Fly your planes to victory as you re-create the aerial battles of the First World War!
This is a modern remake of the competitive 2D multiplayer airplane game Lentokonepeli (Literal translation from Finnish: "airplane game", also known in English as Dogfight).
Since Lentokonepeli is not open-source, this repository serves as a place for bug reports, feature requests, and general discussion.
I am remaking this codebase for the fourth(! and hopefully last...) time.
Lots of planned features are in mind, including a website with accounts, leaderboards, and statistics tracking.
Join us on Discord if you are interested in staying up to date on the remake of this game and interact with the community.
The game was originally created in 2005 by the Finnish game studio Playforia (Aapeli). Their gaming website was built in 2002 entirely on Java. As web browsers would begin to treat Java as a security risk, their website became less and less accessible until it was permanently shut down in 2019.
With the death of Playforia, Dogfight should have died too. Fortunately, I was able to download a copy of the client-side jar file before the site went offline. This jar file contained game assets such as images and audio. It is now possible to recreate the game using these assets, along with reverse engineering the physics through captured video and other documentation.
The purpose of this project is to bring this nostalgic game back to life and keep it alive forever.
After pouring hundreds of hours into making (and remaking... and remaking...) this game with different languages, tech stacks, and playing around with different implementations, each with varying degrees of accuracy and success, I have realized the sheer amount of time I have personally invested into remaking this game and that I have not earned a single cent from this effort.
I am not saying that I think I deserve to be compensated for the large amount of time that I spent voluntarily. The simple fact of the matter is that this project has been one of the biggest personal projects I have worked on as a single developer. I do not want to have my many hundreds of hours of development work freely available for anyone to view, copy, modify, or monetize.
It is possible that in the future (maybe a year or so after successfully shipping this project) I will open source it. But for now, since I'm the sole person working on this, I want control of how people experience this game.
- Aapeli (Playforia) for creating decades of entertainment and friendships through their internet gaming platform.
- Pyry Lehdonvirta, the original programmer of Lentokonepeli.
- Pallosalama for his many high quality recordings and documentation of maps and other important game information.
- Members of Munkkiliiga (and everyone else in the discord server) for being such dedicated fans to the game, and having the patience to work with me. Their passion and enthusiasm for the game inspired me greatly.