Good news and bad news for IL-2 4.005 patch delay

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The forthcoming IL-2: Great Battles Series patch 4.005 has been delayed. Widely expected to arrive sometime this week, the developers at 1CGS have decided for a number of reasons to set back the date of the next patch and we have some details straight from 1CGS developer Petrovich.

The good with the bad

The bad news is of course that the next patch is delayed and probably by a couple of weeks. The good news is that the delay is allowing for the developers to fix some more critical items including a major update on the engine damage models. Here’s what Petrovich had to say,

But there are good news. In update 4.005 you will get even more than we originally planned. Given the new information discovered by our partner “Digital Forms” (many thanks to them!) who is working on the project “Tank Crew”, we significantly improved the methodology of calculating the fragmentation and high-explosive impact of explosions.

AnPetrovich

And there’s more too.

Also, according to the results of testing the airframe DM, we realized that the engines DM must also be improved. Initially, we planned to improve engines DM, as well as systems DM not this time, but later. However, tests showed that against the background of a more realistic airframe DM, “glass” engines turned out to be a weak spot. Therefore, last week the engines DM were also significantly improved. This is still not a “dream DM”, but we did a significant step in that direction.

AnPetrovich

Naturally, this kind of thing can happen in software development. Fix one thing and suddenly something else becomes a problem and with a flight simulator that can be magnified when it comes to something the virtual pilots interact with in such a fundamental way.

Damage model updates are fantastic but if the engines have become even more of a problem then I suspect a great many will have issue with it. I think it makes sense for 1CGS to delay the patch and await further improvements.

It’s also worth noting that the engine updates we do see in the damage model for 4.005 are not the aimed for result either but rather a step along the road. Whatever changes they made, they did them quickly and so I appreciate some extra testing time.

When is the patch now anticipated?

The patch is now anticipated to arrive, at the earliest, sometime next week. I can see testing for something as complex as this perhaps taking a little more time and so its possible that it will take a couple more weeks.

Some may be disappointed, however, I think it will be worth a couple of weeks of delay.

Read the full update from Petrovich right here.

6 responses to “Good news and bad news for IL-2 4.005 patch delay”

  1. bigalrico Avatar
    bigalrico

    It is sad that the update was postponed, but on the other hand it is reasonable. It’s better to do it properly than to just slap it out.
    And at least one of my big fears was rebutted, since keeping the engines in their old form wouldn’t help. For example, it wouldn’t motivate me to take a P-47, since a few 7.62 MG bullets would be enough to finish the engine in its current state. Of course it’s too early to celebrate, since this upgrade is not final and not there yet, but it is very welcome 🙂

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  2. Gretsch_Man Avatar
    Gretsch_Man

    I’m not really disappointed as I consider it more important for the devs to do a thorough job. And their latest update does sounds promising.

    Just allow them the time necessary to do all those implementations.

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  3. heartc Avatar
    heartc

    Sounds more and more like DCS to me. Let’s add this and this and this and this. In short time, it will be Spaghetti code, too, with the accompanying performance drop and 32 GB RAM required for “complex” missions with more than 4 a/c.

    You have been warned.

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    1. ShamrockOneFive Avatar
      ShamrockOneFive

      I’m not sure what I’m being warned about specifically.

      As for IL-2, so far it’s been doing quite well so far despite several updates to the core engine. We’ve even seen performance gains. The future I suppose remains uncertain.

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  4. heartc Avatar
    heartc

    Keywords identified: “so far”.

    It’s all good. I’m not trying to be confrontational here, it’s just that I’m beginning to pick up a smell that I’m all too familiar with. That smell is called “Release a base product / engine, and then keep adding onto this forever, doing multitudes of changes on it because we are really reluctant to move to a new engine, and then let’s all stand back in awe as we watch everything turn into a burning wreck of bloated code on an ancient engine and wonder why we are now dealing with crashes and many times the system requirements of newer better looking products.”
    That, as of now, holds true for DCS vs IL-2 BoX, but I would be sad to see that one day in a not too distant future, it would also hold true for IL-2 BoX vs ?. Oh, and if the “?” is a “0”, then it would only be the worse for it.

    But I agree, so far the game is well optimized, and quite amazingly, for what it does and how it looks. However, I *have* noticed some not so subtle issues and performance decrease with Battle of Bodenplatte, in contrast to the former releases. I guess that is down to the mandatory 4k skins in it (there are no 2k ones available afaik, even if you select 2k in the settings), as well as the bigger map and bigger and more cities. So, that is actually understandable. What is not understandable though, and what bothers me, is that they list the same minimum (they don’t even list recommended, so can’t comment on that) system requirements for it as for the other releases, and I think that is not the honest way to go about things. They should update the stated requirements if the product demands it, instead of downplaying it to garner in more buyers. People should at least be aware that they might run into issues that they haven’t done in the previous releases, that is only fair. A number of people are experiencing performance issues and D3D crashes with BoBP, as well as map lag (more severe than before), which indicates that the system requirements have increased for this release (which is only logical, see above). I have also experienced gfx driver crashes (D3D) and related issues – luckily not during flight per se, even with lots of planes, but it happens now and again when I switch through the planes with the F2 view and thus the view changing quickly from one place to maybe a far distant one, and the system cannot update the new landscape data in time. It’s not world-ending because I can easily avoid doing that, but my system is not even AT minimum specs and still encounters these issues, so it is clear that the stated minimum system specs are rather wishful thinking (or false advertisement) for BoBP.
    I’m not saying they should not add onto their sim with new releases, I’m saying they should be honest about it.

    Anyway, thanks for having the debate. You have a great site here and I love reading it, exactly because you appear to be a real human bean, rather than a shill or PR guy.

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    1. ShamrockOneFive Avatar
      ShamrockOneFive

      Thanks for explaining your thoughts. Certainly valid concerns to be shared by most or all of us and I suspect including the developers who want to make sure that IL-2 stays accessible. It’s a delicate balance that most studios struggle with… trying to up the ante and push forward while not leaving their communities behind or introducing massive performance problems along the way.

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