34 pointsby indigodaddy8 hours ago10 comments
  • causesothere7 hours ago
    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.

    • aryx5 hours ago
      For the nostalgic, here is the 90's era playable also in the browser: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/games/#first-per...
      • pjmlp4 hours ago
        Lots of cool mini games!
        • aryx2 hours ago
          thx. You can actually also see their tiny (OCaml) code from the same website.
    • squarefoot5 hours ago
      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.
    • VerifiedReports4 hours ago
      Hm, not sure what that refers to. BattleZone was a vector-graphics arcade game from Atari.
    • 5-4 hours ago
      it has been somewhat recently re-released:

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

    • mactyler7 hours ago
      man, same, that game defined my childhood
      • pelagicAustral6 hours ago
        Same here... probably playing at the same time as Heavy Gear, Mortyr and Ghost Recon
      • nullify886 hours ago
        Eagles nest 1.
  • tikhonj7 hours ago
    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

    • Plaastix7 hours ago
      Wow same! I'm so amazed to see this on HN. One of the few amazing open source multi platform games
  • reactordevan hour ago
    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

  • VerifiedReports4 hours ago
    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.

  • doctoboggan7 hours ago
    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.
  • pjmlp4 hours ago
    The server looks dead to me, oh well.
  • stackghost6 hours ago
    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.
    • triyambakam4 hours ago
      Oh wow, I was on Hepcat too. That was a good one
  • great_tankard7 hours ago
    gg
  • hn_submit6 hours ago
    This is a slop port to TypeScript / JavaScript? The original code was written in C++.

    The Apocalypse map is still golden!

    • indigodaddy6 hours ago
      Looks like Tim Riker is driving it. He's been the main maintainer and name behind BZFlag ever since I can remember..
      • shiomiru2 hours ago
        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.)

    • VerifiedReports4 hours ago
      The maintainer himself is creating this.
    • readthenotes15 hours ago
      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
      • pjmlp4 hours ago
        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
  • pravex7 hours ago
    [flagged]