Official forums for BZFlag.org

That's a simple and reasonably elegant solution; didn't know it was doable. I mistakenly just assumed that the PM machinery verified each address as it was entered!

That answer makes complete sense - thanks.

I don't think my request falls into either of those two categories, nor that it is unreasonable. The groups, usernames, etc., are all tied to the bboard, and the fora are intended for discussing BZFlag issues. In the simplest form, my suggestion would be to allow group names as the outgoing address ...

Gerbil - what is the "auto email feature"? Do you mean just getting an email that tells you that you have a new message? One bboard problem is just getting all the admin names in the outgoing message, without missing anyone.

I often have messages I'd like to send to a group of people - sometimes these are coincident with the groups I've had set up (e.g., PPANZER.ADMINS), though it might be better if I could set up a list of active admins and just message them. I've probably got 25+ active admins (out of maybe twice that...

I've just moved from a somewhat flaky DSL line to a cable modem that's significantly faster (i.e., 10x). I see my lag on servers has gone *way* down, but now I'm seeing some percentage of packets being lost - the percentage being in the low single digits. I've never seen that before; does this mean ...

Now it does work - not sure what was going on. Maybe I didn't have a server restart with the zones in when I thought I did. Weird. But thanks - it made me retest from scratch.

I'm working on a new CTF map, and when players are killed and respawn, I want to make sure they respawn at or near their own bases, not randomly on the map. I have set up zones for the teams around their bases, but spawning still happens somewhat randomly. Is there something I'm missing, or is there...

Constitution said: "If I'm guessing right, this entire topic arose out of an incident where the observer info showed abnormal state, and an admin relied on this and banned a player who was not cheating." ... "Yes, this observer information can be a useful tool to an experienced admin ...

If you'd like a bit of lighter text, you might enjoy the new Cockney and Jive translations of my server guidelines: http://www.bentz-engineering.com/serverguidelines.html ; personally I think the Pig Latin goes too far, and is hard to read. (This is relevant to the extent that cheating is discussed ...

Minor points: Yrogirg mentioned that an admin could gain some advantage by seeing another player's speed. But I'd want the detector (however implemented) just to tell me that limits were exceeded, not what the speed value(s) are. On sharing: I encouraged this author of his modified client to do so. ...

While driving today, an idea occurred to me: how about an "observer bot", that would cycle through players, watching each for a few seconds (maybe a settable parameter), use what information the observer can certainly already see to check what can be checked, then send admin messages out a...

I think he's saying a bit more than that, and the perspective is one I'm glad to understand. I know I thought (and perhaps Ghost too) that these were close to trivial changes in the client. One of my admins sent me a message that he's modded a client to do some of this, which probably was the root o...

Yes, but I've seen multiple times that what might appear to be someone cheating can be due to lag on that player's connection, or the (playing) admin's connection. I think human judgement is very useful here, right now perhaps critical.

Well, why can't I see this when I'm playing? My admins (and I myself) usually are on a server to *play*, not observe. Having some display of odd events while playing, for admins, would be very useful. Actually I think players are much more sensitive to oddities than observers are, unless by accident...

It would be nice if the client displayed additional info if the player is an admin on a server; for instance, highlighting players going faster than they should be, curved shots, shots missing that shouldn't (narrow tanks), and any and all other reasonable checks for cheats. None of this would assis...

Radio Paradise, an internet radio station with no commercials - radioparadise.com or something. Nice variety, and the constant music increases mental flow. No cost to it, nor any signup or anything.

This came out of a conversation during a game: several people thought it might be fun to hunt me, and we chatted about it - maybe having a "selected" player, think of the rabbit hunt mode, but the play would be as normal, with one exception: if you shot the rabbit, you got 3 points instead...

At least one of my servers has lots of European players; while I know a few languages, I certainly don't know all that I would need to understand everyone. It'd be nice to tie in some (free, available) web services to do translation. One possible problem is language identification (though players co...

I've got a lot of tools written in MS Visual Basic Express (which you can download from Microsoft for free); I usually write maps by writing scripts that generate map files. You're welcome to the source code, etc., if you like.

Changing the config directory worked - thanx.

It won't run on my 64-bit Windows 7 machine - just exits after changing screen brightness, followed by a msg from Windows 7 that it didn't work.

Well, I don't have a "modeler"; if BZFlag specs say that I need to produce a mesh, etc. of a certain sort, I usually write software to do that. There's something unstated and a little disturbing here, that the spec isn't quite the thing, but that one is supposed to adopt a tool (perhaps on...

I have a very simple problem to solve, but to do so seems to involve so much hair that I can't believe that there isn't a better way. I've used texcoords, for instance to put an image on a sign. I have something very simple I'd like to do, but the texcoord machinery might be annoyingly ponderous to ...

Automatic kicking/banning might be good, but: 1. The server owner (or admins) should have something to say about how long a ban is, etc.; 2. Automatic machinery like that might just let someone more rapidly test a cheat client - a human in the loop might pick up patterns given the data, and issue a ...