Airfix DogFighter Programmer's Manual

1.1 Introduction.

About 10 years ago, after I worked my way through Microsoft’s Combat Flight Simulator, I stumbled upon Airfix Dogfighter. Having assembled many Airfix models when I was young, I was intrigued by the concept of the game so I bought it. About 2 days later, when I finished the last Mission, I had mixed feelings. Sure, the game was enjoyable, but it was all a little short wasn’t it? And I didn’t think much of the Networking playing options either…
So Dogfighter was shelved, I forgot all about it and eventually I lost the pack while moving house.

Towards the end of last year I found the AirfixDogfighter.de website, and that brought back a few memories…. I was pleasantly surprised to find that apparently there is still life in the old game yet. I read the articles on the site with great interest and immediately bought the game again, long live Ebay!

Jim Rowley has done an excellent job in providing the UpExtract-program, well done Jim!
After getting familiar with the extracted files, I found it quite easy to build my own campaigns and missions, though of course there are some limitations. I am a programmer myself, so I didn’t have too much trouble understanding the concept and structure of the game, though I must admit there are still some things I haven’t figured out. In order to keep track of what I was doing and what I had discovered, I started to make notes in a Word-document (this one!), and eventually it became quite voluminous.

After a while I thought I might make this info available to other ADF-fans who might want to build their own Missions and Campaigns but don’t know how, so I edited my notes a bit to make them readable and understandable for others. The result is this “Manual”…

1.2 Who is this manual intended for?

Undoubtedly there will be quite a few die-hard ADF-fans out there who are perfectly familiar with the inner trappings of the game and its datafile hierarchy and don’t need any help, but there might be others who struggle a bit. For those who would like to write their own scenario’s/missions/campaigns but don’t know how, this manual might shed some light on the inner workings of the Airfix Dogfighter game engine.

1.3 Prerequisites

So what do you need to make good use of this Manual? Of course the Airfix Dogfighter game ships with its House-Editor, but this feature in itself is a bit limiting. In order to get a more satisfying result and use this manual to max. effect, you will need a Hex Editor. I myself use the Visual C++ -editor that comes with Microsoft Visual Studio 6, along with a few home made utilites written in VB6 from the same suite, but there are quite a few other good editors out there. I recommend HxD, a powerful and fast Hex-Editor that you can download for free.

To be truthful, you don’t actually NEED one as there are ways to modify the game without using a Hex-Editor, and those options will be described later on in the manual. For a good understanding of how ADF works, however, we will start doing it the hard way…

I am afraid that, in order to use this Manual successfully, you will have to be familiar with Binary and Hexadecimal data and calculations. I have thought about including a brief course on it, and perhaps one day I will write one as an addendum to this Programming Manual, but for the moment I have decided against it, as it is not specific to the Airfix Dogfighter game, and there are plenty of other sources of knowledge out there in the wild blue yonder…...

Lastly, you need to have downloaded and run the UpExtract-utility mentioned earlier. For instructions on how to use UPX, see the "UPX-Extractor"-page.