Welcome to the Linux version of BZFlag! BZFlag is a network multiplayer 3D tank battle game. You can play against several other people anywhere on a TCP/IP based network, including the Internet. BZFlag is free and open source; please read the file COPYING in the bzflag-<version> directory off the standard doc directory (probably /usr/share/doc). Both hardware and software rendering is supported. Hardware rendering is highly recommended, as software rendering is very slow. Hardware rendering is provided by the OpenGL drivers for your video card. ATI and NVIDIA are the primary chipsets for video cards in use today. Many Linux distributions to not ship with video drivers that properly support hardware acceleration on modern cards. Both ATI and NVIDIA provide Linux drivers for many architectures on there websites. In general they provide greater performance then the default drivers in many distributions. More information about BZFlag is available in the man pages for bzflag, bzfs, and bzadmin. Also check: http://BZFlag.org/ Different Linux distributions use different naming conventions for the packages that provide the dependencies needed to compile and run BZFlag. Known requirements include: Debian & Ubuntu: libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libsdl1.2-dev libcurl3-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev (may have to add this yourself as well) In order to build bzrobot with python support, you will need: python-dev swig Fedora: A "yum install SDL-devel curl-devel ftgl-devel ncurses-devel" command will follow dependencies to automatically install all of the packages required to compile BZFlag. Known bugs in the Linux version: * screen redraw problems when using accelerated glx. normally only happens, if at all, when you change video format. the workaround is to press ctrl+alt+'+' or ctrl+alt+'-' after exit to change the video format. restart the X server if that doesn't work. this appears to be a problem in glx. * window sizing weirdness. if you have a 3Dfx card and want to use a resolution other than 640x480 then use the -3dfx and -geometry options. if you don't have a 3Dfx card then try the -no3dfx option. Known issues: * rpm may complain about missing libGL and/or libGLU. just use --nodeps and make sure you've got Mesa installed. Mesa 3.1 provides these libraries while earlier versions provided libMesaGL and libMesaGLU. The earlier versions (starting with version 2.6) will work as long as there is a symbolic link from libGL to libMesaGL and from libGLU to libMesaGLU. * if rendering is very slow on your hardware, try turning off some rendering options. if you are using software rendering, turn off textures and shadows and lower your resolution, as they cause the largest load on the CPU. If you are using hardware rendering, make sure you have current video drivers for your video card's chipset. * some sound drivers don't support the SNDCTL_DSP_SETFORMAT ioctl. in this case bzflag uses SNDCTL_DSP_POST to flush partial buffers which may not work well on some drivers. use -mute to disable sound. Having sound problems? If you're using ALSA for sound, you may get better performance to use "hw:0" instead of "plughw:0" or "default" for audio by specifying "hw:0" under the Options->Audio->Device menu in the game. This seems to be due to a bug in the SDL audio mixer. If you're using Debian, you may also have positive results replacing libsdl1.2debian-alsa with libsdl1.2debian-all via apt. Submit bug reports and comments on the SourceForge site http://sourceforge.net/projects/bzflag/