have install the popcon package as well as bzflag.

inst vote old recent no-files (maintainer)

451 84 347 19 1 (Tim Riker)

Ah...the good old days....

[JakiChan]

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.

Graphics Issue

[KrackHouse]

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.

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 :) Don't take my word for it though...
"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."