[phago].de

We at phago are always trying to build stuff around BZFlag... some of the projects we started actually made it into public and you might have heard of them (movies, bzcontests, shirts, bzadvertisement). However, there's a bunch of unfinished stuff which is on hold. Mostly due to laziness, not enough time or lofty goals. Here's a list of those, you might find it interesting.

Follow up:

1) BZAnywhere - your BZFlag Linux live cd
BZAnywhere was supposed to become a linux live cd, preconfigured with lots of BZTools. It was based on PCLinuxOS which is easy to remaster. We planned to include all 2.0.X versions, 1.10.8 and even a 1.7x for nostalgic reasons. Besides the game we had map editors, artwork, a browser with all the important bzbookmarks, preconfigured bzfs setups and maybe a webinterface where you could upload your config and then load it into your live-cd with two clicks. All this sounds very hard to do, but in contrary, is quite straight forward. We even had a working version which featured all of the aforementioned things except the config-loader.
We then made the mistake to announce it too early in bzbb (read the topic here) which put us in a hurry... we messed a few things up and accidently lost most of what we had done so far. Additionally we realized that maintaining a whole linux distro was a bit too time consuming. So we dropped the project, although the idea of being able to boot a BZ-OS everywhere you are, is still very fascinating.
And because everybody likes images: Take a look at the default wallpaper:

2) BZFlag.de v3
Oh well.. BZFlag.de, thats a long story. When we started with bz.de we used a CMS (Mambo) and had a lot of content which plenty of other pages were happy to steal. At some point we realized that Mambo didnt fit our needs anymore and wasnt very flexible. So I started to program a CMS from scratch which made it quite far. Take a look at v3.saturos.de (log in with user=bz, pass=flagge ... and no, dont bother trying this password anywhere else, its solely used there). Note that the comments are more or less working and you can click through the navigation. There's no content at all, but the website is already using a database backend.
Sadly we had to realize that there wasnt much interest in the German-speaking BZCommunity for a huge site like this.. our forum never had many users and that every other German bzpage stole our content just got too annoying, so we dropped v3 and instead put up a small page which just provides a very short introduction, screenshots and download links. RIP v3.

3) getting active in other leagues
As you might have noticed we got a ~zytose-team in every league.. [pillo] in pillbox, [hydro] in plosi (ok, its gone by now, isnt it?), [exo] in ducati and of course [phago] in GU. All these teams together is what we call the endozytose.network. Sadly endo.network basically is just [phago] which makes it rather pointless. We really tried to become active in other leagues, but GU is just plenty times more fun than any other league out there and as we are all getting older and not having as much as time as we would like, we always end up playing GU. Looks like some things never change.

4) BZContest 3
You might remember the first two BZContests - and yes, there were plans for a third. I imagined it to go away from the scheme we used in #1 and #2 and go more in a direction of playing the game. Like maps that require you to go through a certain path of obstacles, so skill would decide about the winner. While this concept sounds very exciting, it has a significant flaw. The question is how to make sure somebody made it through the course... what stops him from just roaming to see the other side of the map or opening the map file in a texteditor and look for the solution there? *scratches his head*
Looks like this is not going to happen any time soon.

5) phago movie
Since phago was founded we are dreaming of a 'real' phago movie. Not a Games Convention documentary, a movie with a plot. I thought the story could loosely follow the famous WoW South Park episode (if you dont know it yet: take a look, it's awesome). But then again the time argument kills this project. We have an amazing intro though, here it is:

6) BZLC/GUC pro
I bet most of you know my BZLeague checker, some may even use it. Once I started drafting a "pro"-version which lets you customize the page to your needs. I planned to include custom selection of servers, auto-refresh as an option, adjustable font size and a few other features. I never managed to start working on it though, so you'll have to live with the current page... or just use strayer's.

7) guleague skin
Ever since guleague started I wanted to create a skin that replaces the default look. I have something that works pretty well, but theres a huge problem: Right now guleague features two skins: A light and a dark one. From what I was told most people use the dark one, while I highly prefer the light-blue version. Thats why I based my skin around the light part and dont have an equivalent for the dark side. Yawn. Laziness took over and I never finished any of those layouts. Another problem is that its hard to test such a skin... you're editing the CSS-file, but I never set up a webleague to test it. I am sure meno or longdon could help out with that, but its so much work again that I am getting tired already by thinking about it.

8) a phago logo
Oh yeah, the everlasting search for a phago logo... I think I'll dedicate a full post to this topic soon.

Thats it for now, I hope it wasnt too boring. If you got any feedback, drop us a comment.