Talk is cheap, don't believe everything you hear. I've heard some of the things that you allude to. You didn't open a can of worms, someone else did. At least you've given me the opportunity to respond to it. I normally don't want to respond to subjects about my previous work, but I feel that it is warranted this time and I would like to get some things off of my ches and set a few things straight. I've heard some of the rumors about my prior work and am left wondering how WB has achieved such success in spite of me working on it. I hear stories of how I was always making 'playability' changes to planes and not even telling people about it. I find the idea that I was constantly making gameplay changes to aircraft fairly amusing except for the fact that some people believe it. Maybe that makes it more amusing, I don't know. Modeling planes was not my primary job, it was a collateral duty that I handled. On top of that, I wasn't just dealing with one project. I didn't have a big staff of people that could specialize on every little detail that needed to be done. Despite that, I still modeled 6-12 new planes every release for the most part. I'm pretty impressed with how I could handle all that and still have the time and energy to spend tinkering around with stuff that wasn't broken.
If you want an honest self-appraisal, the truth is that I loathed making changes to a fault. I wasn't going to fix something that wasn't broken, and I wanted some strong evidence to show me that something wasn't right. There were some problems that I didn't recognize soon enough and didn't get fixed, but that was mainly due to workload.
As for fudging planes for playability reasons, that's also a load of tripe. My playability decisions were based on what planes or variants would be modeled and implementing things like the RPS. The only place playability had a part in how a plane was modeled dealt with trying to overcome the limitations inherent to computer simming.
A lot of this also goes back to the beginnings of WB when I did have to make a lot of changes in the beta and shortly after going pay. I didn't have 60 or so examples to work with and I didn't have someone to teach me how to do it. It was a difficult process to get through and required a lot of trial and error. My techniques improved a lot over the years and some of the older models suffered from my novice ignorance and naiviety about how to research and interpret data and translate it into the flight engine successfully. I've been doing this for four years now and my outlook is quite a bit different than when I started. When you first get into something, it's easy to think you know all the answers when in fact, you just don't know all the questions. It reminds me of the Mark Twain quote that goes something like this: "When I was a teenager, my father was the stupidest man in the world. By the time I turned 30, he was the smartest. How'd he get so smart?"
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Doug "Pyro" Balmos
HiTech Creations
