A consistent complaint for IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad owners was the shortened draw distances versus other sims. As time has gone on, 1CGS has improved the draw distances for objects, trees, grass and more – One thing hasn’t gone away on clear days is the haze in the distance. That is changing in a big way!
You can see for miles and miles
The above images dramatically highlight the change that is coming to the IL-2 engine with a draw distance that is significantly higher than before.
According to the developers, the draw distance has been increased from 40 to 150 kilometers. This is nearly four times the distance from before. And this comes with a host of other changes to make it all work:
This task automatically brings several smaller ones with it in tow: increasing rendering distance of the clouds and making them more diverse, improving the air haze, the horizon, making additional, simplified landscape beyond the map borders since you can see so far now and so on.
The biggest difference will be for people who fly at higher altitudes although it will affect those at lower altitudes too.
We get a nice new shot of the Yak-7B flying along at lower altitudes and you can see what a difference it makes here too.
The draw distance was forgivable in my mind but it was always a shortcoming too. If 1CGS has truly found a way to do this with minimal performance hit then that would be astounding. They claim to have succeeded too:
…one of the main objectives was to not allow significantly FPS drop appear due to this new feature, and we succeed in this.
Here’s hoping! I’m sure there will be options to return the draw distance to a lower setting should your system not appreciate the added work but I’m also hopeful that this will be fairly accessible to players with relatively updated systems.
When initially mentioned, I had thought this feature would be something coming for post IL-2: Battle of Kuban launch but it appears that this may already be fully implemented into the series by the time of release. We’re still expecting the next patch, likely to be a massive one, to be launched around December. Though not confirmed, I feel like the team will likely add this as one of those features coming in that patch.
Stormbirds 