You've survived countless naval battles in the Pacific theater, stayed alive through all the dogfights and bomber intercepts, and even sunk a ship or two. So now what? Is that all there is to do in Combat Flight Simulator 2? Not by a long shot!

M O R E   I N F O R M A T I O N

Check out The Chaps Squadron online where you can download the "In Defense of Austrialia" mission.

There are a great many battles that have been recreated by enthusiasts for use with Combat Flight Simulator 2, adding countless hours of enjoyment for CFS 2 users. These recreated battles are often referred to as "add-ons" or "freeware created by third-party developers." We had a chat with two of those third parties, Jorge Alsina and Joe Amodea, the creators of a new campaign called "In Defense of Australia 1942," which highlights the Royal Australian Airforce's 75th Squadron at Port Moresby. Additional campaigns like this can also help to fill in the gaps in the historical representation of World War II. While the Combat Flight Simulator 2 team has provided an extensive campaign in the Pacific theater, there are still many more engagements to be explored, involving the military forces of almost every country involved in WWII.

So, if you've ever wanted to learn what it takes to create an entire campaign involving all new aircraft and missions, then check out this interview with Joseph Amodea and Jorge Alsina, two hard-core Combat flight Simulator 2 players and the creators of "In Defense of Australia 1942".

Interview by carlson@zone.com

Thanks for taking the time to speak with us about your new campaign. There are a lot of people interested in learning how to create new missions and aircraft for Combat Flight Simulator 2. Please introduce yourselves and give us a little background on your role in creating this add-on.

Jorge Alsina: In real life, I am an engineer from Caracas, Venezuela. I have been a third-party panel and gauge designer for the Microsoft Flight Simulator products since the early days of FS95. In CFS 1 I made several add-on campaigns and missions, including two well-known desert campaigns. In this CFS 2 add-on, I made the P-40 flight dynamics, the P-40 panel, the campaign and missions, the Australian intro screen images, and the model, painting, and flight dynamics of a Japanese AI G3M2 "Nell" bomber.

Joe Amodea: I operate a small telecommunications business in New York, catering mostly to governmental agencies, but we also conduct some "private sector" business as well. I was a school teacher early in my career, so I still get a kick out of sharing knowledge and helping the "newbies" who have gotten involved in this unique pastime.

I have written a couple of design-oriented tutorials and shall enjoy continuing to do so in the future.

I got involved as a hobbyist with FS5 and then FS98 and CFS 1, but it wasn't until CFS 1 that I started creating add-ons. Until recently, my forte has been texture art. I began repainting aircraft models for the Chaps virtual CFS squadron , of which I'm a member. After acquiring some experience with the native CFS models, I began to work with the fine virtual models of Alain L'Homme, among others. I am sure my childhood fascination with military aircraft and the building of plastic models, as well as balsa and tissue models, has led to my "second childhood" involvement with virtual flight!

The campaign you created is titled "In Defense of Australia 1942." Could you fill us in on some of the historical background for it?

Jorge: When the Pacific war began in December of 1941, the Allies were ill-prepared to stop the advancing Japanese armed forces. Australia, an important military target for the Japanese, already had most of its troops deployed in North Africa, and their pilots were detached to either North Africa or England. To take advantage of newly available U.S. aircraft, the Australian government proceeded with the formation of new Pacific squadrons. One of these was the 75th RAAF Squadron, formed in Townsville (Queensland) in March of 1942. With only nine days of training, and some experienced pilots that had been gathered from Africa squadrons, the newly formed squadron was sent to New Guinea. The 75th was unknowingly opposing the famous Tainan Wing, one of the best Japanese air fighter groups of the war. Aces like Saburo Sakai , Toshiaki Honda, Masuaki Endo, Toshio Ota and Hiroyoshi Nishizawa were part of that wing.

The 75th's defense at Port Moresby is a romantic military story filled with gallantry and honor among a group of pilots that gave all they had, including in most cases their lives, to stop the Japanese air forces in the theater. The 75th's battle has been compared to a little Australian "Battle of Britain." They probably did as much as the U.S. naval forces to prevent the capture of Port Moresby by the Japanese. Australians will never know what would have happened if the 75th hadn't been at New Guinea in those early days of the war. To paraphrase Churchill's comment on the Battle of Britain, never have so many owed so much to so few.

Joe: The main thing about this action is that there were so few resources available at this early point in the Pacific war that I suspect each man had to account for himself as if he were two. And these guys were faced with far superior numbers and experience.

You've created a new set of missions to use in the campaign. What about aircraft or scenery?

Jorge: It was not possible to design the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) campaign with any of the stock aircraft. That was the way Joe got into this project, and came to solve the problem of designing a badly needed aircraft from scratch. There were several choices: a Kittyhawk, a Beaufighter and a Spitfire V, but after further thought, we decided on a campaign in Port Moresby with Kittyhawks, an aircraft both of us love.

Joe embarked on what turned out to be a long odyssey to design a very detailed fighter, after a particular aircraft known as "Schuftie," (an export P-40E, known to Australians as the Kittyhawk IA). At the same time, I started to work on the flight dynamics and the early damage profile. In the following months several events happened that allowed me to improve the model for a better frame rate.

At the end of the model design, Joe discovered a way to produce a virtual cockpit with live instruments, a first in its class, thanks to Flight Simulator Design Studio Pro (from Abacus software ).

JOE: I would like to say that this flight sim community is a fine community to work with. Where else can you have easy access to the software developers among both commercial and independent hobbyists? We were not only able to speak with the father of Design Studio Pro, Louis Sinclair, but also with the originator of Aircraft Animator , Konstantin Kukushkin.

JORGE: The default scenery in Combat Flight Simulator 2 was appropriate for our campaign's purposes. The [CFS 2] team had already included Port Moresby, Lae and Salamaua, which are the three aerodromes used in "In Defense of Australia 1942." The only thing required for these missions was placing some more objects on the airfields, which can be totally done with the Mission Builder. So we did not design any scenery at all.

Were there any sources in particular that you used as reference material for your campaign?

JORGE: Many books from our respective collections were checked for technical and historical data, but Internet sources provided the core of the historical campaign. The best site was the 75th RAAF Squadron section in Warbirds RAAF Australia . Other links and an extensive bibliography are provided in the HTML document that is included with the campaign.

JOE: There is a truly wonderful site that I would like to mention, called simply Australia@War , which obviously was developed by a person who loves what he is doing. The site documents the participation of the RAAF squadrons but also has many scanned images of maps and other artifacts of the time. And it includes poignant stories and reports on virtually every RAAF aircraft lost as well as attacks by Japanese forces on the Australian homeland.

Tell us a bit about the new aircraft-how did you go about creating a new aircraft from scratch? What software did you use?

JOE: I'll have fun with this one! From all the reading I have done and from conversations I have had, it is clear that the pilots who flew these planes had dirty work to do as well as tough life-threatening assignments to accomplish, but they also had strong feelings about these aircraft. I think that there was sometimes a real bond between the pilot, the plane, and the supporting ground crew.

Some planes, like the P-47 and the Hellcat, evoke images of toughness and raw power, but the P-40 and also the Spitfire are graceful and beautiful as well as functional. At least they are in the eyes of this beholder!

As for the model, it wasn't difficult to find good information on the Curtiss aircraft. There is quite a lot of good information available, and so many subject aircraft to recreate that we will have no danger of running out of material. The documentation included with the campaign establishes this in some depth.

While I have always wanted to try my hand at recreating a virtual model, until the arrival of Design Studio, I found the available tools to be daunting, with the prospect of a steep learning curve ahead. Design Studio Pro has a fairly intuitive user interface, and in my opinion can be mastered by any determined enthusiast.

It was a great pleasure for me to "push the envelope" on the flaps and the intake and exhaust systems, but especially on the virtual cockpit.

What part of creating a new aircraft was the most challenging? Was it the "skin," the 3-D modeling, or perhaps the configuration files?

JOE: The most challenging aspect of building the virtual aircraft, apart from the initial learning curve, is knowing just how far to go with each subsystem. By that I mean that it is possible to build a 25,000-polygon monster that would look beautiful but would result in frame rates so low that it would be unusable. So the challenge is to achieve all the detail needed, while creating polygons in a sparing or economical way. It is a delicate balancing act.

Learning to prepare and apply the texture art properly is also a challenge with rewarding results. Since I have been painting for a couple of years now, I was able to take that part of the process for granted, though I readily admit that I am still learning and that I expect each project to be a little better than the one that preceded it.

It sounds like a lot of work goes into the aircraft. How much time did it take to create each aircraft?

JOE: This is a difficult question to answer because at some point I really stopped counting the hours. As I am new to 3-D design, I have to think that many of the initial hours were an investment in my future! If I told you how many hours went into the building of the aircraft, it might raise a few eyebrows and discourage some folks. In spite of that, I encourage others to try their hand at this. Like most things, it gets quicker as you gain experience. I think an individual might be able to turn out six entirely new aircraft in a year of "spare time."

JORGE: The Nell, on the other hand, is just a 1,000-polygon aircraft with two big textures. It doesn't have any cockpit detail or any of those "small" details that make an aircraft "big," simply because it was intended for AI flight. Designing that model only took a couple weeks.

You used the Combat Flight Simulator 2 Mission Builder for the individual missions, is that correct? Did you use any other software to create the missions?

JORGE: I used the Mission Builder in 99% of the design. The new trigger/event language makes of the Mission Builder an excellent tool, and it's a quantum leap from the old Excel editor that was made available for CFS 1. Unfortunately, it still requires some more features to allow using different aircraft, names, skills, and aggression levels in the same flight, and for designing new formations. Keith Bedford's mission editor is a must for post-Mission Builder tweaking, but it's still in beta and has one or two bugs. So I used a text editor (Microsoft® Notepad) for some final details.

Were there any particular difficulties in creating missions of this type? What was the most challenging part of setting up missions on this scale?

JORGE: The Mission Builder made the overall job much easier. The trigger/events learning curve was not much a problem, but we believe that the most difficult part was dealing with the "warp" at different levels. While we have checked all of the warp pitfalls, we are still not entirely sure users won't get one or two situations where they can't warp and have to fly back to some waypoint manually. Our beta testers really helped a lot to discover these kinds of problems.

Do you have any advice for first-time mission builders?

JORGE: We would advise them to read the Mission Builder instructions thoroughly. They are very good, in our opinion. And the other thing we would advise is to learn from others by using the MB or Notepad to open good missions that are available and trying to understand them.

Once you had your individual missions completed, how did you go about turning them into a single campaign?

JORGE: The campaign is, in fact, a short one. We would say it is more of a mini- campaign. Due to the historical accuracy of the missions and the fact that they must be played in chronological order, the campaign was very easy to design. Let's say that all missions have 100% probability to pass to the following mission, no matter how it ends (except dying in the campaign; that would end the career). There are easy and difficult missions, and they don't have a particular order in that sense. The campaign, while short, could be difficult to end, because you may lose many wingmen and your career may be terminated before you play the final mission in the new campaign.

Thanks again for taking the time to speak with us; it's been a pleasure. Do you have anything else you'd like to pass along to the other Combat Flight Simulator 2 players out there?

JORGE: We think CFS 2 is a great sim. Not all features that everybody would want are there, but it's a step forward in combat flight simulations. We also believe that "In Defense of Australia 1942" is a good quality expansion product and we expect to see this kind of add-on in the future-either freeware or commercially-more frequently in the Internet.

JOE: We hope we have raised the bar a little for freeware developers, but we have no illusions. Everyone aspires to achieve just a little more than what has come before, and it's great to see how others who follow pick up where you leave off. It will be fun for us to see what happens next!