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Classic Games (Games) Software Entertainment Games Linux

BZFlag goes Platinum 196

Posted by Zonk from the you-don't-see-nearly-enough-tank-games-anymore dept.
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."
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BZFlag goes Platinum More

BZFlag goes Platinum

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  • Momentous? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by schild ( 713993 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:15PM (#11061797) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pronobozo ( 794672 ) * <pronobozo@pronobo[ ]com ['zo.' in gap]> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:21PM (#11061833) Homepage
      "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.


    • 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.

      While it may be true that open source games lag proprietary ones, Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org] and Freeciv [freeciv.org] have taken on lives of their own. They beet out BZFlag on the happy penguin [happypenguin.org] top ranked games [happypenguin.org].

    • OSS builds your CV (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      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.

  • rox (Score:1)

    by mmu_man ( 107529 )
    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 :).

  • Gameplay? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FiReaNGeL ( 312636 ) <.moc.liamtoh. .ta. .l3gnaerif.> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:16PM (#11061802) Homepage
    I sure hope the gameplay is good, cause the graphics [bzflag.org] 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? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You haven't played it, have you :)
    • Once you start improving the graphics, where do you stop?
      • Once you start improving the graphics, where do you stop?

        You don't. Duh...

      • Re:Gameplay? (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > Once you start improving the graphics, where do you stop?

        Once you start digging a hole, where do you stop?

        Once you start growing a beard, where do you stop?

        Once you start posting stupid comments on slashdot, where do you stop?

    • Re:Gameplay? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by eddy the lip ( 20794 )

      If anything, they're too good. One of my favorite things about BattleZone was the monochrome vector graphics. Damn, I miss that game.

      I love shiny graphics as much as the next guy (UT2004 is a current favorite), but give me a good game over whizzy graphics any day. Hell, I just whacked Morgoth again a couple of weeks ago. Not using any of those silly tiled graphics, either. I look like a '@', as god intended.

    • Re:Gameplay? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 )


      I sure hope the gameplay is good, cause the graphics look like they date from the 80s Era.

      Do you have any memory from the 80's? Graphics like this didn't appear on home computers until at least the early to mid 90's. Granted, by today's state of the art, that's dated. But then - so's the game.


      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 L

      • Re:Gameplay? (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        > Do you have any memory from the 80's?

        Yes, actually. I have four 256K, 30-pin SIPPs lying around for no particular reason.
      • Graphics aren't everything. There's a wasteland of games out there that were little more than a bit of flash. And they're all but forgotten.

        Graphics are a part of the whole package. A game may have great gameplay, but if it has terrible graphics, it's still missing omsething.
        • But then, isn't HAVING FUN the reason why you play, not wanking off to pixel shaders?
          • 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.

    • Re:Gameplay? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cosmol ( 143886 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:49PM (#11061996)
      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.

      • I agree - but my LAN buddies took one look at the graphics refused to play it even though the game play is more fun than eye-candy games they did play. Go figure.

        P.S. Is there a way to save the settings of your favourite server in addition to the map? The settings are just as important for the game play, and many of us don't have the time, skill or patience to fine tune the default settings to suit a given map.
      • The graphics look like they date from the 80s

        Well, kinda. They are rather flat, and could use some improvements. But I think this is primarily in the world model. You didn't have mip-mapped textured polygons in the 80s. You certainly didn't have projected shadows and accurate sky simulations back in the 80s. There are still parts of the graphics that are nice.
    • What you may not realize, is that BZFlag is a take off of the classic wire frame arcade game, Battle Zone. Primitive graphics just keep it close to its roots :)
    • 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!

  • That's amazing. (Score:5, Funny)

    by b00m3rang ( 682108 ) * on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:17PM (#11061812)
    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. (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:36PM (#11061939)
      > 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.
      • I guess you run a server so popular that it's visitors can generate enough traffic within literally a few seconds to bring down web servers, right? Oh, no... that's right, you're just some joyless anonymous punkass cynical fuck. You must be fun at parties.

  • Is this really anything close to an accurate count (Score:3, Interesting)

    by detain ( 687995 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:19PM (#11061821) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Funny)

    by KillerHamster ( 645942 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:19PM (#11061826) Homepage
    http://bzflag.org/screenshots/bzkitty.jpg [bzflag.org]

  • Memories (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gnarled ( 411192 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:21PM (#11061837) Homepage
    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!
    • Wow, I had the exact same experience with my father's CADD SGI machine but I didn't even realize I was playing the ancestor to BZflag (or using an SGI machine) until your post. That's pretty cool.
      • We had an SGI lab at my university ('97-98 timeframe). They had this game called PointBlank in their section of demos that was apparently also an early form of this. It featured a plane in addition to the small, medium, and large tanks. I have looked all over for this game, and it seems to have disappeared.

  • Dammit (Score:3, Funny)

    by orangesquid ( 79734 ) <orangesquid AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:22PM (#11061845) Homepage Journal
    I *knew* there was something wrong with that wget script I wrote. Forget to actually increment the loop variable...

  • Monumentous? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?

  • Gameplay rocks! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by menotume ( 839471 ) <meno@m-a-[ ]om ['t.c' in gap]> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @03:36PM (#11061936)
    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.
    • Played BZFlag twice. Done with it. Have played Halo 2 on Live 435 games and counting. Long live Halo 2.
      • How can people play those stupid games? Like a lot of suckers I bought a copy of the first Halo because of the rave reviews and gushes about how wonderful it was. In gameplay terms it was less fun than Doom or Quake. FPS are not a console strong point yet by any measure - especially when measured against PC shooters like UT2004 or HL2.
      • I used to play q3a and unreal tournament every day at work, and became addicted to playing with other 'real people', so much so that playing against a computer isn't much fun for me anymore. The problem that I ( and many others ) had was that after 1/2 hour of ultra fast high twitch factor action, I was completely ready to HURL, and felt physically ill. I started playing bzflag because it is the same concept (fps) but the action is more slowed down and calculated, and the feeling of wanting to barf is gone.

    • Re:Gameplay rocks! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LeiGong ( 621856 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @04:06PM (#11062065) Homepage
      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.

  • ok, so now that i have it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    how does one go about finding other living organisms to battle?
  • I just downloaded it. I don't understand why the menu screens support only keyboard mode (use up down to move, enter to select, etc). It was frustrating that I had to stop using my mouse after opening the game. It could make life so much easier.

    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.

  • 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!
    • "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
      • 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.
      • ### "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 gra

  • Wake me up.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Saturday December 11, 2004 @04:02PM (#11062041) Homepage
    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"

    • Bullshit.

      BZflag on full res/textures etc looks great and plays better.

      Spending millions on artwork and music which nobody notices anymore is one reason EA games aren't worth buying. BZFlag is good looking and more damn fun than any commercial game I've seen in years.

      TWW

  • 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?
    • A hint for new players:

      Avoid Jumping

      When you start, jumping seems like a really good way to avoid getting shot. The problem is that between jumping and landing your position is 100% predictable, meaning that the odds are good that you will land on a bullet. If at all possible, try to dodge sideways, rather than up.

  • It's funny that I downloaded that game very near to the 1,000,000 mark. I wonder how close I was.

  • Ah...the good old days.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by JakiChan ( 141719 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @06:08PM (#11062852)
    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 (Score:4, Informative)

    by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Saturday December 11, 2004 @07:04PM (#11063129) Homepage
    There was an attempt [bakadigital.com] 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 [ogre3d.org] and ODE. [ode.org] 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."
    • "which is based on OGRE, ODE, RakNet and FMod."

      Prediction. Those 4 APIs will become the LAMP of gaming in the not too distant future. ROOF maybe? Sounds sufficiently all encompassing.
    • 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...
  • 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?

  • Tanarus -- 1997.

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