Master of the Skies: The Red Ace is a small WWI flight game that Small Rockets released in 2001. It is witty and hand-crafted, and it has stayed with me ever since. It was written for the Windows of its day, so it has become hard to run. I wanted to fly it again on any machine, so I rebuilt it.
Red Ace Remake is the whole game rebuilt in Godot 4. It runs in the browser, on Windows, on Linux and on Android. It also carries something new: Der Rote Kampfflieger, a twelve-mission Red Baron campaign.
What is in it
- The whole game. All 28 missions on the three original maps (country, desert and trenches), the campaign with its pilot roster, ranks and promotions, the briefings and debriefings, the cheats and the replay list.
- Faithful logic. The flight model, the AI, the weapons, the damage, the scoring and even the HTML menu engine follow the decompiled
RedAce.exe. Where I was unsure, I ran the original under Wine and compared the two side by side. - Original assets, refreshed. The models, maps and art are converted from the game. The art is upscaled four times with Real-ESRGAN, and the flat card trees and palms are remodelled in Blender.
- Plays anywhere. Web (WebGL 2), Windows, Linux and Android, with touch controls and tilt steering on phones.
 The main menu, drawn from the original HTML pages |
 A mission briefing |
 The trenches at dusk |
 The desert campaign |
 The held camera views |
 In a phone browser, with touch controls |
New in v1.7: Der Rote Kampfflieger, the Red Baron campaign
The remake's engine can now carry new content beside the original game. The first large piece is a story campaign flown as Manfred von Richthofen. It starts with his duel with Major Lanoe Hawker in November 1916 and runs to the last patrol of April 1918.
You take command of Jasta 11 and teach its pilots to fly as a squadron and to bring each other home. That lesson is tested at Bloody April, in the dawn raid on the balloons, at Cambrai and, finally, by the young pilots of 1918. I will not say how it ends.
- Twelve missions on the country and trenches maps: Hawker, First Sortie, Bloody April, Scramble, The Plates, Balloon Busting, The Other Side, Wounded, Dusk Raiders, Cambrai, Formation and The Last Patrol.
- A story told in the cockpit. Each mission has a period briefing, a debriefing and its own failure page, with painted artwork for the campaign pages.
- New aircraft and objects. The Albatros D.II, D.III and D.V and the Fokker Dr.I in squadron colours, the R.E.8, F.E.2d, Sopwith Camel, S.E.5a, Halberstadt and a Handley Page O/100 with three gunners. There are observation balloons, British tanks and a working rail yard, under dawn and dusk skies.
- Clear objectives. Lines on the HUD show the current objective and your progress. The minimap marks the targets, what you must protect and the aerodrome.
- Campaign progress for each pilot, with promotions from Leutnant to Rittmeister and a Replay Missions list that opens as you go.
To find it, open Goodies → Bonus Missions → Der Rote Kampfflieger from the main menu.
 The campaign page |
 Balloon Busting: the briefing |
 Dusk Raiders: a dogfight over the rail yard |
 Scramble: R.E.8 bombers and their escort over the hangars |
 The Last Patrol: leading the young pilots |
 Dusk Raiders: a Handley Page O/100 |
 Cambrai: the Dr.I against the tanks |
 Balloon Busting at dawn |
Also in the box: a Battle of Britain mission
A second, smaller mod puts you in a Spitfire over a new coastal map inspired by Dover. Three raids of Bf 109s and He 111s come for an aircraft factory, and three squadron mates fly beside you. It is under Goodies → Bonus Missions → Battle of Britain.
 A Spitfire over the coast |
 The harbour, with its freighters and fishing boats |
The original 28 missions and their rules are untouched by both mods.
How to play
| Platform | How |
|---|---|
| Browser (desktop or phone) | manuvarkey.github.io/redace_re. There is nothing to install. |
| Windows | From the latest release, unzip redace-*-windows-x86_64.zip and run redace.exe. |
| Linux | From the latest release, unzip redace-*-linux-x86_64.zip and run redace.x86_64. |
| Android | From the latest release, install redace-*-android.apk. You must allow installs from unknown sources. |
On the desktop the mouse flies the plane: pull back to raise the nose. Right Shift and Right Ctrl move the throttle, the left mouse button fires the guns and the right one drops bombs or fires rockets. The arrow keys hold the camera views, Tab shows the objectives and Esc pauses. Keyboard and joystick layouts are on Options → Controls, as in the original.
On a phone, tilt the device to steer or drag the virtual stick, and use the on-screen throttle, FIRE and BOMB controls.
The Android app with touch controls
Play it right here
The game downloads only after you click Play. Click the game to capture the mouse; Esc pauses.
How it was made
The remake does not run the old program. I decompiled RedAce.exe with Ghidra and rebuilt its logic in Godot, function by function: the flight model, the pilot AI and its goal scripts, the guns and bombs, the damage model, the mission rules and the scoring. The menus are the game's own HTML pages, drawn by a new renderer that follows the layout rules of the original's HTML engine. The models and maps are RenderWare 3.1 files, converted to glTF by a converter written for this project.
The original game, run under Wine, was the reference throughout. Menu pages were compared pixel for pixel, and flight, lighting and combat were measured against the same missions in the original. The technical notes in the repository list each part with the function it came from, and the few places where the remake deliberately differs.
Thanks to Small Rockets
This project exists because The Red Ace is a wonderful game. The menus, missions, characters, art and music in the remake belong to the team that made it: Tim Aidley (programming), Anthony Callaghan (art), Adrian Moore (mission design and sound effects), Ian Livingstone (music), Tomas O'Sullivan (the trenches level), Peter Lane (help file and web site), Shawnee Sequeira (producer), Jonathan Small (head of Fiendish Games) and the quality assurance team. Thank you for the game, and for many happy hours in the air.
Links
- Play online: manuvarkey.github.io/redace_re
- Downloads (Windows, Linux, Android): latest release
- v1.7 release notes: github.com/manuvarkey/redace_re/releases/tag/v1.7
- Source code and technical notes: github.com/manuvarkey/redace_re
- Red Baron campaign guide: mods/redbaron/README.md
- Battle of Britain mission guide: mods/britain/README.md
If you fly it, tell me how it went. Bug reports and playtest notes are welcome on the issue tracker.
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