1C Game Studios is working to ensure that there are gameplay trailers from all of their IL-2: Great Battles Series titles and that means new trailers for previously and just released titles. Let’s have a look!
New for Kuban and Flying Circus
The first new trailer is by community member =HH= Paulk. Paulk is a master of trailer creation and has put together some seriously impressive trailers before. He’s previously done the Battle of Stalingrad and Battle of Moscow trailers. Check out this latest one showcasing Battle of Kuban.
The second trailer released today is for Flying Circus Vol 1. It’s here that I find myself in a bit of a self serving position. It was my intense pleasure to create a trailer to help showcase what Flying Circus is all about.
I can provide some fun facts on the creation behind this. The trailer pulls from single player and multiplayer scenarios that I’ve flown recently and features approximately 46 GB of video from over 600 clips. I then edited all of that down into the three and a half minute trailer that you see. It’s painstaking work but it can also be quite fun.
There were some technical challenges along the way too including a slight stutter that Shadowplay insisted on putting in some but not other recordings.
As always, there’s always more to learn but hopefully it showcases what Flying Circus is like.
I hope you enjoy watching both trailers!
Stormbirds 
Seeing these doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Bodenplatte and FC with regards to the updates you’re keen on saying will appear. The terrain there like in Kuban and Prokhorovka is highly lacking. Hell, I’d go as far as to say its ugly. The lower you descend you can actually start to count the pixels, and this doesn’t even take into account the awful looking normal maps explicitly evident in the FC screenshot depicted on the left of the page here.
Purely opinionated here, using this engine for TC without making any changes to the foliage, terrain, sprites, tex res, etc was a massive mistake. It’s one thing to have a bunch of aircraft zipping around at several hundred+ meters not noticing what’s below. It’s something else entirely to feature AFV’s in the same unchanged, hapless, and uncomely environment where detail and immersion are pivotal.
It’s insane to think that there are user terrain mods for FSX, which is well over a decade old mind you, that puts anything the IL-2 dev crew does to absolute shame. Either the engine is so completely dated as to render said results or they’re lazy and unwilling to push it towards any potential future renders. I mean given how absolutely limited the graphics options are it could be a combination of both.
The more I play the IL-2 titles the more unimpressed I become with regards to what this highly dated engine seems to be capable of. Meh, maybe we’ll see something truly current-gen sometime soon…
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts Det. There’s a couple of ways that flight sims are doing terrain scenery and they have pros and cons.
IL-2 uses textured tiles and “painted” areas for things such as relief along hillsides and cliffs. This reduces the amount of hard disk and RAM memory needed.
DCS uses a hybrid system going from the painted tile at very low altitude to low resolution satellite at higher altitudes. Sometimes that looks good, sometimes it doesn’t. Again the concept here is to keep performance higher.
FSX, X-Plane, etc. can be configured to use pure satellite imagery. That can look good at high altitudes and absolutely abysmal at low altitudes. Or it can feature extremely high resolutions and look good at low altitudes too… But you need several terabytes of hard disk space just to store all of the imagery. Performance can suffer in these situations.
I think you’re pointing out a fundamental compromise. This isn’t the 1C team being lazy. When it comes to Flying Circus vs Rise of Flight, they have pushed the needle forward a fair bit.
The only other comparison is to DCS World which has leapfrogged IL-2 with DCS 2.5 when it comes to visuals. But I don’t see their map rendering being particularly better. None of the combat flight sims is going to use satellite imagery purely at this point.
We’d all love to see what a next generation renderer could do. Jason’s already talked about it. https://stormbirds.blog/2019/09/10/a-short-message-from-jason-about-il-2s-future-plus-more-speculation/
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Thank you ShamRock for this clear explanation.
Didn’t know these visual distinctions !
Sure going to keep and remember this.
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@DET
You can indeed come to those conclusions.
However, do not forget 1C (and ED) has to target the average PC configurations.
Those maps (1C as well as ED) are huge.
Many things are happening at the same time.
If I turn up every feature in the graphics engines (at 4K, also for the plane textures) of the 1C and ED softwares I, personally, am still quite amazed at what I can get.
The new MS FS looks incredible, but I am still waiting to know at what level we can have an impact on what happens down below and up in the air.
If I look at those 2 1C youtube videos I see evidence of a true ongoing war, not a showcase of a serile nice looking demo.
But of course I would wellcome a ‘truly next-gen’ engine too … who wouldn’t ?
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This is a huge point of anxiety for fans of the new Flight Simulator from Microsoft. They are employing some next generation technologies when it comes to terrain rendering but it’s not perfect either and it still has compromises.
I don’t think we have a truly good understanding of what kind of PC it will take for it to look as amazing as the trailers are. From what we know, a lot of the test rigs so far are very beefy Core i9’s with GTX 2080’s. I have hopes that it will run well on a lot of systems (they are intending to bring it to the Xbox after all) but as you say… they aren’t simulating an ongoing war. So CPU and memory can be focused.
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I enjoyed both trailers, particular the boat displays in Kuban waters. Regarding graphics, I’m pleased that developers have made ongoing efforts to optimise performance while graphics quality has increased over the years. I’m sure that many flight simulator fans are fine with jerking across a gorgeous landscape at 20fps, however for a combat sim, smooth gameplay is essential.
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Great points Huckle. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. Performance is definitely a consideration for combat flight sims that seems to be less of an issue for FSX, P3D and X-Plane 11.
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