While I hope everyone is enjoying the now complete IL-2: Battle of Bodenplatte, I also know that many of you are looking forward to the future for IL-2: Great Battles and to the next development phase for the series. Let’s have a look at the latest that we’ve seen from the 1CGS team and make some guesses as to when some of this content may arrive.

Three Collector Planes

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The Yak-9, Yak-9T, and Hurricane Mark II are all slated to come sometime in Q1 2020. That puts their release at sometime between January 1st and March 31st.

Narrowing the details down a little, we can make some guesstimates on their release date based on a typical development cycle for an IL-2 aircraft. We tend to see un-textured versions of IL-2 aircraft approximately 3-4 months before release. That would then put all three modules release at sometime in the mid-February time period.

I would then guess that all three are likely to arrive at once or in fairly short order one after the other depending on how the development cycle goes.

And Battle of Normandy?

The bigger question right now is when might we see our first IL-2: Battle of Normandy content show up? That is a bit of a tougher guess right now because I have a suspicion that development may have already started for a short period of time between the Battle of Bodenplatte wrap-up and the announcement of three new Collector Planes.

Why do I suspect that? In the image above you’ll see a Typhoon Mark IB that has been added as a static aircraft for IL-2: Battle of Bodenplatte. To create any static aircraft, IL-2’s developers seem to use a level of detail (LOD) model, one that has fewer poylgons and lower resolution textures. LOD’s are used to draw aircraft with fewer computer resources at a distance and their models are typically based on a higher level of detail model. If the developers spent the time to create this model already then it is very likely that they have a higher detail one that they built it from – that’s typically how this kind of modeling work gets done.

Add that together with the inherent similarities between the Tempest and the Typhoon and I would guess that not only did the team already do some preliminary work here but that it may have advanced a fair bit. Of course nearly the same could be said for the Spitfire XIV which would draw at least partially from the already done Spitfire IX.

There is still much to do on just this one plane, however, with a cockpit, flight model, damage model, and various programming requirements still needing to be met before it can be produced.

It’s also likely that a German plane will launch alongside an Allied one for Battle of Normandy and so it’s easy to point towards the Bf109G-6 Late or FW190A-6 as two potential options for the series. Both are comparatively minor conversions from other types that the team has already built and has extensive experience with. While some see these as duplication’s, they are still their own aircraft with the potential for some unique features – they also could be the only German fighters available for someone who doesn’t own any other IL-2 content.

All of this leads up to the million dollar question and that is when: Best guess based on everything above? Spring, say April or May 2020 is when I think we’ll start to see content from Battle of Normandy. When you think about it, that’s not too far away!