A couple of weeks ago I posted about an upcoming Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) Q&A that Jason Williams was planning to do with r/il2sturmovik. Jason’s now had a chance to read through and answer many of the questions that came up during the AMA and I highly recommend checking them out.

Some key highlights

I don’t want to steal the thunder from the Reddit group but I did want to reproduce a few highlights from the AMA that I think will really interest readers and then encourage you to visit the AMA answers from there.

Question: What are the plans to increase the very limiting 9.6k render distance? As planes increase in power and speed, being able to see farther and farther is more than important; it’s necessary.

Jason: We already cheat to make planes more visible at that distance. To go further we’d need to implement some kind of graphical tweak and adjust many other areas like AI and physics etc. to make planes exist physically at longer distances. We’ve discussed it many times, but it requires a fair amount of work from our lead programmer who as you will see, shoulders most of the burden. And with modern monitors you end up simply running out of pixels and things devolve into dots and how we deal with those dots becomes and issue that takes time to do. So, my best answer is, we are well aware of the community’s desire to somehow increase your visual awareness of planes beyond 10km. It’s high on my list to tackle once we have a free moment to do it.

This is an issue that keeps coming up and it matters to some people more than to others. Beyond about 10km (9.6km apparently) rendering of objects stops and that tends to make it difficult to pick out aircraft at longer distances and perhaps more importantly is a challenge to high altitude bombers.

It’s particularly bad for higher altitude bombers as targets will pop in much closer than 10km in a straight line as the altitude and the circumference of the render bubble cause these objects to appear well into the bomb run making last minute adjustments difficult if not impossible.

It’s not an issue with an easy solution but it’s nice to know that the team has it on the radar.

Question: What kind of cooperation between Tank players and plane players do you envision for the game? Eg.: will planes spot enemy tanks, or tanks be able to request air support to deal with a particular target?

Jason: When we have the Marshal feature implemented I envision such complex scenarios in multiplayer for sure. For single-player such a feature is harder to make obviously, but it would be cool. We do envision battles with ground objectives being supported by air power. That’s the whole point of letting our tanks play with airplanes. The Po-2 which is deep into development should be good fun in directing the battle from the air acting as an airborne observation post.

I’ve been going on about this sort of thing for a while but I thought this was a good one to hear “from the horses mouth” so to speak. The idea of implementing Tank Crew and making combined arms more a part of the IL-2 experience than before is one that interests me greatly. I think it will be a boon to multiplayer in particular and help evolve the series in some new and interesting ways.

I also think it’s a great mention of the third party Po-2 and how that aircraft can interact in the multiplayer scene. The Po-2 is currently in development and expected to arrive sometime in the autumn.

Question: Can you give us a rough estimate of what planes are coming up? Obviously the 190A/F-8 just dropped and the P-47 is next, but are there any aircraft that are proving to be particularly challenging?

Jason: I don’t have the entire schedule in front of me, but I know the Me-262 will be last to be finished thanks to having to build a jet FM to support higher Mach numbers. The Tempest cockpit is turning out to not be so easy to find good references on since there appears to not be any surviving examples in museums. Again, correct me if I am wrong.

People are frequently wondering and asking which aircraft are next and what the schedule is looking like. We don’t know what the schedule is right now but we know that the P-47 is likely to be the next aircraft to arrive on the scene and now we know that the Me 262 jet fighter will likely be last in the schedule and that the Tempest V is proving to be difficult to find cockpit resources for.

Read the rest

I definitely encourage you to visit the r/il2sturmovik Reddit and read the rest of the answers. Jason talks about everything from the Pacific to the types of aircraft that he and the team would like to see (Hurricane is of interest). Jason even muses about what types of aircraft/theatre he’d love to do if money were no object.

Read it all right here.