Developer updates from the 1CGS team haven’t been as frequent as of late but this one helps fill in some details on Flying Circus with some big updates and news on Career mode as well as a bit of talk about a potential volume 3.
Career mode beta test begins
The big headline here is that Career mode for Flying Circus is almost done. The dev diary update reports that the last piece of the Flying Circus puzzle is coming into place and Career mode is nearly done.
They also report that Ugra Media (here they are spelling it Yugra again – it goes back and forth) are also fine tuning and debugging the map too and that the plan is to have that complete by end of the month.
The new version of Career mode has two main phases.
- From April 1st till September 30th, 1917.
- From April 1st till November 11th, 1918.
They do make special mention of the lack of a winter version of the map because there is currently just the one season included at present.
There will be 105 airfields for player flights with the ability to join 9 French, 15 British 6 American and 12 German squadrons for a total of 42. There are also 17 types of missions planned and they report that they intend to work on some Great War specific mission types starting next week including Balloon Hunt, Photo Recon, Artillery Fire Adjustment and Visual Recon.
Volume 3?
Flying Circus fans have been a anxiously awaiting news about Volume 3 and if the current trajectory, laid out during the Volume 2 announcement, would continue. It sounds like that’s the direction we’re going in according to Han, IL-2 Producer, who wrote this week’s update.
Simultaneously, we are also negotiating with Yugra Media about the continuation of the Flying Circus series. Our goal is to fully reproduce the aircraft set and the Rise of Flight map in the modern engine. We are hoping for a positive outcome and your support, since the player interest primarily affects our decisions.
Han on the IL-2 forums
They also mention that a winter season and expanded Career mode with more phases are possible if a Volume 3 becomes a reality and that ‘if’ appears to hinge on sales of the product.
In the meantime, Volume 2 looks to be set to bolster the Flying Circus series reasonably well with Career mode adding considerably to the single player potential of the product and plugging a key gap that Volume 1 had.
Stormbirds 
Well well well… Interesting. Very VERY interesting…
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Do you get the career mode if you only bought volume 1?
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That’s a good question Scott. I’m not sure if we know the full answer to that, however, with Career mode for the rest of IL-2 they added it retroactively to the other WWII titles when it was added so I can see something similar happening here.
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Cool. I’ll cross my fingers then. Thanks for keeping on top of these things. 🙂
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Absolutely! More when I know it for sure.
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Ho hum. Still waiting on some substantial news about the future of the Il2 series’s, while the developers appear to do their best to alienate their customers.
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I suspect we won’t hear much about that for some time.
Todays news I saw as a positive. FC Vol 2 is the only significant product still hanging in the air a bit.
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It’s a question of the point of view… This is from the announcement of FC3:
“ This is one part of a new two-part plan to create not only FC2, but also FC3 with our partner Ugra Media. Completion of this new plan will make the first three volumes of Flying Circus an exhilarating combat flying experience that will usher in a new era of development for Great War titles and content. ”
So if FC3 will not come I will not purchase any other content they create because a broken promise.
Maybe I am alone with this opinion but this is how I that about.
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You have to make a purchasing decision based on your own criteria. I always support that. Nobody should feel obligated to purchase something if they don’t want to.
I quibble a bit on the word of promise. Jason had indicated that he’d like to do Vol 3 right after Vol 2 but I never saw that as a promise. A hope for sure.
Things have obviously changed in the world and in the leadership there and so… I’m a bit nervous that it won’t happen. By the same token the fact that they are talking about it also gives me some hope that they will.
It will play out in the fullness of time 🙂
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very interesting news for WW1 flysimmers, it’s still a bit vague and who knows that’s because of the Russian language translator they are using. Only It would be greater, after hiring lots of new labor, to show the future plans. If you are extending your amount of employees then there must be also a strategic plan behind. So they are hiding something that could be very disappointed for most buyers or will strongly reduce sales. Because the Rof engine and BoX engine are basically the same I guess they are swapping all the RoF planes to FC, to get easy money first. I do hope they will do that btw.
While no mention of any real game improvement, ( reducing graphical artifacts or multicore), I still suspect the hiring is for the new flysim on a completely different game engine not compatible to BoX and FC.
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@UNKNOWN who wrote “swapping all the RoF planes to FC, to get easy money first.”
I don’t believe this is “easy money” in any way.
None of the old plane models can be used ASIS and there surely is no VR version of the old content.
FWIW … FC3 in IL-2 GB will be another DAY1 pre-order by me (if it ever materializes of course) !
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RoF and FC do have more a less the same game engine. That’s why you do read lots of comments like “if you have Digital nature game engine you have also access to the Digital warfare game engine”. Biggest difference between them is 32-64bit, DX9-DX11, VR and of course some fine tuning.
So what would you think would be the easiest step, swapping RoF planes to the actual FC game engine or swapping RoF planes to another new game engine like FS2020 or Unity5? Keep in your mind it’s not only the plane model (players & AI in different view ), but also DM/FM etc.
I still suspect the extra labor in the design team, is pure for creating another game engine and like Clod does have a complete different game engine then BoX it will be impossible to use any FC/RoF planes, models or campaigns in that new engine. But we will see after a couple of years, the actual game engine shows his age.
Btw did you also noticed the official RoF forum will be closed.
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