IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad News

Dear Friends,

Today we'd like to start this dev blog in an unusual way - with a retrospective. Over the years of work on IL-2 Great Battles we have created many aircraft, and for each of them we could write a whole article about how we searched for information, solved contradictions in documentation and drawings, built a visual model and designed a physical model and FM. But sometimes you can just show it - as they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.



With studio-quality lighting, rather than a real-time renderer, you can really see how much work and love went into recreating each of our aircraft. The Hawker Hurricane Mk.II, a collector's aircraft we built three and a half years ago, is still a model of excellence in both visual modeling and physical model perfection.



As for the latest news, the new update 5.204 will be released soon, in two weeks; its testing is almost finished. It will include the new Ta 152 H-1 Collector Plane from the end of the war, which we described in detail in Dev Blog #358, as well as a number of important improvements and changes.

Modern controllers have many buttons and encoders, and their total number may exceed the limit of 64 buttons or axes if multiple devices are connected at the same time. Therefore, to support such configurations, the maximum number of buttons supported by the game will be increased to 128.

Several bugs in the career mode will also be fixed, such as friendly aircraft attacking the player group, and a new type of combat sortie will be added for the Luftwaffe on the Western Front - covering the takeoff and landing of the jet aircraft. Since Allied piston fighters usually could not catch up with them in the air, they used the tactic of shooting them down on takeoff when they had not yet gained much speed, or on landing when they had already dropped it. To protect the jet-powered Me 262s and Ar 234s from such attacks, they were covered near the airfield by German piston fighters, including Ta 152s.

Dear friends,

Today we would like to show you the first screenshots of the new map under development - Odessa. In addition to the city itself, it includes almost all of modern Moldova and small parts of Ukraine and Romania. At the moment, about half of the work is done. It's a big task because more than 400 settlements and at least 30 airfields are planned. Odessa, Tiraspol, Beltsy, Bolgrad, and Kilia are finished, while work is still going on with Chisinau, Kotovsk, Izmail, Voznesensk, Rybnitsa, Galati, and others.


Odessa in the 1940s is modeled with a good level of accuracy; it is correct to a point where one can learn its layout and landmarks: in the city there are the famous monument to the Duke, the cannon of the frigate "Tiger" monument, the opera house, the railway station, Kulikovo Field, Potemkin Stairs, "Chernomorets" stadium, the prison building, the artillery school, cathedrals, and monasteries, the old Vorontsov lighthouse (it was blown up during the war and rebuilt in the early 1950s) and others.



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We would like to repeat our appeal to contact us if your ancestors fought in the war in aircraft and ground vehicles you can control in our sim - if you have the photos of your loved ones taken during the war in your family archives, we can add them to the virtual cockpits as default photos instead of the generic ones, with your permission.

The idea is to have a photo that the pilot or tanker would have placed there himself, so a photo of his girlfriend, wife, children, or parents is needed, not a picture of him. For example, this is what the family photo of Squadron Leader Jack Collins looks like in the cockpit of the Typhoon, as shared by his son (the Growling Sidewinder video tells more of his story).

Dear friends,

We have released a new update 5.203, which includes a new ground combat generator mode for Tank Crew owners, which we told you about in one of the previous editions of the Dev Blog, new mission types for the scenario generator and career mode, updated descriptions of all WWII aircraft, added popular campaigns created by enthusiasts AEthelraedUnraed and Juri_JS, and much more (the full list of changes is below).


One of the most important innovations in this version is the introduction of a new dynamic battlefield system in the pilot's career mode to create the most interesting and varied scenarios and to optimize the CPU load (usually, the graphics card's performance limits the saturation of the battleground to a lesser extent because the objects are far apart and they are not rendered with high detail all at once). Since this system directly affects your gaming experience, let's learn more about it.


[h2]DYNAMIC RESOURCE ALLOCATION SYSTEM[/h2]
The new system now works in WWII career mode escort scenarios, where the player's fighter escorts AI-controlled attack, bomber, or transport planes - there are several unique variations, from escorting Ju-52s flying out of the Stalingrad cauldron, or bombers on their way to V-1 launchers in Normandy, to escorting transports with paratroopers during Operation Varsity at the end of the war.

It is based on a dynamic resource accounting mechanism. Both individual combat vehicles and groups of them are assigned a certain performance cost - for example, a truck requires very few CPU resources, while a group of heavy aircraft requires many - and request permission to appear in the game world from the resource controller. The resource controller first checks the amount of resources required, and then, in the case of an aircraft group, the probability of its appearance. The only exceptions to this general rule are such key elements of the scenario as the player's unit, its cover or other groups covered by it, and a group of the player's air targets - they will appear in the mission anyway.

If a unit or group is destroyed, crash-landed, just landed, or otherwise removed from the game world, the controller will use the freed-up resources to create a new group. A bonus effect of introducing this mechanism is that it virtually eliminates the problem of many objects appearing at the same time for ground vehicles, which can cause a noticeable "stutter".

[h3]Early warning posts[/h3]
Enemy interceptors appear in the air for a reason - they are summoned by observation posts located along the front and rear lines. They are organized into three large interception zones along the front line - each zone is assigned its own group of interceptors. The posts request the appearance of interceptor groups from the Resource Controller and then direct them to the group of aircraft to be intercepted: interceptors can either appear in the air at a sufficient distance or take off from their home airfield. In the current implementation, Airborne Warning Posts do not initiate intercepts of single aircraft or groups of fighters that don't cover strike aircraft.

[h3]Additional Events[/h3]
When generating the next day in Pilot Career mode, additional events are selected that may occur on the player's route that day if a friendly aircraft is passing nearby. For example, there could be a pair of enemy fighters on a free hunt or a group of friendly fighters, an enemy reconnaissance plane at high altitude, a group of transport planes flying to the rear, an airfield cover flight of 4 fighters, and so on. They will not suddenly disappear into nowhere - if you follow them, they will fly their full route and land on their airfield, and to save resources, if they are far enough away from enemy planes or the player's plane, they will be removed.

[h3]Other changes[/h3]
Player squadron aircraft are limited to two flights of 4 aircraft each and the second flight if covers the first by default. Large-caliber anti-aircraft guns will stop firing when friendly aircraft are nearby and will not distinguish the player's aircraft from other available targets. Ground vehicle firing modes have been optimized (they pause between bursts of fire).

[h3]Effect of career settings on performance[/h3]

The "Air Forces and AAA" setting has the greatest impact on performance because aircraft consume the most CPU time - it limits the appearance of air groups (other than the player's link) and anti-aircraft artillery units on both sides in the scenario. The higher this setting is, the more aircraft there will be in air groups, the more anti-aircraft artillery units will be operating simultaneously, and the higher the chance of a random event being triggered (and the higher the CPU load).

The "Ground Forces" setting controls the number of ground vehicles to which resources are allocated, independent of the "Air Forces" and "AAA" settings. For example, you can set "Air Forces and AAA" to the minimum and "Ground Forces" to the maximum. By combining these settings, you can find a setting that will allow you to play comfortably in Pilot Career mode on your computer.

As for the "Power Balance" setting, as you can see from its variants "enemy inferiority - parity - enemy superiority", it makes the enemy forces weaker or stronger than the forces of the player's allies, both quantitatively and qualitatively (experience level of pilots, marksmanship, etc.). For example, at the first setting, the chance of a group of enemy interceptors arriving is so low that they may not appear at all, at the equal setting this chance is about 50%, and at the enemy superiority setting they will almost certainly appear.

The new battleground system will be extended to other types of career missions if it receives positive feedback from the community.

[h3]5.203 CHANGELIST:[/h3]

1. Advanced Quick Mission mode for player-controlled ground vehicles has been added to the Prokhorovka map - it is available to all owners of Tank Crew: Clash at Prokhorovka;
   
2. Career: a dynamic battlefield generation system has been added to all scenarios of player flight escorting bombers, attack or transport planes;
   
3. Career: evacuation mission previously only available on the Normandy map has been added to all theaters;
   
4. Career: added night variants of Attack Railway Junction and Traffic Interdiction missions;
   
5. Advanced Quick Mission mode on Western Front WWI map: added Balloon Defense, Artillery Spotting, and Photo Reconnaissance mission types;
   
6. Advanced Quick Mission mode on Normandy and Rheinland maps: added glider towing;
   
7. Descriptions of all World War II aircraft updated: additional instructions added for manual startup and approximate fuel consumption at different modes (work on the descriptions continues);
   
8. Added popular unofficial campaigns: Kerch-Eltigen Operation (Bf 109G-6 pilot in late 1943, by Juri_JS) and Battle of Hürtgenwald (P-47D pilot in late 1944, by AEthelraedUnraed);
   
9. Flying Circus Career mode: corrected career progression of American Sqn. 94 and Sqn. 95, German Jasta Boelcke, Jasta 11, Jasta 12, Jasta 14, Bosta 13, FA(A) 235;
   
10. Flying Circus Career and AQM modes: parked aircraft have been added to all airfields used by players;
    
11. Western Front WWI map: started adding new settlements to a previously mostly empty part of the map;
    
12. Updated campaigns "Lightning Strikes", "Havoc over Kuban", "Hawks over the Bulge";
    
13. Synchronized ShVAK guns on all aircraft have the muzzle velocity of projectiles increased by 25 m/s, from 815 to 840 m/s due to the difference in the length of the rifled part of the barrel;
    
14. All Soviet aircraft from the middle of 1942 (except for I-16 and Il-2 rev. 1941) have late-type HE ShVAK ammo with increased weight to 96 g and increased explosive filling to 5.6 g;
    
15. Fixed taxiing on High Halden and Woodchurch airfields on the Normandy map;
    
16. Fixed mission point placement near the edge of the map in free hunt missions;
    
17. Corrected the audible ranges of airplane engines in first-person view;
    
18. Fixed a problem with the vertical stretching of modification pictures in the equipment customization menu;
    
19. Bf 109 G-2: fixed wrong technochat message about negative propeller pitch value ("-1%");
    
20. Bf 109 G-6: added MK108 cannon reloading tumbler animation;
    
21. P-38J-25: fixed uneven clock hands animation;
    
22. P-47D-28: corrected animation of gyroscopic sight sun filter handle;
    
23. Typhoon Mk.2b: fixed animation of the right rudder trimmer;
    
24. Yak-9 and Yak-9T: fixed bug with collimator reticle not disabling when the reflector is broken;
    
25. Fw 190 A-3 and A-5: fixed minor graphical bugs in the wing model.
    

Dear Friends,

Today we'd like to tell you about the new Great War aircraft that are in development.

While transferring them from our classic project Rise of Flight to IL-2 Great Battles, we are fixing problems we found during this work - sometimes there are some asymmetric aerodynamic elements, a wrong object hierarchy, engine overheating/overcooling, and other similar problems.


For example, while working on the Airco DH.2 recently, we found problems - it had an invisible "ghost" stabilizer in the physical model, inconsistencies in drag values, and it was also missing its top speed - judging by the reference data, it was missing it by about 15 kph. Well, mistakes happen, and they will be corrected: the DH.2 in FC will have recalculated drag values, corrected handling, and an increased top speed. Soon the beta testers will try it out, and some additional changes may be in order after these tests.

Its AI will also be updated as it needs to be taught how to use its blip switch for taxiing (such early flying machines had no throttle and the engine always ran at full power - its pilot had to press and hold a blip switch button that cut the ignition when he wanted to slow down).


Another upcoming aircraft, the Sopwith Pup, also had some problems with its flight characteristics and engine, which are currently being corrected.


While working on Flying Circus aircraft, we are not only adding new features thanks to the IL-2 Great Battles engine but also fixing old problems whenever we get the chance. The new Flying Circus aircraft pack is scheduled for release this summer.