BZFlag (an abbreviation for Battle Zone capture the Flag) is an online multiplayer free and open-source tank game.

Inspired by Battlezone,[2] BZFlag was first written in C by Chris Schoeneman in 1992[3] as a part of his studies at Cornell University.

Super flags affect a tank's performance by adding abilities or weapons to its arsenal.

Schoeneman eventually re-wrote BZFlag in C++ for SGI's third IndiZone competition, which won in the "Reality Engine" category.

Its audio and several other sub-systems have been written using OS specific methods, although newer releases use SDL to perform low-level operations on all platforms.

The copyright holder for the game is Tim Riker, but maintenance is guided by Scott Wichser and Jeff Makey as project managers.

If there is no special style indicated by the server owner, the only objective is the above (to simply kill opponent tanks); it is called a "free for all", or "FFA" for short.

Certain thresholds are used to catch malicious players and kick them off the server, as well as message filters and an entire collection of other anti-cheating features.

In rabbit-hunt games there is a white tank, known as the "rabbit", against the orange-brown "hunters", or every other player.

BZFlag uses a customized text based map format to define the placement of objects.

While writing a map is fairly simple in this format, most map-makers use a 3D modeling program such as Wings 3D or Blender.

Note that BZEdit is not distributed with the game, and is no longer under active development (versions of it are available at the BZFlag SourceForge.net site).

Bad flags are dropped after a short amount of time, after a certain number of "wins" (kills), or until the tank dies.

A server's environment consists of three things: The map in play, the time of day that is being simulated, and weather conditions, introducing elements of which players have no control, like rain, snow, icy and/or slippery ground, modified friction and gravity, and fog.

BZFlag takes the local time from the geographical location of the server and creates a night or day-time atmosphere in the background.