Re: Proposal

[quinet@montefiore.ulg.ac.be (Raphael Quinet)]

> From: Peter Mardahl <peterm@soda.berkeley.edu>
> (...)
>   How about hacking up a mode so that opposing teams can fight
> to obtain an objective?
> (...)
>   How about a server mode which starts people up with
> reasonably strong characters, and have teams competing for 
> fountains of mana?  (No fountains, no mana!)

Some time ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a game named BOLO on the
Macintosh.  In short, this is a strategy game where each player controls one
tank and wants to gain control of several "pillboxes" and refuelling bases.
The "pillboxes" are nasty things that fire at every player but their owner.
Well, I used to hate Macs, but I must admit that I like this game...

There are some interesting ideas in this program :

- The players may join and leave an alliance whenever they want.  When they
  make a new alliance, every pillbox or base they own is shared by the members
  of the alliance (i.e. the players aren't annoyed by the pillboxes and they
  can use the fuel bases).  If they leave the alliance, they loose all these
  goodies.

- The only disadvantage when your tank is destroyed by another player's tank or
  pillbox is that you loose your ammunition and you have to restart from one of
  the starting positions, but you still own all your bases and pillboxes.
  There should be some configuration option in the CrossFire server with which
  you may choose to play a kind of strategy/exploration game (i.e. you loose a
  lot when you get killed, but the game is still a lot of fun for a single
  player) or a team/war game (i.e. the aim of the game is to fight against
  other players; you don't mind if you get killed, but the other players or
  teams may stole some of your objects).

- The fuel bases are very much like the "fountains of mana" : you have to
  possess at least one of them if you want to survive...

- There is a BoloTracker program that keeps track of the current Bolo games in
  the world.  Whenever a player joins or creates a Bolo game, he may choose
  to notify the BoloTracker (using UDP datagrams).  Using another program
  (BoloFinder), you may join one of the current games.  There should be
  something like that for the CrossFire servers.  If there was one host (like
  ifi.uio.no) that could automatically keep track of the CrossFire servers in
  the world, this would add a lot of fun to the game.

Bolo is available on sumex-aim.stanford.edu:info-mac/games/bolo and most
other ftp sites (wuarchive.wustl.edu, ...).  But don't spend too much time with
this game : keep on improving CrossFire !

By the way, will there ever be a new "official" release of CrossFire ?  Since
0.89.2, there seems to be as many versions as there are people on this list...
Flame, flame...  ;-)

                                      Raphael Quinet
                                      <quinet@montefiore.ulg.ac.be>
                                      <quinet@server.montefiore.ulg.ac.be>