Battlezone Online: BZFlag in the Browser

tikhonj

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

causesothere

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.

doctoboggan

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.

stackghost

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.

hn_submit

This is a slop port to TypeScript / JavaScript? The original code was written in C++. The Apocalypse map is still golden!

pjmlp

The server looks dead to me, oh well.

VerifiedReports

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.

reactordev

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

robotguy

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.