Of all the work I did on PacFi, the most challenging was the P-61B-5 Black Widow. It didn't follow the rules. It couldn't follow the rules. I don't think the plane would have had the same allure if it had.

The plane was hard to find good references for; it spent most of it's active service highly classified. It also continued my streak of getting the projects with little or no reference material to go on. As of 2004, there were exactly four P-61s left, in places progressively more impossible for me to reach - one in Ohio, one in the Smithsonian, one being put back together in Maryland after being hauled off a mountaintop in New Guinea, and one in -

wait for it -

China.

The PacFi team found our info in lots of places - Russia, Japan, Spain, Poland, Serbia, the Ukraine, and some of them less likely given the subject matter (Brazil, Finalnd, Hungary, Indonesia) - but only the Black Widow could go to China.

Because of the shape, there wasn't a good - or even a workable - way to break it up into the necessary sections for the IL-2 damage model; breaking off the 'nose' meant the pilot wasn't in the plane anymore (makes the game engine cry). It had a greenhouse (lots of frames) canopy, but it ended up taking fewer polys to build the whole thing than it did to use the doubled-geometry alpha-mapping system for IL-2 that was meant for greenhouse canopies. It had spoilerons and ailerons, effectively two sets of roll control surfaces. No other plane in the sim had duplicate controls. It was built around the earliest milimeter wave radar systems and the game engine had nothing close to radar. It had 32 seperate cowl flaps that had to be propagated down through LODs, yet stay in the very aggressive LOD poly limits. It had a turret that could be controlled by more than one crew member. The engine had a hard enough time dealing with a turret that had a single killable crew member. The pilot had night vision goggles (which wasn't so bad... we joked that the AI did that already). There was a huge list of things that made the Widow a difficult plane to put in PacFi.

The polycount limit alone was close to impossible - the lead designer (and the man who owned the studio, so his third hat was effectively "God") would not compromise on a 3500 poly limit, for performance reasons. I explained that this aircraft was highly unusual - a three-man, twin-engine, twin-boom, greenhouse-canopy, split gear-door, turret-armed plane the size of a medium bomber, with twin four-blade props, was not possible at the quality level we demanded with the poly limit he wanted (and the lead artists strongly agreed with me) - but no dice. All the detail was stripped out of the cockpit and gear bays; otherwise mandatory details, like stick, throttle, gunsight, and seats were completely left out - and I literally couldn't find a single edge on the model that I could collapse without completely destroying a shape.

The final total was 3740 - but only because of the mandated use of an alpha-mapped canopy; it was 3478 with the poly canopy. I still don't get it, myself.

Ironically, it was PacFi's victimization by the legal department of a certain major defense contractor that prevented its inclusion in the game (along with numerous other American aircraft, ships, and vehicles).

However - I still have the original 8k poly source model, and it's waiting in the shadows for the successor to IL-2: Oleg Maddox's Battle of Britain: Storm of War.