Anyone who knows how to write computer code can contribute to OSS projects, provided they’re willing to donate their work.
Bzflag gameplay software#
This meat and potatoes approach is typical of software produced by OSS (open source software) projects.
Only a modestly decorated menu screen with the most obvious option highlighted (“join game”) greets you.
There are no movies, splash screens, or loading delays long enough to go make a sandwich. Launching the game doesn’t set off the usual procession of cinematic paeans to the game’s developers and publishers. Spending a little bit of time playing BZFlag is a study in how some high-budget commercial game projects have strayed from the fundamentals of good gameplay design. The latest version of BZFlag, released in January, takes up roughly one-fifth of one percent the disk space of Unreal Tournament 2004, a gargantuan first-person shooter that requires five CDs and about 45 minutes to install. This is BZFlag, a free game with perhaps the best fun-per-megabyte ratio on the planet. I sputtered around the battlefield, ineffectually firing my cannon at other players whose tanks all seemed superpowered compared to mine. Whatever it was, it added an extra dash of disorientation to the often humbling experience of playing a multiplayer game for the first time. I had a feeling that my opponents were laughing at me, but I couldn’t be quite sure because they were doing it in Finnish. I felt more like a tank-shaped piñata, and I was having great difficulty staying alive for more than a few seconds at a time. But the best thing about BZFlag is what has kept it under development for so long – it's still a huge amount of fun.Everyone was a tank, except for me. You'll also find lots of configuration options to fine-tune how the game runs, and it should run on almost any hardware from the last 10 years, even without a dedicated graphics card. You can have dozens of players on the same map, and there's usually a server somewhere in the world you can join or run your own server just as simply from the main menu.
Bzflag gameplay full#
You can still run the game in both full screen and "quick, minimize, and switch to spreadsheet" window/working mode. There's no real-time RTX raytracing, but there is texture, modern resolution, and lighting support. The graphics, in particular, no longer look like a retro-inspired tribute to a bygone era. Despite the retro graphics, it felt incredibly advanced at a time when being online was uncommon.īut what many people don't realize is that BZFlag has been in development ever since, with some major updates, a new website, and both Flatpak and Snap options. It was reminiscent of an early vector arcade game called Battlezone, with one big difference: The 1997 release of BZFlag included a multiplayer lobby where you could find games and play on the battlefield with strangers. You moved within a landscape of simple square buildings that obstructed the distant mountains, where another player would be prowling, waiting to target you in their sights, and blow you into the next level. This was a simple vector game, drawn in lines, and controlled from the player's point of view. If you first installed Linux in the late 1990s, especially in a university or school lab, one of the first things you might have tried was a game called BZFlag.
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