I've made a couple of comments like this on HN before, but whenever you make a homepage for a project, whether it's a game, game engine, software library, command line tool or anything--please start by describing what the thing is in one or two sentences.
Here's what I thought when I clicked this link:
> BZFlag? Does this have something to do with zipping files? Meh, I'll click and see what it is.
> A picture of some 3D rendered stuff, and download links for a bunch of platforms... Is this a game engine? A physics simulator? Maybe if I scroll down I'll find out
> Hmm, the project news doesn't tell me much... "A Flying tank", "Tanks with Superpowers"... I guess this is a game where you drive tanks? I'll take a look at the comments.
> Ohhhhhh, I see.
This could've been fixed by just having an h2 and a paragraph at the top saying "BZFlag" and "An open source tank-based warfare game with online multiplayer, going strong since 2008!" (or whenever the project started)
You don't necessarily need to have a tagline like that on every release page or documentation page, but if I end up on your site and delete everything from the URL except "projectname.org", I should be 2 seconds away from a simple description of what your project is.
With all that said, people seem to like this game, I may check it out later!
Edit: Looks like they added a tagline to the page. It’s clear, it’s obvious, it makes sense. Thanks!
97b683f8 1630 days ago [-]
It's a FPS with jumping tanks. Grab flags on the ground and get special abilities.
The main gameplay element is that when a tank is in the air it keeps its rotational momentum and you have no way to correct the trajectory mid air. Sometimes you have to jump and aim on the right or even backwards and this all gets down to injecting the exact quantity of movement prior to the jump with the mouse (a nice addition beyond the classical pointing mechanics of FPS).
Tanks can't tilt, but hopefully they can jump, so another saillent part of the gameplay are mid-air duels, when two tanks facing each other start firing, jump to avoid the slow-moving orbs, and carry the fight into the air.
It looks like a caricature, but it has great mechanics that could make a good basis for an e-sport. If e-sports are introduced into the Olympic Games and they decide to look for an open-source game, BZFlag would be a good contender.
twic 1630 days ago [-]
Web pages? Those'll never catch on if you ask me. The package info seems clear enough:
$ dnf info bzflag | sed 's/^/ /'
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:29 ago on Thu 31 Oct 2019 22:24:31 GMT.
Available Packages
Name : bzflag
Version : 2.4.18
Release : 3.fc30
Architecture : x86_64
Size : 11 M
Source : bzflag-2.4.18-3.fc30.src.rpm
Repository : fedora
Summary : 3D multi-player tank battle game
URL : http://bzflag.org
License : LGPLv2
Description : BZFlag is a 3D multi-player tank battle game that allows users
: to play against each other in a networked environment. There are
: five teams: red, green, blue, purple and rogue (rogue tanks are
: black). Destroying a player on another team scores a win, while
: being destroyed or destroying a teammate scores a loss. Rogues
: have no teammates (not even other rogues), so they cannot shoot
: teammates and they do not have a team score. There are two main
: styles of play: capture-the-flag and free-for-all.
TomMckenny 1630 days ago [-]
Alternatively, a 90's style site in keeping with the aesthetics of the game would be cool in its way.
blast007 1630 days ago [-]
Thanks for the feedback. I added a short tagline to the top of the homepage.
crb 1630 days ago [-]
> going strong since 2008!" (or whenever the project started)
It's not immediately clear from the site, but it might surprise people to learn BZFlag was first released in 1993. (And is based on an arcade game from 1980.)
nwallin 1630 days ago [-]
> "An open source tank-based warfare game with online multiplayer, going strong since 2008!" (or whenever the project started)
1992, FYI. Same year as Wolfenstein 3D. Not sure what the original graphics looked like, but I know it was first person. It probably had line polygons like Battlezone, the arcade game that inspired it.
Not correcting you just to seem smart, I genuinely think it's interesting that the game is that old and still active.
sb057 1630 days ago [-]
"Free multi-player 3D tank battle game for Windows, Linux, and macOS" is front and center on the home page.
zamadatix 1630 days ago [-]
This was added in response to this comment.
doctoboggan 1630 days ago [-]
Oh wow, I played this game a lot about 15 years ago. I was in my teens and this game is the reason I learned linux system administration so I could run my own server. I built a computer with junk parts from my friend's dad's old parts bin and installed ubuntu on it.
I struggled with linux then but learned a lot. Some say I am still struggling with linux to this day.
WD-42 1630 days ago [-]
This game, Tux Racer, Chromium B.S.U. If you could get your graphics drivers to work, these were your reward. Learning linux was so fun back in the day! And the fact that you could just apt/rpm install them was mind blowing.
Oh wow, now THAT was a classic. I remember playing that on an old version of openSuSE... maybe 9 or 10?
DblPlusUngood 1630 days ago [-]
Don't forget gltron!
aidenn0 1630 days ago [-]
xboing, crackattack
shadowgovt 1630 days ago [-]
I love that this game is still going on. I had a similar experience; logging onto random servers was an absolute madhouse of learning new rules on the fly.
phkahler 1630 days ago [-]
One of my favorite variants of this is the rabbit hunt. One tank is white (a rabbit) and everyone is supposed to hunt it. Whoever kills the rabbit becomes the new rabbit, right then and there. Only ever saw 1 or 2 servers running a game this way.
travisgriggs 1630 days ago [-]
I've been playing this game for a long time now. The crowd has dropped off in recent years. I'd love to see it regrow.
What would be really cool, is a reboot form that worked for mobile.
giancarlostoro 1630 days ago [-]
That might just be it too. People wind up doing most computing on their phones. A game I used to play as a teen now has most of their users on their mobile apps while old players use their desktops.
1630 days ago [-]
Fwirt 1630 days ago [-]
For those who enjoy online multiplayer FOSS games in this vein, see also Teeworlds.
https://teeworlds.com/
miloignis 1630 days ago [-]
Man I used to love BZFlag - it looks like it's still active, I should get back on.
Unfortunately, due to the OSS nature of the game, it's super easy to cheat :/
The patches to wallhack and autoaim are literally a 2 min google search away, and the compile process is well documented and easy.
I wonder what kind of measures can be put into place without utilizing what essentially boils down to DRM?
blast007 1630 days ago [-]
I am one the developers of the game. Improving the anti-cheat capabilities is certainly one of our long time goals. The game server currently lacks a complete simulation of the game, so most of the important logic is handled only in the clients.
The first big step would be isolating the simulation logic into its own library. Then both the client and server can share that library. We would be able to move some of the decisions to the server, or at the very least verify if the client's decision make sense.
sp332 1630 days ago [-]
The server shouldn't trust the clients. The clients should just send inputs or actions, and the server will do validation and decide what the result will be.
Arnt 1630 days ago [-]
One of the patches involved is called 'autoaim'. How will the server know that the human user didn't actually aim that precisely?
failrate 1630 days ago [-]
Autoaim cannot be solved absolutely by technical solutions.
Even if the executable is fully electric fenced and verified matching a checksum, aimbots can just read the video buffer from a different process.
In practice, you can statistically analyze player hit metrics and then monitor people who appear to be too good.
However, this requires basic customer service which is less likely to come from a free server for a noncommercial game.
gnode 1630 days ago [-]
I don't expect it would be that hard to make an aimbot look human by throwing in some random variation. It would probably then be difficult (even for a human auditor) to reliably differentiate genuinely good players from "too good" players.
failrate 1630 days ago [-]
Additionally, some humans are far more skilled at aiming in a video game than you might think possible.
itsthecourier 1630 days ago [-]
It may send the position the player is aiming at at certain periods, if the player is way to accurate and linear moving to the target you can ban him. Some false positives and stuff should be considered too
errantspark 1630 days ago [-]
That's a good first step but it doesn't really stop hackers. Specifically the two cheats that the parent mentions don't require the server to trust the client. There's mitigation that can be done to prevent wallhacks, but aimbot can be really difficult to detect without sophisticated tools, and even then fundamentally the cheat can operate as an intermediary between mouse input and the game receiving that mouse input which makes it impossible to directly detect without memory inspection. Essentially you're left with heuristic analysis of mouse movements, or more likely a "Overwatch" (CS:GO) type system where moderators/janitors are tasked with evaluating players to determine if they're cheating or not.
astrobe_ 1630 days ago [-]
Cube2, another oldie but goodie FOSS games relies heavily on admins too. They are supported with stats (a server plugin, IIRC) and a observer mode which is actually available to all spectators (the game is more focused on fun than competition).
Pxtl 1630 days ago [-]
Cube1 solved the problem by keeping the communication stack closed source so you couldn't build a aerver-compatible client. The OSS version of Cube1 used a different communication stack.
kube-system 1630 days ago [-]
We don't really have the technology to do that completely. Because it's really hard and expensive to stream pre-rendered video at a low enough latency, most action games still transmit player positions and trust the client to accurately render the corresponding video client-side.
Although, even in scenario with a completely untrusted client receiving only final video output, there's no guarantee that the actions being input are human.
gnode 1630 days ago [-]
> even in scenario with a completely untrusted client receiving only final video output, there's no guarantee that the actions being input are human.
I imagine it would be a fairly trivial application of computer vision to make an aimbot for first person shooters that works most of the time.
bb88 1630 days ago [-]
Back when I was a youngster playing nettrek, the same thing happened. Basically, those smart enough to hack the code could create their own cheats. The wikipedia page says that game mechanics were changed so that borgs no longer had a specific advantage, but I don't know what those game mechanics were. Though it was pretty obvious if you were playing against a borg or not at least in the early days. In play chat also alerted people to those that were playing borgs.
Back in the day, you would shoot at a borg, and if your shell was aimed perfectly, it would side-step one tank width while the shell was in flight. You couldn't kill one unless you were right on top of it (or had guided missile or laser).
steveeq1 1630 days ago [-]
Do people still play netrek these days? Read somewhere that game has been around since the '80s.
bb88 1630 days ago [-]
The wikipedia article says it still is.
slim 1630 days ago [-]
maybe just play it with friends, on a lan?
Roboprog 1630 days ago [-]
This is great LAN party game.
Although my daughter used to always pick up that damn laser and then shut out the rest of us
Aardwolf 1630 days ago [-]
For wallhack: it would be impossible if the server would not send locations of opponents behind walls
For aimbot: let server slightly autoaim, but require more shots and slower rotation so it's a bit more about strategy than about aiming speed?
ivanbakel 1630 days ago [-]
>it would be impossible if the server would not send locations of opponents behind walls
Wouldn't that require the server to do some amount of 3D logic every netcode tick for every player? And then you'd get into real latency problems, since either you do rollbacks to account for when people are allowed to see each other or you let the fastest connection win.
jandrese 1630 days ago [-]
Depending on the complexity of the geometry this is within the realm of reason. Fairness might not be a huge issue as long as you make sure visibility is a two way street. People will probably complain about high latency players popping into existence after they're already most of the way around a corner though.
mantap 1630 days ago [-]
The server already has to do a full 3D simulation for each client. The server just doesn't send updates for players that are not visible to another player. So yes the server has to do a bit more work, on the other hand it reduces server bandwidth.
somacert 1630 days ago [-]
darkplaces quake does this. see sv_cullentities_trace.
Maybe that's why no matter how good my son got at the game, he always found himself with negative points in every session.
dajohnson89 1630 days ago [-]
hashing the binary?
Sayrus 1630 days ago [-]
You can't stop cheating even on a closed source software with an anti-cheat running with kernel privileges. The same idea applies to open-source, especially as any anti-cheat feature is open sourced too.
No matter how powerful your anti-cheat protection is, it can be bypassed (There were ROP-based cheats recently on HN if you want to take a look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21355058).
At the very least, you won't be able to protect info like the position of entities and players (You need them even before you see the players to avoid problems, meaning anyone can create a wallhack or an aimbot).
If one could create a trusted environment, that would be a different story. I do think this is possible with cloud gaming. If you can't interact with the game memory, the game files or the underlying operating system, the best you can do should be macro or AI based on what's displayed on the screen.
jdietrich 1630 days ago [-]
You can't necessarily detect the cheat software, but you can detect the behaviour of cheat software. Writing an algorithm that can play a first-person shooter at a superhuman level is pretty trivial, but writing an algorithm that plays like a really skilled human is vastly more difficult. This behavioural approach to anti-cheat is now highly practical thanks to deep learning.
As long as the network and its weights are open-source, you can create adversarial examples automatically. So the idea is to run the auto-aim bot, but then run the network on your inputs backwards to morph your inputs to look more "human-looking".
Raw Autoaim Bot -> Neural Net (since its open source) -> tweak inputs until its considered a human -> send the tweaked autoaimed command.
samus 1630 days ago [-]
The weights don't really have to be open-source though. After they are trained, they should be subjected to the same policies as database passwords to counter your attack, or to at least force the cheater to train the counter-network via the game.
dragontamer 1630 days ago [-]
> After they are trained
Are you suggesting that BzFlag sysadmins are going to be custom-training their own neural nets?
Based on my experience with LeelaZero, its far more likely for people to share weights with each other. And participate in community-training. Not everyone has the skill to spin up TensorFlow, carefully partition off training data, and monitor neural nets through training.
But almost anybody can download the "latest weight file" as a Cronjob and update their bzflag server every day or week.
itsthecourier 1630 days ago [-]
To restrict this you may refuse to share the position of all units unless they are visible
JoshTriplett 1630 days ago [-]
1) A modified binary can send in the hash of an unmodified binary. The server has no way to know.
2) Linux distributions compile BZFlag themselves, they don't just distribute upstream's binaries.
thomble 1630 days ago [-]
I always keep a legitimate binary of BZFlag around and make sure my hacked version hashes that one instead of itself.
phkahler 1630 days ago [-]
The server would need to provide the binary, or at least a large precompiled core library. Even then, with all of it open source it seems like one could hack it.
I believe this was my first time learning to compile a C++ project. This was 13 years ago; I was 14 years old. Great memories playing with others, chatting, building maps.
fnordfnordfnord 1630 days ago [-]
Back when I was faculty at a .edu, I installed this game in my student labs and it got a lot of action, despite the availability of much newer games.
pvg 1630 days ago [-]
I think one reason for this is that the base variant is easy to understand and there's no 'map' to learn making it a great fit for casual, pick-up play. BZFlag is the OG Q3DM17.
DiabloD3 1630 days ago [-]
At least you said Longest Yard and not Campgrounds.
twic 1630 days ago [-]
In my first full-time programming job (only back in 2008!), we used to play BZFlag at lunch. It was the only fun thing you could install through the CentOS package manager. A year or two later, we had Quake 3, with Lego mods.
sn41 1630 days ago [-]
I used to love playing this circa 2001. It's also great to learn programming games using OpenGL. Great to see this still going strong...
pitzips 1630 days ago [-]
Are you a fellow Tanarus refugee? I miss that game so much. I had the most flags in total in that game!
winrid 1630 days ago [-]
I played this a lot with my sister on Pentium 3 Linux boxes. Good times.
tiku 1630 days ago [-]
A great game for office Warfare. Low specs so everyone can play.
1630 days ago [-]
Rendered at 19:21:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Here's what I thought when I clicked this link:
> BZFlag? Does this have something to do with zipping files? Meh, I'll click and see what it is.
> A picture of some 3D rendered stuff, and download links for a bunch of platforms... Is this a game engine? A physics simulator? Maybe if I scroll down I'll find out
> Hmm, the project news doesn't tell me much... "A Flying tank", "Tanks with Superpowers"... I guess this is a game where you drive tanks? I'll take a look at the comments.
> Ohhhhhh, I see.
This could've been fixed by just having an h2 and a paragraph at the top saying "BZFlag" and "An open source tank-based warfare game with online multiplayer, going strong since 2008!" (or whenever the project started)
You don't necessarily need to have a tagline like that on every release page or documentation page, but if I end up on your site and delete everything from the URL except "projectname.org", I should be 2 seconds away from a simple description of what your project is.
With all that said, people seem to like this game, I may check it out later!
Edit: Looks like they added a tagline to the page. It’s clear, it’s obvious, it makes sense. Thanks!
The main gameplay element is that when a tank is in the air it keeps its rotational momentum and you have no way to correct the trajectory mid air. Sometimes you have to jump and aim on the right or even backwards and this all gets down to injecting the exact quantity of movement prior to the jump with the mouse (a nice addition beyond the classical pointing mechanics of FPS).
Tanks can't tilt, but hopefully they can jump, so another saillent part of the gameplay are mid-air duels, when two tanks facing each other start firing, jump to avoid the slow-moving orbs, and carry the fight into the air.
It looks like a caricature, but it has great mechanics that could make a good basis for an e-sport. If e-sports are introduced into the Olympic Games and they decide to look for an open-source game, BZFlag would be a good contender.
It's not immediately clear from the site, but it might surprise people to learn BZFlag was first released in 1993. (And is based on an arcade game from 1980.)
1992, FYI. Same year as Wolfenstein 3D. Not sure what the original graphics looked like, but I know it was first person. It probably had line polygons like Battlezone, the arcade game that inspired it.
Not correcting you just to seem smart, I genuinely think it's interesting that the game is that old and still active.
I struggled with linux then but learned a lot. Some say I am still struggling with linux to this day.
https://anti.itch.io/super-tux-party
It's fairly new and made with Godot Engine 3.0.
https://godotengine.org
What would be really cool, is a reboot form that worked for mobile.
The patches to wallhack and autoaim are literally a 2 min google search away, and the compile process is well documented and easy.
I wonder what kind of measures can be put into place without utilizing what essentially boils down to DRM?
The first big step would be isolating the simulation logic into its own library. Then both the client and server can share that library. We would be able to move some of the decisions to the server, or at the very least verify if the client's decision make sense.
Although, even in scenario with a completely untrusted client receiving only final video output, there's no guarantee that the actions being input are human.
I imagine it would be a fairly trivial application of computer vision to make an aimbot for first person shooters that works most of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
Although my daughter used to always pick up that damn laser and then shut out the rest of us
For aimbot: let server slightly autoaim, but require more shots and slower rotation so it's a bit more about strategy than about aiming speed?
Wouldn't that require the server to do some amount of 3D logic every netcode tick for every player? And then you'd get into real latency problems, since either you do rollbacks to account for when people are allowed to see each other or you let the fastest connection win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf94PbE-b9I
At the very least, you won't be able to protect info like the position of entities and players (You need them even before you see the players to avoid problems, meaning anyone can create a wallhack or an aimbot).
If one could create a trusted environment, that would be a different story. I do think this is possible with cloud gaming. If you can't interact with the game memory, the game files or the underlying operating system, the best you can do should be macro or AI based on what's displayed on the screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc
Raw Autoaim Bot -> Neural Net (since its open source) -> tweak inputs until its considered a human -> send the tweaked autoaimed command.
Are you suggesting that BzFlag sysadmins are going to be custom-training their own neural nets?
Based on my experience with LeelaZero, its far more likely for people to share weights with each other. And participate in community-training. Not everyone has the skill to spin up TensorFlow, carefully partition off training data, and monitor neural nets through training.
But almost anybody can download the "latest weight file" as a Cronjob and update their bzflag server every day or week.
2) Linux distributions compile BZFlag themselves, they don't just distribute upstream's binaries.