OLEG MADDOX, IL2主设计师, 这是他在中国举办的ICAS2004国际模拟飞行邀请赛上的书面发言, 在此发布, 以做纪念..
First of all I would like to say that I’m very happy to visit such a great country! Then I’m happy to be here at this competition! Great thanks to organizers of this event!
Now a few words …
I would like to talk about history of development of our simulator. I was dreaming to develop the sim for many years… right from the time when I started the game business. It was in the end of 1992. My first game that I played on a PC was Wing Commander. Its not a sim but it was the first great sample for me what is PC and what is possible to make. Then was the Retalator sim. Being aviation engineer I understood that it is not yet a time to develop the sim that will satisfy me in terms of flight model calculation due to low power of PC for that time. I was still dreaming….
Here is one of our developers Dmitry Soldatenkov that is working with me from the start of Maddox Games. He was our main programmer and artist at once…. For the first time we were making small puzzle and educational games with him…. And we also were working at the same time for German company City Information System GmbH making special software – electronic maps for the PC and then for the car’s build-in navigation electronic maps. In 1994 in our team hired new programmer Yuri Antonov with aviation education, that came to us with almost ready sci-fi flight sim, that we named later Stormfighter. It was a mix of Wing Commander and aircraft simulator. From that time I began to dream to develop the WWII flight sim even much more than before. I had a lot of info for Soviet and German aircraft. But it was still a dream. For that time the policy of the company was to get first profit on the market and it was decided that we need to make shooters…. In 1998 we had an economical crisis in our country which is strange, but helped us to go ahead only with one product, but which will be the best in terms of our possibilities in programming with a small team. The great role in this was playing the 1C company which offered us to start a WWII sim for the Russian market….And the original plan was to make just a simple sim Il-2 with only one flyable aircraft type….I started some research that took more than one year just to understand the needs of players. We evaluated almost all possible sims of other developers, I was asking a lot of questions on the sim forums. Many users didn’t trust me when I was speaking about possible features of our sim that we would like to get in final. At that time we already started modeling of aircraft, ground objects, etc… But…. In 1999 we begun to rework all the work that was already done… because I understood, speaking to community, that we are on the wrong way in some areas of development…. Thanks to 1C Company that didn’t limited us in time and which is most important - in funding.
From that time our team was strengthened by Roman Deniskin, that come to us from War Birds community and had a lot of talents, for example such as to be programmer and 3D artist at once. He brought to us the needs of great sim community and reworked a lot of things in our development and even corrected me in some defined in the past directions of development J.
Then the meeting with my old friend Thomas Herzler, the owner of German company Blue Byte, defined the fate of Il-2 on western market. He simply bought the rights to sell the game outside of Russia. He trusted me at all and didn’t really limited us in time. He was also dreaming to get only good sim – the sim of his dream.
Then – all you know already. J
Several words about goals in development of flight sims as I understand it:
- to simulate by a code the aircraft behaviour as close as possible to reality, being limited by the power of a home PC.
- to use only historical technical data (verified many times in different sources) for modeling
- to look for the needs of players from kids to real pilots, which is the biggest contradiction thing in development.
These 3 items are really problematic… The flight sim development is one of the most, if not the most complex works in a game industry. Here it isn’t enough just to make an aircraft to look like real… The physics and aviation education background of developers is required. It’s a must!
Modern flight sim development also accumulated a lot of new programming technologies, using special hardware, which is one of the things that can’t be overlooked…
The modern flight sim, doesn’t matter which era is modeled, is a very complex product of years of research, education and programming. As well as it is a “fight” between best possible and compromises, due to limited power of PC…and, sorry to say - time of development….
So, if you like to win on the market – you need to execute all mentioned here items in an excellent conditions… even such as compromises.
Finally we got IL-2 /FB and AEP add-on. It is the art of compromises. It has a lot of well done aircraft models (currently more than 150) that copy real aircraft inside and external. And most of them are flyable.
Now about cyber flight sim sports.
There are many ways to develop these competitions. In my opinion the dogfight isn’t the only way of this. There are possible aerobatics competitions for example, races and many other types of competitions… I don’t count here only Il-2, I speak about flight sims in general.
I really think that FAI should look for such competitions as a very serious aviation sport, based on modeling of real aircraft. And in my very personal opinion FAI should work with the developers that to define the visual and technical standards for such competitions. Its my hope.
_________________________________________________
首先我要说的是我非常高兴能够访问这样一个伟大的国家！另外我也非常高兴能够参予这次赛事，再此我要感谢这次盛会的组织者！
下面我简单说两句。
我想先说说我们这个模拟飞行软件开发的历程。开发模拟软件是我多年的梦想。从我进入游戏行业起就已经有着这样的梦想，我在个人电脑上所体验的第一个此类游戏就是银河飞将。这个游戏不是模拟性质的，但是它对我而言是一个很好的范例，让我了解到什么是个人电脑以及个人电脑能够具备什么样的潜力。接下来就是Retalator模拟软件，作为一名航空工程师，我知道当时的个人电脑还不具备充分的能力，能够让我开发出真正满足我对飞行模式计算需求的模拟软件。尽管如此，我依然没有放弃梦想。
这位是我们的开发组成员之一，德米特里·索尔达藤柯夫，他自Maddox游戏公司创始之初他就和我一起工作了。他曾经是我们主要的程序员和艺术工作人员。最初我们开发的都是一些小型的猜谜及益智类游戏，同时我们也在为一家叫做城市信息系统的公司开发软件，这些软件主要是用于个人电脑的电子地图，以及用于车载导航的电子地图。在1994年我们的团队迎来了新的程序员，尤里·安东诺夫，他曾经接受过航空方面的教育，他加入我们时，几乎已经开发完成出一个科幻背景的软件，这个软件我们后来命名为Stormfighter。这个软件的内容相当于银河飞将与飞行模拟类软件的混合体，自此以后，我希望开发以二战飞机为背景的模拟软件的愿望就更强烈了。我对于前苏联及德国的飞机相当的了解，但我的想法在当时只能是一个梦，因为在当时公司的首要任务是在市场上赢得利润，而公司当时决定开发能引起市场反响的软件。在1998年我们国家经历了一场奇怪的经济危机，但这场经济危机使我们完成了一个产品，但是这是我们这样的小团队所能做到的最好的成绩。1C公司起到很重要的作用，他们让我们开始开发一款以二战飞机为背景，针对俄罗斯市场的模拟软件。最初的计划只是开发一款简单的IL-2软件，其中只有一款飞机能够飞行，我开始花了大约一年的时间作调查，只是想了解一下用户的需求，我们对其他开发商的模拟软件几乎都做了评估。我在不同的模拟软件论坛上提出了非常多的问题。当我告诉他们我们的模拟软件最终希望完成的细节时，非常多的用户对我报以不相信的态度，当时我们已经开始为飞机和地面物体建模，但到1999年，我们把几乎完成的工作全部推翻重来，因为通过与飞友们的交流，我发现我们的方向错误了。感谢1C公司在时间上没有对我们提出任何要求，更重要的是在资金上对我们没有限制，在那段时间，我们的团队又得到了加强，来自War Birds公司的罗曼·丹尼斯金加入了我们，他才华横溢，曾经担任过程序员和3D艺术人员。他给我们带来了飞友们的需求，而且重新进行了很多我们的开发工作，甚至改正了过去我在开发工作中的一些失误，然后我碰到了我的老朋友托马斯·赫兹乐，他是德国Blue Byte公司的主人，我们确定了将在西方市场上销售这款IL-2软件。他只是简单的购买了这款软件俄国境外的销售权，他对我非常信任，在时间上没有提出任何限制，他也梦想着他能得到一款好的模拟软件----他所梦想的模拟软件。
关于发展模拟飞行软件目标，我谈谈自己的意见：
-- 依照真实飞机的性能进行模拟，尽可能的靠近真实，唯一可能的限制仅仅是家用电脑的能力。
-- 只用历史上的技术数据（通过多种渠道证实）进行建模，
-- 征询小孩和真正飞行员的意见，虽然从开发角度讲，他们存在巨大的对立。
这三点的确是问题，飞行模拟开发是游戏产业最复杂的问题之一，仅仅让飞机看起来像真的是不够的，开发人员必须具备物理及其航空背景。现代的飞行模拟开发同时也聚集了大量的编程技术。使用特殊的硬件，这些方面也是不能忽视的。现代的飞行模拟不管我们谈到的是哪个时期的产品，都是经过长期的研究教育及编程才得到的产品。这同时也是最大可能性与妥协相竞争的产物，因为家用电脑的能力是有限的，所以很抱歉开发是需要时间的。所以如果你希望赢得市场，你必须在刚才提到的这几方面都获得最好的结果，即便是妥协也要如此。
最后，我们开发得到了1L-2/FB，和AEP补丁，这就是妥协的结果，我目前有许多非常好的（超过150架）飞机模型，他们就是连飞机的内部也同外部一样，和真实飞机非常接近，而且大多数都能驾驶。
现在谈谈模拟飞行运动：
我认为发展这项运动有很多方式，就我个人而言，空战并不是唯一的比赛可选项目。我们还可能开展特技项目，竟速项目及其他各种项目。我在此不仅仅是说IL-2，而是就模拟飞行整体而言。我确实认为国际航联应该把这样的使用真实飞机建模的模拟飞行比赛看成是非常正式的飞行运动，我个人认为国际航联应该同软件开发商一起制定这些比赛的外观及技术标准，这是我个人的希望。
________________________________________________________
时间：2004年3月26日
地点：武汉·中国光谷
@6翻译 |
发表于 2007-8-22 08:50:24