Recently Len "Viking1" Hjalmarson interviewed Oleg Maddox of Maddox Games regarding their upcoming IL-2 simulation.

[Ed. Note: The following article is based on an email interview and Oleg's responses have been preserved in their original form. Len's questions are in red and Oleg's responses are in the regular, black text.]

Oleg, this is an exciting project, because it is the FIRST ever simulation for many of these aircraft on the PC.

Not long ago you decided to add three variants of the Bf 109 so that the player could fly for the Germans. How did that decision come about and how did you decide on the Bf109?

This happened because we decided to make our sim more interesting than we planned before. We have thought a lot about multiplayer and decided to introduce not only Deathmatch (Dogfight mode) but also Cooperative play. That's why these new questions arose.

• How should we make multiplayer?
• How should we attract various players groups (the ones who prefer Single and other who prefer only Multiplay)? What should we do to create an interesting game for everyone?
• How should we attract players thy fly only for Luftwaffe (and there are so many such players)?
• What should we do to add more accurately modeled planes and keep the highest quality of ground vehicles?

After hours of heated discussions I decided to send a list of questions to simmers and their ideas and proposals helped us to create the final concept. After we inserted fighters into Multiplay, we decided to make them flyable in Single play (thanks to Thomas Spann). Game concept was greatly changed and the overall difficulty of the project increased.

Why have we chosen Bf-109, and not FW-190 for example, or Hs-129 - (Il-2 analogue)? Well, just because FW-190 appeared on the Russian Front much later and they were mostly used as fighter-bombers for A2G attacks. Though I should mention that Fokke-Wulf's without its bombload became a worthy adversary. Hs-129 - wasn't very popular among pilots, though this German plane can be regarded as best model designed to fight against tanks if we don't mention its unreliable engines. We tried to model Stuka, but after a few tests of the flight model we understood, that gameplay for Germans will be worse than for Russian Air Forces. And another point is that game concept is based on the beginning of the WWII in 1941, and Bf-109 was chosen as the most produced German fighter (second only to IL-2).

We aren't planning to create lots of flyable planes - instead we are paying great attention to modeling of every plane. And it is a hard work to model absolutely everything in full detail: FM, cockpit, damage modeling. I'm sure players hate to fly lot's of planes with the same or just slightly changed cockpits and flying models. We are planning to release several add-ons with new flyable planes for both Multiplay and Singleplay. Add-ons will also contain new scenarios, made with the help of built-in editor after the initial IL-2 release.

Click to continue

Tell us about the variants you are modeling.

There we plan to model the following flyable Messerschmitts for the initial release of IL-2: Bf-109E-4, as the most mass production fighter in the beginning of Russian campaign and this period. Bf-109G-2 the most mass production plane of G-series on Russian front. We'll present 3 guns model - the fastest one. Bf-109G-6 with 5 guns and G-2 were the best of all propeller engined Messerschmitts, as it is stated in report of testing all captured German planes made by research institute of Air Forces.

Fig. 1. LaGG-3

In our previous interviews, in January and September of 1999, we didn't get much information on the flight models. Tell us what factors you are taking into account in your flight model? How accurate are the models for the various aircraft and is this a force based model?

Our common FM is a force based model. We are designing our flight model using nonlinear equations of motion that describe an aircraft's motion in flight. Model computes aerodynamic, inertial, gyroscopic, propulsive, and landing gear forces and moments in the real time.

Our model includes several sub-modules:

• Standard atmosphere model
• Equations of motion
• Aerodynamic model
• Propulsion model
• Mass properties model
• Landing gear model

First module uses standard atmosphere model, including altitude effects on air pressure, temperature, and density. For example, please look at the drawings, that show dependence of the maximal speed on different altitude. This and many other parameters are used for modeling of each plane. We have such drawings from confirmed trial docs for each modeled aircraft.


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