Battlezone Online: BZFlag in the Browser | Hacker News Reader

Battlezone Online: BZFlag in the Browser

github.com

40 pointsindigodaddy29 comments

Oh man, there's a real hit of nostalgia. I played BZFlag a whole bunch back in middle school and high school, and it was one of the first places where I got involved in the community at all (mostly hanging around some phpbb forums!)

Good times.

I don't remember too much of what I did, but I made a couple of maps one of which was hosted on a server for a week or something. It wasn't especially good, but it was a pretty amazing experience that somebody else thought something I made was good enough to try out, and that I could log into a "real" server and see it in action :P

Wow same! I'm so amazed to see this on HN. One of the few amazing open source multi platform games

For a second I thought this was that 90s era game about the space race where you play a tank pilot on the moon fighting the USSR in a first person rts.

I'm sure this game shares some DNA or history, but man, big nostalgia hit.

man, same, that game defined my childhood

Eagles nest 1.

Same here... probably playing at the same time as Heavy Gear, Mortyr and Ghost Recon

It's inspired by BattleZone which I loved/hated back in the day at the arcade for being too hard. I never imagined I would become much later a regular BZFlag league player. Come take a look, the community shrank over the years but we're still having fun.

For the nostalgic, here is the 90's era playable also in the browser: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/games/#first-per...

Lots of cool mini games!

thx. You can actually also see their tiny (OCaml) code from the same website.

it has been somewhat recently re-released:

https://rebellion.com/games/battlezone-98-redux/

Hm, not sure what that refers to. BattleZone was a vector-graphics arcade game from Atari.

Battlezone is a series with many games in it.

I played this game a lot, and it was somewhat responsible for me learning the linux server environment. I scrounged together a computer from my friend's dad's old parts bin, installed ubuntu on it, and then built a BZFlag map and shared it with my friends. I still remember the feeling of seeing someone I didn't know joining my game.

I hope this expands the community.

BZFlag suffers from inbreeding, where a couple of abusive admins can harass and ban players across all the (two) popular servers and choke off an already-small community. They abet cheaters and ban those who call them out, which is perplexing and sad.

Fun story (at least I think so):

About 20 years ago we used to play BZFlag in the office during lunch, maybe 6-8 of us in a company of ~50. Someone complained that we were using up the network bandwidth, although I knew the BW for the game was tiny. I bought a bunch of USB Wi-Fi adapters from Woot! and we would place them on the tops of the cubicle walls when we played. We wouldn't actually plug them in. We played on and off for several more years without any network complaints. I even built a map of the office, taking pics to use as textures, so we could drive tanks around the office, jump on our desks and shoot each other.

I have a fun story. I was allowed to set up an HTTP server on the network at work. Boss wanted me to be an Apache expert. I didn't get permission to run a BZFlag server, modded to allow infinite reload. I had rotating servers with goofy stuff like blank maps, all flags Laser, with infinite reload. I remember the frantic call from my boss about a DDoS attack hitting my server. The thing I missed was each shot is a single UDP packet, so I was basically DDoSing the entire network. Woops

I had so many sweaty sessions on the Hepcat pillbox server, back in the day. No jumping, no superflags, CTF. Super high skill ceiling. That was some of the best gaming.

Oh wow, I was on Hepcat too. That was a good one

While we’re at it, MechWarrior/BattleTech could use some TLC in the form of the same treatment.

This and titles like it made my childhood

The server looks dead to me, oh well.

This is a slop port to TypeScript / JavaScript? The original code was written in C++.

The Apocalypse map is still golden!

Looks like Tim Riker is driving it. He's been the main maintainer and name behind BZFlag ever since I can remember..

He holds copyright, but to my knowledge he hasn't been an active contributor for a very long time.

(At least I remember reading a discussion on BZFlag licensing a decade ago, when his inactivity was already noted. Looking at the commit log, he made 9 commits since 2011 and they mostly concern licensing.)

Everyone knows that unless a game is programmed with handcrafted machine code (assembly is a modern crutch for those who can't program of course) that it is simply not worth playing

Yes definitely, hand translated into hexadecimal and then typed in via code monitors, or if getting fancy DATA blocks, preceded by a mini loader and jump to execution entry code. /s

Having seen with my own eyes what you can do with assembly per KolibriOS I agree with you.

The maintainer himself is creating this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com