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The first four super flags were: high speed, quick turn, rapid fire, and oscillation overthruster.

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You still needed good tactics to keep yourself alive, but you had to have a team strategy to excel.Īfter one of the students hacked the code to make his tank super-powerful (blatantly so he wasn't trying to fool us) we invented superflags. This kept our interest for quite a while (it's still my favorite mode). We quickly came up with the capture-the-flag mode and designed the new world it's played in. It didn't take too long to get bored with the basic shoot-'em-up game. They owe their similarities to their BattleZone heritage. The two games share no code and were designed and written independently.

Yes, that's right, BZFlag was written with no knowledge of bz. In fact, BZFlag was called bz back then because no one in the PCG knew of the existence of Chris Fouts' bz. This is no surprise because both games are based on the old Atari arcade game BattleZone.

After a few more tweaks, we had a pretty fun game.Īt this point the game resembled bz by Chris Fouts. So we scrapped some realism in favor of playability. It took forever to get from one end of the board to the other and you couldn't even see a shot before it hit you. I had tried to base the BZFlag world on the real world, so the playing field was 10km on a side and shots moved at around Mach 1. Once that was fixed, the second bug became clear: it was impossible to play. The first was that each player had his very own random world it was soon discovered that hiding behind a pyramid didn't work because the pyramid wasn't even there in the other player's world. The earliest complete version had two notable bugs.

So in a week long marathon of programming BZFlag took shape. So there it sat, unused, for a few months until another student browsing the WM demo directory found it and said it looked cool and that I should finish it. I had by then also realized how much more work was involved and had other stuff to do. I began to write BZFlag as a simple demo but soon abandoned it after producing a program that was supposed to let you drive around a virtual world but instead had a bizarre warping effect because I goofed up the order of my transformations. I believe it's still used today on the HP's, but will hopefully step aside for OpenGL. The fact that you could open a window and render to it with only a dozen lines of code ensured WM's success. To encourage the other students to use it I wrote a number of small demo programs, small being the key word here. So Rick and I wrote an IRIS GL-like layer on top of Starbase which we called WM (for reasons lost in the mists of time). If you wanted to make an image you usually had to at least ray trace it. In the words of fellow student Rick Pasetto, 'Starbase sucks rocks.' As a result, very few students wrote interactive graphics tools to assist their research. While CRX-24Z graphics wasn't too bad (around XS24-Z performance), HP's graphics library, Starbase, wasn't quite as easy to use as IRIS GL.

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So by 1992, IRIS GL was an old friend.Īt the Cornell PCG, essentially the only computers available were HP 700 series workstations.

I was an intern at SGI for the summers of '90 and '91, working on a prototype Indigo during the second summer which was a blast. As told by Chris Schoeneman, the original authorīZFlag began back in 1992 while I was a Masters student at the Cornell Program of Computer Graphics.

Bzflag gameplay