There are around 250 servers active at any given time (although only about 10-20% have active players most of the time). Certain thresholds are used to catch malicious players and kick them off the server, as well as message filters and an entire collection of other anti-cheating features. Servers can change the game mode and have custom maps made to fit the properties of the game. If they succeed, that team becomes "The King of the Hill." There are three other objectives and corresponding styles (four in total): a style called "capture-the-flag" (or "CTF" for short) in which tanks try to pick up an opponent's flag and bring to their own home base, a style called " rabbit chase" in which the objective is to have every hunter (orange)tank try to destroy a particular white tank, called the "rabbit," and a style called "King of the Hill," in which a team attempts to stay in a certain area for 30–60 seconds without being killed. If there is no special style indicated by the server owner, the only objective is the above (to simply kill opponent tanks) it is called a "free for all", or "FFA" for short. Styles are server-based, as the server operator chooses what style to host. There are styles of game play that modify the objective. The basic objective is to destroy opponents' tanks, which are tanks of another team's color. Tanks have the ability to drive through other tanks, but cannot travel through buildings or other world objects. In a game of BZFlag, players drive around tanks, viewed from a first-person view, in a server-defined world (also known as a "map"), which can be modified. The game's original author, Chris Schoeneman, is no longer involved in development. The project is maintained by Tim Riker with help from David Trowbridge and Sean Morrison. Most developers monitor source edits using the mailing list available on. However, when a developer has made an edit of which other developers do not approve, or is inappropriate for the game, they are requested to revert to the previous version of the file. Though there are currently 64 listed developers, a much smaller number of those are active contributors.ĭevelopers are able to edit any of the project's files to make changes at any time. The project invites all sufficiently experienced developers to contribute. The number of contributors to the project has steadily increased over time. Zlib is used to decompress data files, which is written in C. Textures for in-game objects are loaded from PNG files audio, from WAVs. Newer releases use SDL to perform low-level operations on all platforms except for Microsoft Windows. Its audio and several other sub-systems (such as window management and file access) have been written using OS specific methods. Tim Riker was later given the project prior to version 1.7e to maintain and evolve.īZFlag is written in C++ and uses OpenGL for rendering. Schoeneman eventually re-wrote BZFlag in C++ for SGI's third IndiZone competition, which won in the "Reality Engine" category. Previously, players had to either set-up their own servers, know of servers, or read a list published and maintained by a third-party, but the new server list (hosted on the official BZFlag website, even today) allowed anybody to play games on servers that chose to become public. In 1997, the release of version 1.7d came with a groundbreaking new feature: an in-game public server list. Soon after, bad and good flags were added, and the idea remains part of game play today however, flags do not have markers and are completely unknown of their types until they are picked up by a tank (unless a tank is carrying an identify flag). There was only one of each flag, and all flags had a marker on them so tanks knew what type it was. The first four flags were High Speed (boosted tank speed), Quick Turn (tank turned faster), Rapid Fire (shots moved faster), and Oscillation Overthruster (tank could go through objects). This release took a new turn compared to older versions after a cheater, who edited the source code of his client to give himself powers that do not come from official releases, inspired Schoeneman and Pasetto to add "super-flags." Super flags affect a tank's performance by adding abilities or weapons to its arsenal. In 1993, BZFlag was released to the public for the first time. This new mode added a requirement of strategy, teamwork, and skill, which was sufficient to keep interest. However, after Schoeneman and his friend Rick Pasetto (who helped Schoeneman develop BZFlag from the beginning) became bored with the concept, they invented the capture-the-flag mode. Originally, BZFlag was simply a shoot 'em up game with no other modes. At first, BZFlag was called "bz" and despite its similarity to the game of the same title by Chris Fouts, both games were completely independent of each other. BZFlag was originally written in C by Chris Schoeneman in 1992 based on the chart-topping hit arcade game, Battlezone.
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