Future of the game

The Future of the game

The future of the game is limited in that the developers do not offer support for the game. They will not be releasing any mods to keep the game alive. They cannot release and game information due to a legal fall out with their publishers. Therefore in-house editing tools and game details are not available and have to be discovered manually. There are also not very many web sites for the game, aside from planetdogfighter.com which is growing out of date, my site and a couple of others. Multiplayer is a very limited affair with poor error handling and is the reason why I set up this site - so people could actually find others to play.

The game engine and extensibility

According to the UDS web site the Dogfighter engine has the following features:

Dynamic add-in support for new vehicles, weapons, levels and game modes.
Advanced and easy-to-use level editor.
Powerful object oriented script language.
Multithreaded virtual machines for handling complex missions.
Advanced task based Artificial Intelligence module.
Fully network oriented engine using an event based message system.
Multiplayer support for at least 16 players.
UDP/IP protocol support for playing over the Internet.
IPX/SPX protocol support for smoother game play over a LAN.
Fast Server-Client system with Client prediction.

Note the dynamic add-in support for new vehicles, weapons and game modes. Obviously the developers considered expansion. If someone could crack the code to making new models etc this would extend the life of the game. Perhaps the UPExtract tool (see the editing page) could be used to extract the texture and model files, and someone with the right knowledge could edit them.

New Game modes

At present there is only one game mode in the game; Dogfight. A welcome addition would be Capture the flag and Team Deathmatch modes. However someone needs to figure out how to add these modes first. Apparently the game modes are loaded dynamically from the "\game\modes\" folder. I suppose if someone wrote a dll file with the right interface using the game API to make appropriate calls to the game engine, a new mode could be produced.

New Planes

According to the lead developer of the game, in order to add new planes you would need to export a model from some 3d package to the game format and add a DLL type which has the code and parameters for the aircraft. However the developer can't tell us the format of the plane files because of a non-disclosure agreement.