An arcade capture-the-flag game played on real cities, rebuilt from OpenStreetMap at one and a half times life size so the streets are wide enough to chase through. There are no weapons. The only way to take the flag is to hit the car carrying it, hard enough.
Every round is the same four moves on a different street. The flag drops, everybody races for it, whoever has it runs for the drop zone, and everybody else tries to hit them hard enough to take it.
| flag:drops_at | junction | Always where more than one street meets, so it can be reached from more than one side. Everybody goes for it. |
|---|---|---|
| carrier:top_speed | ×0.92 | Carrying the flag slows you down. |
| carrier:boost_recharge | ×0.6 | And starves your boost, so the map works against you on the way to the drop zone. |
| steal:closing_speed | ≥ 9 m/s | A chaser has to actually connect. A gentle nudge is refused, and the game tells you why, so no steal is an accident. |
| thief:immunity | 2 s | Take it and nobody can take it back straight away. |
| thief:boost | +1 s | And some boost comes back, so a good ram pays for itself. |
| drop_zone | green | Revealed when the flag is taken, somewhere else on the map. Deliver there to score. |
| weapons | no | The car is the weapon. |
Eight power-ups, collected by driving through them. Bots use theirs when the situation fits and never detour to farm them. Free-for-all or 2v2, four to eight cars, with civilian traffic to weave through.
Each arena is built from OpenStreetMap and the elevation under it, so the hills, underpasses and bridges are the real ones. The figures below are counted from the arena files the game loads.
İstanbul · 41.0325° N 28.9790° E
Steep, irregular streets that punish a straight line, and İstiklal Caddesi down the middle.
| streets | 389 |
|---|---|
| named | 267 |
| street length | 33.8 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 76 m |
| underpasses | 4 |
İstanbul · Atatürk Mahallesi · 40.9896° N 29.1365° E
Wide boulevards and apartment blocks on rolling hills. The fast one.
| streets | 145 |
|---|---|
| named | 59 |
| street length | 19.3 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 53 m |
| bridges and tunnels | none |
İstanbul · Feneryolu · 40.9848° N 29.0459° E
The Asian side: Feneryolu's long residential streets and the start of Bağdat Caddesi. Moda and the old centre sit on the water, which the game does not model, so this is the Kadıköy that can be built.
| streets | 161 |
|---|---|
| named | 77 |
| street length | 22.1 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 43 m |
| underpasses | 1 |
İstanbul · Şişli · 41.0558° N 28.9902° E
Apartment blocks and shopping streets either side of Halaskargazi Caddesi. The Bomonti–Dolmabahçe tunnel runs just outside it, on purpose: with the tunnel inside, a third of the deliveries went uncontested.
| streets | 243 |
|---|---|
| named | 132 |
| street length | 27.3 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 75 m |
| bridges and tunnels | none |
San Francisco · 37.8003° N 122.4152° W
Hills steep enough to launch a car, a tunnel to cut under them, and Lombard Street's crooked block.
| streets | 271 |
|---|---|
| named | 81 |
| street length | 25.6 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 103 m |
| bridges and tunnels | 2 |
London · 51.4988° N 0.1737° W
The museum quarter: the Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road, Exhibition Road up to Hyde Park, and tight squares and mews all round. Measured with bots over the same 24 matches as Russian Hill, its chases scored clearly higher.
| streets | 402 |
|---|---|
| named | 99 |
| street length | 25.2 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 18 m |
| underpasses | 9 |
Paris · 48.8734° N 2.2904° E
The Étoile, where twelve avenues meet at one roundabout around the arch. The Champs-Élysées leaves it to the east, Avenue Foch to the west.
| streets | 282 |
|---|---|
| named | 97 |
| street length | 26.4 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 41 m |
| underpasses | 1 |
Paris · 48.8891° N 2.3411° E
The hill under Sacré-Cœur: steep, narrow streets that wind up from Rue Ordener and Rue Marcadet to Rue Lepic and the top. Chases here are slow and close, and few flags get home without a fight.
| streets | 342 |
|---|---|
| named | 152 |
| street length | 26.3 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 70 m |
| underpasses | 0 |
San Francisco · 37.8004° N 122.4218° W
The slope from Russian Hill down towards the Marina: Lombard Street, Van Ness Avenue and the grid of steep blocks between them. It plays quick, with shorter runs to the drop zone.
| streets | 254 |
|---|---|
| named | 54 |
| street length | 23.1 km |
| height, lowest to highest | 89 m |
| underpasses | 2 |
Each place comes in sizes for the number of cars — small for up to four, medium for five or six, large for seven or eight — except Kadıköy and Marina Ridge, which play their medium maps for seven or eight too, for now. Five looks — Rain Noir, City Night, Neon Night, Synthwave and Golden Hour — are one key apart, and the rules are the same in all of them. Rain Noir's weather changes as you play, from drizzle to thunderstorms, and four camera views include the driver's seat.
Twelve fixed-seed matches between four bots on Russian Hill, replayed after every change, so tuning is judged against numbers rather than impressions. The parts numbers cannot judge get played instead.
These come from the build you can download. Since 0.1.8 two axles of tyres turn the car: it carries its turn after the wheel straightens, leans into a corner and can be caught sliding, and the bots learned to drive it. The handling figures are measured on flat ground.
Free. On a Mac, open the disk image and drag Hitflag to Applications; it is signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple. On Windows, run the installer: it puts Hitflag in Program Files, with a Start menu entry and an uninstaller.