26.05.2017
Today I’d like to share some straight talk with you about our current and future plans for the Sturmovik franchise. I took over as Lead Producer in August 2016 with the goal of improving Sturmovik and bringing it more in line with your original expectations, while at the same time bringing the product’s technology into the future. Matter of fact my goal was to improve, what I call the four key pillars combat simulations – technology, features, content and community.
The past 9-10 months has seen Sturmovik be improved in many ways with new technology, more content and additional features being developed with more still to come. I also hope that some new out-of-game initiatives will further strengthen our small community even more.
19.05.2017
While the German bomber of the Battle of Kuban plane set is already available to customers who pre-purchased the new theater of war, today we'll show you the first screenshots of the Soviet one. This is the US-made bomber A-20B, these aircraft were sent to USSR since December 1942 via the lend-lease program. A-20B had 2000 kg bomb load (up to 16 bombs in the internal bay and 4 outside) and had two machine guns for defense - 12.7 mm Browning M2 .50 and 7.62 mm Browning M2 .30. In addition, it was armed with two forward firing 12.7 Browning M2 .50 machine guns for some offensive capability. Just like P-39L-1, this aircraft had freely rotating forward landing gear.
11.05.2017
Our work on the update 2.010 is finished and we present it to you. The main feature of this update is IL-2 Sturmovik mod. 1943 which has many significant additions.
The update also brings several graphics enhancements: SLI/Crossfire support (which stopped working properly since DirectX 11 support release), rear view mirrors, landscape anisotropic filtering, improved tree shadows, improved visual hit effects on aircraft, particle shader with indirect memory addressing that is a bit faster, better looking clouds on Ultra graphics preset - all of this is already available to you.
05.05.2017
We have several good news for you today. The first one is that we almost finished the new aircraft - IL-2 mod. 1943. While this is the modification of the aircraft that already existed in our sim, this one will bring many interesting and not easy to implement improvements with it. One of them is the BB-1 mechanical aiming sight we told you about in the past Dev Blog.
The second innovation is the new weapon - PTAB-2.5-1.5 anti-tank bomblets. Modeling such a weapon required significant optimizations - this aircraft could carry up to 240 bomblets and drop them all at once. This was a complex task since the optimization must keep the performance hit to a minimum while keeping the drop pattern realistic. We implemented a system where the flight path is calculated for each bomblet if there is a possible target near the projected impact coordinates. If the possible targets are far away, the flight path is calculated for a cluster of bomblets at once, maintaining the realistic calculation accuracy.
20.04.2017
Today we'll tell you a bit more about Battle of Kuban development progress. Let's begin with the graphics engine update.
Having finished Open VR API implementation, we started the work on another long-awaited feature - aircraft rear view mirrors. In fact, rendering the mirrors realistically looking and keeping the performance hit manageable at the same time is a complex task.