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Comment by hpcjoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing they (authors of battlezone) and the article aren't aware of BZFlag[1]. I started playing it in 1995 on SGI machines. I now play it on my laptop. This is definitely 3D, and the tanks can jump.

[1] https://www.bzflag.org

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Looks like the article predates bzflag by over a decade, there's a little blurb in there that mentions it, different from the re-publication date near the title.

Derp ... I didn't look at the date at all. Thanks!

Sure, at the time, the authors of battlezone wouldn't have been aware, since it predated BZFlag (and SGI) by 15 years. As did this article, written when battlezone was still current.

IEEE has had this bad habit of recently republishing some old era articles as if they were current. I find it nostalgic but also disconcerting.

Is there something we could do to make it less disconcerting? We hoped the bright box with the original publication date would cover that. (This year we're making an effort to identify articles in our paper archives that were contemporary (or 'ish) design stories at the time, that now have some historical meaning. Until this republication they didn't exist in digital form. Thoughts?

Maybe put the repost date and the original date/re-publication date closer together and/or in the same place? I think part of the confusion is people glance at where they expect the dateline to be and then miss the other bit because it looks like a quote or ad box.

The "bright box" disappears for me and I'm sure many others. It's just a callout and by default is visually ignored with my "ad reflex".

Here's one obvious fix. First line of the article, italics: "Originally published x/y/zz".

BZFlag seems like has a 3D-mode of "Space Invaders".[0,img]

[0] https://www.bzflag.org/media

[img] https://www.bzflag.org/assets/images/media/screenshots/space...

And it was created by... the voice of Minmei?!

bzflag is one of those timeless games, like nethack, xpilot, and even Doom now. People just keep playing and hacking them... for decades.

Did you play Battalion back in the day?

Not to mention xmrid, xbill, and there was a graphical nethack clone called crossfire that I liked to play.

I could never get Battalion to compile under Linux or AIX, but it’s been almost thirty years since I last tried.

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