About
The "Airfix Dogfighter Multiplayer Thingymabob" is a tool programmed for the PC game Airfix Dogfighter. It allows multiplayer users to easily find other people and game servers through the internet.
Airfix Dogfighter is a great little game that had huge potential, unfortunately the company that made it went bust and it went downhill since then. I haven't played it properly for years, just lost interest and moved on to more pressing things. Anyway this is my tribute to the Airfix Dogfighter community as I promised years ago (sorry it took so long). Below is all the Techy info you'll need find / play multiplayer games.
If you still want more info. or help they're is still a bunch of helpful people who play the game in the forums, see the links section at the bottom of this page.
How-To (Screenshots)
After download and unzipping, running "Airfix Dogfighter - MT.exe" will start the tool. The file "ips.txt" contains a list of "favourite" servers (an example list is provided). This can be edited as you see fit, it must contain one server address per a line. The "settings.ini" contains program settings, you should have no reason to edit it. Otherwise its reasonably straight forward to use.
Downloads
You can download the program here : AD-MT.zip (82.9 KB) (beta1)
You may also require the Visual Basic 6 Runtime files. (If you receive missing file errors)
You can download them from Microsoft here: vbrun60sp5.exe (1020 KB)
Source Code
The source code is below. Its not as good as it could be, because its unfinished (tips and ideas for finishing it are below - if anyone is up to the challange).
Code 9-2-2006.zip (17.6 KB) (VB6 sp5)
(I cant spell - so the source code comments aren't the easiest to read).
How it works:
Like all good things its a very simple design. The program will scan every IP in the "IP's file" as well as every IP connected to the IRC lobby channel (this means you do not need to know the IP prior joining a game as long as the game host is "chatting"). Games are found by using the "magic packet".
Magic Packet:
If you want to program a game scanner you will need to know about the "magic packet". The "magic packet" is 9 bytes in length, all 0 except byte one and four, (02) and (20) respectively. (HEX)
02
00
00
20
00
00
00
00
00
This UDP packet is sent to port 19400 on the remote computer and if an Airfix server is running will return a string 162 bytes in length (to the Local Port the magic packet was sent from - not 19400). This string will contain the server settings, it decodes as follows:
Start position (start = 0)
Max Length
Info.
61
32
name of the server
93
32
game mode (different depending on language version)
125
32
level name
157
1
number of currently connected players
161
1
maximum number of players
Still to do: (in order of important-ness)
Make proper IRC Parser code (a.k.a. the AnaliseIRC method).
Add real Error Handling.
Add interval refreshes (scan for games every 10mins?).
Audio/Visual notification of "New" game detection.
Audio/Visual notification of "New" chat user.
...and anything else you can think of.......
Future Ideas:
Port the whole thing to a proper language (C#, or VB.NET at the very least)
Figure out how to automatically launch servers / join games (without sendkeys)
...and more......
Links
Matt Fletcher's Multiplayer Arena - http://www.mattfletcher.co.uk/afd/
Matt Fletcher's Dogfighter Forum- http://www.mattfletcher.co.uk/afd/forum
or ... http://www.kamikazfu.co.uk
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