I’ve been saying for quite some time that the inclusion of the FW190A-8 in IL-2: Battle of Bodenplatte would probably also lead to the inclusion of a second and very similar FW190 variant, the FW190F-8, and it seems that the developers agree because we have confirmation that the FW190A-8 and F-8 are coming to IL-2: Battle of Bodenplatte. And soon! This week’s Dev Diary also talks more about the recently introduced gyro gunsight. A lot more.

Two aircraft for the price of one

Last year when the developers added the FW190A-5 to the IL-2: Battle of Bodenplatte aircraft list, it was really the introduction of two aircraft. The A-5 fighter variant and the U17 modification which made the A-5 into an FW190F-3. The same is happening here with the FW190A-8 and the FW190F-8.

The FW190F-8 comes with the usual assortment of ground attack bomb options but this update also revealed a rare and very interesting armament option: the Panzerblitz anti-armor rocket.

Designed for use on the FW190F series, the history of the Panzerblitz in combat is a little murky ranging from small numbers of operational trials to out and out usage in the last few months of the war. Having it as an option has long been a desire of mine going back to the previous IL-2 series and the developers have delivered.

The WGr 21 is also shown in the screenshots giving us a potent anti-bomber weapon.

More news on the Po-2VS

The latest news on the Po-2VS is that it will be available to fly in sometime in August. This extremely well used biplane aircraft was used all across the Eastern Front in multiple different roles.

New screenshots show the PO-2VS’ successful integration into 1CGS Digital Warfare engine. 4K textures are also confirmed.

The Po-2VS is the first of what will hopefully be many third party aircraft projects that make it into the series. While the aircraft set has grown to a really healthy level now, there are still gaps in the aircraft sets we have available and it would be great to see some of those gaps filled over time.

Additional details on the Spitfire’s gyro gunsight

This week’s developer diary spends a lot of time detailing just how far 1CGS went to make sure that the Spitfire’s Mark II GGS gunsight was modeled to an extremely realistic level. I’ll let you read through the details yourself but I want to highlight a couple of key comments about what is still going to change on this.

The only noticeable simplification that was dictated by the performance reasons is that the gyro movement between the electromagnets is limited by a pyramidal space instead of a cone, because of this the gyro reticle has square limits instead of circular ones. In the future, we may find a way to model the conical limit without an additional performance impact. Moreover, since Spit IX release with this gyro gunsight in update 3.003 we have improved the modeling of the influence of the tension in the gimbal suspension on the dynamics of the entire system. This peculiarity which pushes the virtual gunsight even closer to the real thing will be published in one of the coming updates.

I love the push to get this feature feeling as close to the real thing as possible.

While IL-2 may be slightly more simplified in some control configurations than DCS, the developers still pore over the materials and programming to make sure that, behind the scenes, this series is deeply authentic. I love this attention to detail even if some of the technical explanations for a gyro gunsights operation make my head spin.

For all of the details and even more screenshots, visit the latest 1CGS Developer Diary.