gus.rikers.org — Battlezone Online

Battlezone Online (bzo) is a free, open-source 3D multiplayer tank game that runs in the browser -- on a desktop, a phone or a VR headset -- and plays with BZFlag clients and servers. This server: bzo https://gus.rikers.org Azure server Germany.

Controls

One client runs on a desktop, a phone and a headset, so every action has a way in from each of them. The keyboard has the most; touch, a gamepad and the XR controllers carry the actions a match needs, and the Settings menu reaches the rest -- including from a headset, where there is no keyboard at all. The in-game help (/ or ?) lists the keyboard's; npm run check:controls-docs keeps the two in step.

Keyboard

Driving

• W / S or Up / Down — move forward/backward
• A / D or Left / Right — turn left/right
• Enter — shoot
• Tab — jump
• Space — drop flag
• I or right-click — identify the tank in your sights, and lock a Guided Missile onto it
• Delete — self-destruct, after a five second countdown; Delete again calls it off
• 9 or /autopilot [roger|ace] — autopilot: the pilot drives, aims and shoots until pressed again. Settings -> Autopilot chooses the pilot without a keyboard. You can still drive while it does, to help it out of a corner -- see Combining inputs
• P — pause/resume

Chat

• N — open chat (or click the Send button)
• Enter — send chat (while chat input is focused, or click Send again)
• 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 — switch chat tab (All / Chat / Server / Misc / Debug)
• [ / ] — previous/next chat tab
• Tab — while typing, complete a player, command or flag name; @ starts a mention and # a player's slot number
• Up / Down — while typing, recall earlier lines; type the start of a line first to recall only the ones beginning that way
• . — reply to last direct-message sender
• , — message nemesis target
• Page Up / Page Down — scroll chat history
• End — jump chat to newest message
• Drag across the history while chat is open to select it, then copy; typing carries on in the input

View and panels

• Esc — back out one step: exit chat input, leave fullscreen, leave mouse steering, then open Settings. Pressing it again closes Settings, so it is always safe to press one more time
• M — toggle mouse steering
• C — cycle camera mode
• O — toggle operator panel
• F — toggle fullscreen
• ` — toggle debug HUD
• = or + or Numpad + — zoom radar out (increase range)
• - or Numpad - — zoom radar in (decrease range)
• \ — reset radar zoom to the default medium range (half the world's radar limit, which is the world size unless the map says otherwise)
• Settings -> Radar: ... — cycle Short/Medium/Long radar presets
• B — toggle the voice microphone
• Settings -> Audio Settings — set the game, voice, and microphone levels, and choose the voice channel: All, Nearby, or Team
• / or ? — show/hide help panel

Hunting

Marking a player puts a cyan ◎ on their scoreboard row, a cyan ring on their radar blip, and a beacon in the sky over them in their own tank colour -- so several marked at once are still told apart at a glance. While one of them is in your sights the HUD says SPOTTED: and a ping sounds once a second from where they are. In Rabbit Chase the rabbit is marked for you, and its beacon is cyan like its ring: everyone is hunting it, so everyone's mark over it says so.

• U — hunt: open the scoreboard cursor, and press it again on a running hunt to clear every mark
• 7 — add hunt: the same cursor, but committing adds to what is marked rather than replacing it, and committing on a row already marked takes it off
• Settings -> Hunt — the same thing without a keyboard, for a phone or a headset. Left and right step through Clear and then the players in alphabetical order; select marks or unmarks whoever is shown, or clears every mark on Clear. On a touch screen or with a mouse, tap a chevron to step and anywhere else on the row to select
• With the cursor open, the board's heading reads *SEL* and a pulsing ○ sits on the row it is on, filling in to ◎ when you commit. Up / Down move it, Enter commits, and U or 7 backs out keeping whatever was already marked. I and Space move the cursor too, so a surface without arrow keys can reach it

As an observer

As an Observer you have no tank. Drive and turn fly the camera instead, Tab climbs and Space descends, and holding Shift makes drive tilt the view up and down and turn slide it sideways. The camera rests at the eye height of a tank on the ground, and travel stays level however the view is tilted. Pausing and self-destruct do nothing.

• Enter or C — step through everything: in each view, the leader first, then every player, then on to the next view. The views are Free, Track, Follow, Driving with, and Flag where a map has team flags
• I or right-click — in the Free view, watch the tank in your sights, or show the obstacle there: what it is, an outline round it, and its block from the map file with the group blocks that placed it
• Right-click or tap an obstacle anywhere on screen, in any view and the Overview most of all, to show it the same way
• Pick nothing -- the sky, or empty ground in the Overview -- or press the panel's World button for the whole world: what is in it, faces, textures, the map file's warnings and its largest meshes, each of which shows that mesh
• Click a scoreboard row to watch that player; click the marked row again to go back to following the leader

Mouse

M turns mouse steering on and off, and nothing else does: the keys never take it away behind your back.

The targeting box

The two boxes in the middle of the screen are the steering, as in BZFlag. Where the cursor sits relative to their centre is what the tank does:

• Inside the inner box, nothing. It is the dead zone: park the cursor there to stop.
• Between the boxes, more the further out. Up is forward and down is reverse; left and right turn. Each grows evenly from nothing at the inner box's edge to full at the outer box's.
• At or past the outer box, full. Each axis stops growing on its own, so running the cursor out past the top keeps the tank at full speed and leaves left and right free to steer.
• Reverse is half speed, as it is from the keys, however far down the cursor goes.
• The box sets the speed asked for, not the speed you get at once. A world with an acceleration limit (BZFlag's -a, off by default) brings the tank up to it over time, the same as it does from the keys.

The boxes are BZFlag's own sizes, scaled to the window. BZFlag also holds the cursor inside the box; a browser cannot without taking the pointer over, so in bzo the cursor can leave it -- the steering simply stays at full, and the cost is a longer move back to the centre.

With the keys, the mouse keeps whichever axis no key is holding -- see Combining inputs.

Clicks

Left click shoots wherever the cursor is, whether mouse steering is on or not, unless the click lands on the chat panel or a button. Right click identifies. Mouse steering is unavailable with no mouse attached, in VR, and while the on-screen controls are up, since those steer instead; a click that misses one of their buttons does nothing rather than firing.

Combining inputs

Every input drives at once, and nothing switches between them on its own: M and the Settings rows are the only things that change which ones are on.

Driving is shared out an axis at a time -- forward/back, and turn, each on its own. On each, the first of these with something to say wins:

1. Keys. A held drive key owns its axis, and holding both of a pair (W and S, or A and D) is a deliberate stop on that axis.
2. The stick: the XR controllers in VR, otherwise a connected gamepad, otherwise the on-screen stick. Only one of the three is read at a time -- they are not added together.
3. The mouse, in the targeting box, with mouse steering on.

So you can drive with W while the mouse steers, turn with A/D while the mouse sets the speed, or steer a gamepad's turn while a key holds the speed. A stick let go reads zero and gives the axis to the mouse; the mouse box holds whatever the cursor's place says, which is why it comes last.

Buttons add up. Shoot fires from Enter, a left click, or the stick source's own fire button; jump from Tab or the stick source's; identify from I, a right click, or the stick source's. Any of them will do.

With the autopilot on, the pilot takes the mouse's place, last in line: a drive key or the stick you hold still owns its axis, and the pilot has the rest. So when it is wedged against something you can hold A to turn it out, or S to back it off, while it keeps the other axis, and let go to hand it back -- it carries on from wherever you left it, re-planning its route if you took it somewhere else. Your shots, jumps and drops add to its own. The mouse box does not steer while the autopilot drives: it holds an offset wherever the cursor is parked, so it would never hand anything back.

Menus don't stop the autopilot. Opening Settings, or any other menu, normally pauses your tank. With the autopilot driving, the menu takes the keys and the pilot goes on driving. With a pilot chosen on the Settings -> Autopilot row but not driving, opening a menu turns the autopilot on, and closing the menu turns it off again -- so a menu means "drive for me a moment" rather than "stop". With the row on None, the default, or on a server that refuses bots (-disableBots), menus pause as they always have. A hidden window still pauses either way: the browser stops drawing it, and the pilot with it.

Three keys at once. Many keyboards cannot report some three-key combinations at all -- the third key's press never reaches the browser -- so a held turn and reverse can swallow a jump (#146). The debug HUD (`) shows how many keys the browser saw held at once, which tells the keyboard's limit from bzo's.

Touch: the on-screen controls

A phone starts with them on; anywhere else Settings -> Virtual Controls turns them on and off.

• The stick, bottom left: push it to drive and turn, as far as you push it. A mouse can drag it too.
• ● — shoot. Tapping fires as fast as clicking a mouse; holding fires at the world's sustained rate
• ⤒ — jump
• ⚑ — drop flag
• ◎ — identify, and lock a Guided Missile

Everything else -- camera, radar range, chat, hunting, autopilot, pausing -- is a row in Settings, which a tap reaches.

Gamepad

Any controller the browser reports in the standard layout (most USB and Bluetooth pads, and iOS MFi controllers). Plugging one in turns it on; nothing needs setting up.

The sticks have a dead zone of a fifth of their travel, so a pad left on the desk does not creep. The right stick is free.

The pad rumbles when you fire and when your tank dies, as BZFlag's does: a short buzz for a shot, longer for a shock wave, both motors for a laser, and one long, strong shake for a death. It rumbles only while it is what you are playing with -- a key or a click hands control back and keeps it quiet -- and never for an observer. Rumble in Settings turns it off. The browser has to support it; Chrome and Edge do.

XR controllers

In VR the controllers are the only input. Turning the tank is independent of where you look.

Both controllers pulse for the same events as a gamepad's rumble.

Identify is on the thumbstick press because a thumb that is steering presses it by accident, and identifying costs nothing; the menu is on B for the same reason. Typing -- a name, a MOTD -- uses the headset's own system keyboard, raised when the row takes focus; see the README's WebXR section for headsets that have none.

Flags

Drive over a flag to pick it up. Good flags help; bad flags hinder, and stay until they shake off, you kill, or you die. Team flags are captured by carrying an enemy's to your own base.

Discord

Talk with other players on the BZFlag Discord.

Battlezone Online 1.3.67 · Source, AGPL-3.0