Putting a more accurate pilot physiology model into the IL-2: Great Battles series has been an interesting added layer to the simulation. Introduced over a year ago, the system has added a lot of nuance to what happens to your virtual pilot while undergoing high G-maneuvers. While much of the community has been happy with it, other parts of the community were hoping for a bit more and it seems that 1CGS is responding to that. This weeks developer diary goes into the fine details and here’s the quick summary.

Community feedback and resources

This weeks update comes from 1CGS’ Principle Software Engineer, Andrey (An.Petrovich) Solomykin, and it goes in-depth on the work that he’s been doing on pilot physiology. The interesting thing about this feature is how invisible it is but also how much it affects the experience.

In a recent community poll, we were asked if we liked the system as it is or if it needed to be changed. The poll itself came back with about a 60/40 split in favour of keeping it as is, however, AnPetrovich, also collated responses with comments in reaction to the poll and found a much closer 52/48 split. It’s good to bring both quantitative (i.e. the numbers) together with qualitative (the value or quality) when doing community research like this together and the results suggested that 1CGS needed to do more on their pilot physiology system. And so they have.

Much of the dev diary details what kind of work went into figuring out what needed to change. It’s an interesting series of details and it includes actually going up in a Yak-52 aerobatic aircraft to gain first hand experience on a variety of effects including what happens when you go rapidly from negative to positive G and back again. That’s commitment!

The bottom line of what’s changing

The good news is that what we have now isn’t going away. For those of you, who like myself, really thought the new system added extra and realistic layers to the air combat experience, nothing I read in the update suggests that this is going away. However, further nuance is not a bad thing either and so this is what I’m gathering from the update:

• The changes make the overall effect slightly more forgiving, however, prolonged and repeated rapid maneuvering still cause loss of color vision and narrowing vision before full blackout
• New features have been added such as the fatigue and loss of resistance to G forces when rapid push/pulling into positive and negative G’s
• More aircraft features such as backrest angle factor into the equation which means some slightly added resistance for types such as the Fw190
• A fatigue indicator has been added as an optional feature showing the resistance that the pilot has remaining

The visual indications of blackout and a new indication for redout have been added. The screenshots show them off to good effect and they offer a sneak peek at the Hurricane’s cockpit as well!

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For the full in-depth version, visit the latest IL-2 Developer Diary to get the story.