Friday 2010-02-25 Development update:Interview by Grégory Lemasson/Discussion Thread

[Romanator21]

complete bollocks !

your saying there that there is only 2 states possible for a ww2 pilot in relation to oxygen supply
a) perfectly normal and healthy
b) "far to late" (presumably instant near death state, or death itself)

which is obviously total nonsense

You misunderstood me completely. When one is oxygen deprived, they do not know they are oxygen deprived. It's not as if one is perfectly fine and healthy, and then suddenly die.

Try this experiment: Get only 5 hours of sleep a night for a week. You will not feel tired. In fact you may feel energetic and alert. However, you may notice that you are forgetting things more often, and making more mistakes in every day activity. You THINK you are fine, but really, you are dealing severely reduced mental capacity. You won't suddenly die at the end of that week either, but you may pass out. The difference is that passing out in a plane is pretty dangerous.

Again do a search for hypoxia and exactly what it entails. Here is a quick excerpt:

Unfortunately, the nature of hypoxia makes you, the pilot, the poorest judge of when you are its victim. The first symptoms of oxygen deficiency are misleadingly pleasant, resembling mild intoxication from alcohol. Because oxygen starvation strikes first at the brain, your higher faculties are dulled. Your normal self-critical ability is out of order. Your mind no longer functions properly; your hands and feet become clumsy without being aware of it; you may feel drowsy, languid, and nonchalant; you have a false sense of security; and, the last thing in the world you think you need is oxygen.

As the hypoxia gets worse, you may become dizzy or feel a tingling of the skin. You might have a dull headache, but you are only half aware of it. Oxygen starvation gets worse the longer you remain at a given altitude, or if you climb higher. Your heart races, your lips and the skin under the fingernails begin to turn blue, your field of vision narrows, and the instruments start to look fuzzy. But hypoxia by its nature, a grim deceiver makes you feel confident that you are doing a better job of flying than you have ever done before. You are in about the same condition as the fellow who insists on driving his car home from a New Year's Eve party when he can hardly walk.

What this means is that you will be deprived of oxygen, but you won't be able to tell that you are deprived of oxygen because you are being deprived of oxygen. Carbon monoxide poisoning has similar effects of oxygen deprivation since CO attaches to hemoglobin in the same way as O2. You feel euphoric, maybe a little drowsy. But you are not in the state of mind to say to your self "I am drowsy, this is bad, I must be lacking oxygen". Instead you decide shut your eyes for a few moments...which ends up being the last thing you do.

As for training, you can not know the effects that hypoxia will have on your ability to PERCEIVE it until you've gone through it. I don't think the RAF had pressure chambers for the recruits.

[Insuber]

Hi Oleg,

Just wanted to say "you're doing a great job, Sir!". Investing so much time and money in such a venture denotes a real passion for combat flight simulations, and passion + competence yields always good results.

I bought all the Il2 series as soon as they were published, I'll buy the BoB series too ... look forward to SoW, hopefully very soon! By the way, when?

Bye,
Insuber

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by Insuber

Hi Oleg,

Just wanted to say "you're doing a great job, Sir!". Investing so much time and money in such a venture denotes a real passion for combat flight simulations, and passion + competence yields always good results.

Not me, but the whole team. We have very experineced programmers and modellers. Their level of knowledge is dedicated to aviation (some were working in Sukhoi bureau).
We also have Vladimir Veryugin, that knows I think everythng about tanks of all sides... And his many years hobby corresponds to his work. Of course he can make anything and now he and his co-workers doing other things... because modeling of ground vehicles is finished (that can be used in the next our sims also! The most hard to make the basis for the series!).

Originally Posted by Insuber

Hi Oleg,

Just wanted to say "you're doing a great job, Sir!". Investing so much time and money in such a venture denotes a real passion for combat flight simulations, and passion + competence yields always good results.

I bought all the Il2 series as soon as they were published, I'll buy the BoB series too ... look forward to SoW, hopefully very soon! By the way, when?

Bye,
Insuber

Insuber, I'll second this even though Oleg's already answered your post. IL2 came into my experience somewhere around 2002 when a friend gave me a demo he found inside a magazine. The "passion + competence" that went into this simulator was immediately apparent and it just kept me coming back for more. Attention to detail and desire to improve are marks of a true artist. Oleg and his growing team are true artists IMHO Look forward to SoW also and if my computer won't handle it the DVD package will look great on the shelf until a new computer comes online.

[slm]

Originally Posted by Romanator21

As for training, you can not know the effects that hypoxia will have on your ability to PERCEIVE it until you've gone through it.

Yes, pilots who had not experienced it before didn't know what was causing the gradual change in how flying felt. Because of this I hope lack of oxygen will be modeled so that it's not obvious to the pilot that the problem is oxygen. There are some similar cases in IL2 already:
- when you turn too rapidly you may black out.
- If your plane dives and you try to pull up, plane controls may react slowly because of high speed

I hope oxygen deprivation would be modeled in some similar way, instead of showing the player some text which makes problem solving so much faster and easier.

[Oleg Maddox]

Originally Posted by slm

I hope oxygen deprivation would be modeled in some similar way, instead of showing the player some text which makes problem solving so much faster and easier.

We had this mornig some speech about it. Probably we'll have even graphics representation of the mask. It looks after a small test well.


As for the effect itself. I'm experienced myself in low oxigen situations. I was so many times in mountains and even over the 4000 meters altitudes. So don't worry. To miss the mind on such altitudes is almost impossible... what may happens when you move faster than possible - tachypnea (hope this is right term) and then if you are continue to move fast - even more frequent respiration and then the effect that looks close to blackout if you didn't stop movement even for a short time for the recovering of oxigen in the blood (recovering happens very fast). That is possible just in the first day of moving there at such altitudes. Then the human organism begins to get accustomed... and its already never happens. At least up to 5000 meters. Of course it is depending of the lungs volume. As more smaller lungs - more great time of adaptation. In terms of aviation and oxigen starvation - effect will be very different for different people. Say the good swimmer and trained phisically human will have no problem maybe up to 6000 meters. But these, say like vietnamese people may have the problem already at 2500 m. Some friends of my father (I saw and spoke with them many times during hunting in the forests in the past) told me very long time ago that for Vietnamese pilots there was special order to use mask right from the ground....they were not able to control aircraft in the same conditions as Russian pilots.

So.... we should have, like I pointed above with blackout-redout some average value. Roman knows it. So I expect that we satisfy all.


PS. movement in moutains and work in a cockpit - a different thing. Movement takes more oxigen.

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

Oleg, I know this may be a more technical question better suited for you programmers, can you say what sound API will be used, DirectSound3D, OpenAL or other? Windows Vista and Windows 7 no longer support sound card hardware acceleration for DirectSound3D but do support hardware acceleration with OpenAL.

[philip.ed]

Oleg, if you need any more info on the oxygen mask (RAF) then I am happy to help.

BTW, during the Battle of Britain, the RAF were using the type d-oxygen mask. This was made a wool, similiar to barethea, and the mask itself had no real self-sealing capability on the wearer's face (unlike the later rubber masks).

Now, if you are to model oxygen effects, then the next part becomes very important Because the mask had no real sealing capablilities, a lot of the oxygen espcaped at the sides of the mask. In the event of a fire, if the pilot never turned off his oxygen then the mask would become a human-blow-torch, and the effects of this really speak for themselves; this was the fate of many BoB RAF pilots.
My question to you is, could SoW model this feature? It wouldn't be pretty, but it would be extremely realistic.

[brando]

Originally Posted by philip.ed

Oleg, if you need any more info on the oxygen mask (RAF) then I am happy to help.

BTW, during the Battle of Britain, the RAF were using the type d-oxygen mask. This was made a wool, similiar to barethea, and the mask itself had no real self-sealing capability on the wearer's face (unlike the later rubber masks).

Now, if you are to model oxygen effects, then the next part becomes very important Because the mask had no real sealing capablilities, a lot of the oxygen espcaped at the sides of the mask. In the event of a fire, if the pilot never turned off his oxygen then the mask would become a human-blow-torch, and the effects of this really speak for themselves; this was the fate of many BoB RAF pilots.
My question to you is, could SoW model this feature? It wouldn't be pretty, but it would be extremely realistic.

How ghoulish!

[philip.ed]

Originally Posted by brando

How ghoulish!

It is rather isn't it? But then, so is war