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

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.

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 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?

[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.

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.