DGX BattleSpace 9142

• Benjamin "Mr.Keks" Bisping - http://mrkeks.net - ben@mrkeks.net
• Steffen "CdV" Altmeier
• DerHase - http://www.budapestfastfood.com
• Sebastian Schell - http://sebastian-schell.de

0. PREFACE: TEN YEARS

It's been more than ten years since I started working at DGX9142 on 25 March 2004. Actually, I planned to make a little game over the Easter break of 2004. I was 15 years old at that time.

Since then, lots of stuff has happened, but the completion of DGX9142 is not among it. Battlefied 1942, which inspired this game, has become some kind of a classic. DirectX 7, which is used for the graphics, has long reached the end of its life cycle. I and all the other people who have contributed to DGX9142 do quite different things by now. For my part, I am more into theoretical computer science, print design and political stuff today.

Over the last six years, DGX9142 has hardly been developed any further. The last public alpha was released in March 2008. So I and Steff decided to abandon the project. We don't want it to rot on our hard drives. Thus we release it. This final release is ; in a way the most unfinished version of DGX9142 that has ever been published: Some textures are missing, the net code most likely won't work properly, there is no real balancing etc. etc.

We hope you enjoy the game anyway. :) -- 25 December 2015, Benjamin Bisping (aka Mr.Keks)

1. SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

On newer Windows versions there might be problems with DX7-games. I only tested the game with Wine on Ubuntu, where it works fine.

2. MANUAL: HOW TO PLAY

The basic gameplay follows the Battlefield principle.

Every team has a certain number of tickets. Killing enemy ships or holding special positions decreases the enemy team's ticket counter. A team wins if the other team's counter hits zero.

Your ships spawn at jump gates held by your team. You can conquer further jump gates by flying close to them while there is no enemy ship around. Some gates cannot be conquered -- they are marked with a restriction symbol. Jump gates with a green arrow next to their name spawn NPC cruisers.

Before joining the battle at a jump gate, you chose out of four ship classes.

• Fighter for ordinary combat.
• Bomber to takle big cruisers and stations.
• Scout for quick strikes at unexpected positions. (Scouts jam the enemy radar to a certain degree, but also counter enemy jamming.)
• Support which regenerate friendly ships or supply them with new ammunition.

The fighting is quite similar to FreeSpace, Freelancer and other space games.

• WASD: regulate the forward/backward/sideward thrust.
• Q and E: roll.
• Tab: enable the after burner
• Middle mouse button: lock targets (highlighted by a rectangle)
• Left/right mouse button: fire at the targeted ship

For overview purposes there are additional controls:

• M: show overview map (your ship is highlighted with white)
• ,: toggle grid and hud info
• C: pan view without rotating the ship
• Space: zoom in

If you are your teams commander (as the only human player in a team you will be), you can use the overview map to give commands to your team:

• Left mouse button: select ships
• Right mouse button: give command (move to or attack)
• X: Cancel command

Enter activates the chat. You can also control parts of the game from there, the commands are explained if you enter \help.

F1 shows a list of the active players and their score.

Have fun playing!

3. REDISTRIBUTION?

The game is freeware. You may spread it as you whish.

We also include the source with the game. It's not really "open source" as the source is not "open" in the sense of: Easy to maintain by others. (No documentation, poor structure, some lazy hacks, redundancies, out-dated programing language etc.) Still: Feel free to use the source in any way you like, be it in other projects or in a more polished version of DGX.

To build the source, you will need Blitz3d. It can be obtained from http://blitzbasic.com for free. Its source code can also be found on GitHub.

If you continue DGX and publish your work, please include the original credits with it. The third party parts within DGX are marked as such by comments. The artwork is by the credited people or from freeware archives. You may use it in derived versions of DGX. If you want to use it in another context, you may have to ask the very authors for permission.