How to get started

[radiognome]

I don't know why... but I just for the fun and learning my first new VM-machine on my fresh harddrive happened to be an Ubuntu BZflag server, so I could 'tank' with my eeepc and my macbook if only I were not alone yesterday evening. (dropped my MacBook, killed the drive, did not have timemachine backup my development-servers). I was looking for a game to run on my Ubuntu eeepc, and was attracted by the simple game-play and the old-school OpenGL look (and the GPL-licence and the fact I did not spend the evening restoring the whole PosGRES/GIS setup to have the fresh server do something in the network).

Today, after office-hours (ahem..) my collegue and me waged war on each other from our workstations (shame we have to disable Compiz to make the game work).We are both no 'Gamers', buth thought this could be the next 'Big Hit' here at the company. Shame we just trashed all pentiumIV machines which had been lingering in the broomcloset for years.

I did some roaming across BZflag on the 'Wilde Woeste Web' as we call it here in the Netherlands, and I found only two extremes. In depth stuff on building your own map or more about new developments of tools to help to make your own maps, and servers with worlds and other players.

I would like to play something different than the random generated world from the .conf file I found and edited a little, but I am not into online gaming. I am very bad with gaming. But developing my own map with fog, textures, trees etc...in Drawinfo is a bit beyond my relation with BZflag now.

Is there a place where I can download some good mapfiles I could run on my private server, just to get the taste?

Greetings Radiognome

[dango]

Glad to see new players that enjoy the game!

Finding maps
New maps are posted here, although not all of them are great.
http://my.bzflag.org/bb/viewforum.php?f=64

This place is pretty old, not used anymore, but it still has some pretty cool maps on it:
http://www.garrettsites.net/bzmaps/index.php?page=maps

Also, if you want, you can go onto the public servers, find a map you like, and use /saveworld <name> to save it to your computer. It'll just be the map file, however, so it won't have settings.
(It should appear in $home/.bzf/maps/


About making your own maps
BZFlag maps have basic objects- boxes, pyramids and teleporters. Draw info, mesh, fog, textures, etc. are just extras allow maps to stray from the boxes and pyramids, and to make the map look prettier- meaning you don't have to use these if you want to make your own map.

The wiki has some info here:
http://my.bzflag.org/w/Category:Map_Mak ... on_Methods
and here:
http://my.bzflag.org/w/BZW

You can also run "man bzw" for the man pages.

[radiognome]

Thanks me1 for the helpful links. I'll dive into it over the weekend.

Radiognome

[z[h]ero]

More map files: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=42 ... unc=browse

But developing my own map with fog, textures, trees etc...in Drawinfo is a bit beyond my relation with BZflag now.

Then an option could be to start easily by using just basic map-elements like boxes and pyramids, instead of creating the "complicated" elements you mentioned. Such maps can be fastly and easily developed with grafical map-editors of the bzflag community.