The next patch for the IL-2: Great Battles Series is out and ready to download via launcher or Steam update. Patch 4.005 is another large patch for the series with a huge list of updates and changes. Let’s focus in on some of the highlights and talk about what it’s all about.
A massive patch
Lead Producer Jason Williams posted last night urging everyone to make sure that they had backed up their control profiles and save any tracks that they want to keep around. He also wanted to set expectations as a few I think have maybe confused damage modeling (which is the physics underlying the damage system) with the visual damage effects.
The bottom line from the message is that this patch is bigger than usual with quite a few under the hood changes. The proof of that is in the 140 different items listed in the patch notes that have changed or otherwise been updated. That perhaps also underplays just how significant many of these changes are.
In addition to the under the hood changes, Martin =ICDP= Catney and Francisco =BlackHellHound1= Bindraban have been hard at work bringing older aircraft up to the 4K texture standard including the Bf109G-4, the MiG-3, and both versions of the Pe-2! There’s also four new ground vehicles (two ambulance trucks and two fuel trucks) for the eastern front.
Other highlights
I wanted to pick a few items from the list to highlight as they represent the breadth of this update:
- New language added – Chinese Simplified (简体中文). The career mode is not yet completely translated since the newspaper articles and some squadron histories and award descriptions are in English (they are not necessary for playing though). The Chinese symbols in the pilot name won’t work sadly due to the technical limitations in the mission file format.
- All aircraft got the new, significantly more advanced version of the airframe damage calculations: each aircraft has its own geometrical sizes of the airframe parts and the material types while the damage calculations take into account the peculiarities of the AP, blast and fragmentation damage;
- A complete rework of aircraft skin damage calculations has been done and it now takes into account the projectile caliber or its HE capability: now AP ammo and bullets damage the aircraft skin to much lesser extent than HE ammo while ramming an aircraft with a propeller of another instantly causes severe aircraft skin damage
- A complete overhaul of the blast and fragmentation damage, as well as armor penetration damage has been finished, including, but not limited to: correction of calculation errors, calculation speed optimizations, protection of the calculation results for finding possible errors in the initial data
- Since the calculations of the penetration ability and the energy of fragments were changed, the excessive effectiveness of the bombs against armored targets at large distances has been reduced, but a very close explosion is much more effective than before
- The AI pilots of the high-speed aircraft now try to use their advantage over significantly slower aircraft using the hit and run tactics
Those are just a few highlights of the 140 updates, additions, corrections and changes. Full patch list available here.
What’s next?
This is a huge patch and there will no doubt be a few problems here and there. I can see 1CGS issuing a couple of hotfix patches in the following days if any problems shake out. This patch comes out under extraordinary circumstances with the entire 1CGS team having moved to working from home and with the backdrop of worry and concern that we’re all facing on a daily basis… it’s a small miracle that 4.005 is where it is today. There could be a few issues as Jason warned us so we’ll see what shakes out in the days ahead.
Not included in this patch is the deferred shading system that is still being worked on. That should have some visual fidelity updates to the sim and may bring in a variety of improvements over time. Also coming soon is the Yak-9 which may make the next patch with the Yak-9T, P-47D-22, and Hurricane expected to come after that and in that order.
As always, stay tuned! A lot of interesting stuff coming to IL-2 in the next several months!
Stormbirds 
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