Misc

Google Summer of Code – Accepted Students

By blast  |  2009/04/27 23:00 Posted in Misc  |  Comments (0)

On Monday the 20th, the accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2009 were announced. BZFlag has four students this year.

Quentin Pradet a.k.a. Cygal

Project: Lots o’ bug fixing

This project will be targeted at fixing some of the bugs in the latest development code. Some of the current bugs are big enough to prevent us from releasing BZFlag 3.0.0. Having someone really digging into these will likely provoke other developers to look into these or other bugs as the summer progresses.

Mathew Eis a.k.a. Bulldozer a.k.a. KingRobot

Project: BZRobots

BZRobots is a project from last year. You can find some information about it on the BZRobots wiki page. This goal this year is to make sure that it is working correctly and to optimize/clean the code. It uses a modified copy of some code from the graphical client. This makes it much more difficult to maintain, as changes must be constantly merged to keep both the graphical and the BZRobot clients working.

Istvan Szakats a.k.a. Wyk3d

Project: BZAuthd

This project was started by Wyk3d last year. The goal was and still is to create an authentication daemon that will replace the current authentication system that BZFlag uses. It was brought up to a proof of concept last year.

Currently BZFlag uses a PHP based list server that ties directly into phpBB3′s database tables. We use phpBB’s users and groups. A better system would be to use something like OpenLDAP to store users and groups and then replicate this around to several different servers. This would be more efficient and also provide fault tolerance. That is the goal of this project.

William Hahne a.k.a. Will07c5

Project: BZWorkBench

From our first year in Google Summer of Code (2007), we had a project called BZWorkBench created. This is intended to be the official map editor for BZFlag. In it’s current state, it is not usable for making an entire map, and suffers from performance issues and a limited frontend. This project will be continued this year and will hopefully get to the point where it can be used by map authors to create maps that utilize the new features of our 2.0.x code base.

Happy New Year!

By blast  |  2009/01/04 18:43 Posted in Misc  |  Comments (0)

Hope everyone had a great New Year. It’s 2009, and maybe we’ll see a new release of BZFlag this year.

The BZFlag developers are currently trying to get version 3.0 ready. The current version number in our SVN is in the format of 2.99.x, based on our new version number scheme. There are still some serious bugs in the code that is preventing a release. If you would like to help test, fix, or report bugs, compile a client from SVN trunk code and/or get ahold of us on the main BZFlag IRC channel. You can find this on the server irc.freenode.net in the channel #bzflag.

Official BZFlag Forum Upgrade

By blast  |  2008/12/29 01:00 Posted in Misc  |  Comments (0)

I finally got around to upgrading the official BZFlag forum to phpBB 3. Had a few quirks, mainly with the authentication for the game clients/servers. The new version of phpBB uses the utf8_bin collition, which is case sensitive. Had to use a bit of code from phpBB to convert a username to a ‘clean’ username, and then compare that to the ‘username_clean’ column instead of the ‘username’ column. Groups also had the same issue (case sensitive comparisons via the queries), so I just made all of them uppercase in the database. Hopefully that’s the last of the major issues.

Jingle Tanks

By blast  |  2008/12/25 13:27 Posted in Misc  |  Comments (2)

Dashing to your base
In my 3D rendered tank
Gonna steal your flag
Cap it several times!
You get a super flag
And shoot me in the butt
As my tank blows into chunks
I mutter “WTF!”

Oh, jingle tanks, jingle tanks
Jingle all the way!
Oh what fun it is to shoot
A bullet through your taa-AANK!
Jingle tanks, jingle tanks
Jingle all the way!
Oh what fun it is to shoot
A bullet through your tank!