We haven’t heard too much from Team Fusion Simulations over the last several months. The turbulence affecting the other parts of the IL-2 series have affected them as well. Now we have a significant update from the team that brought us the revamped version of IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover and the Desert Wings – Tobruk DLC package. There are things in motion and that makes this a fascinating look into what’s currently going on behind the scenes. Let’s go!

Setting the stage

A lot has changed in the last year for the IL-2 series. 1C Entertainment, a publishing company connected to 1C Game Studios, was purchased by Tencent (a Chinese conglomerate) in February of 2022. Then, in September and November, we saw a couple of long time members of the 1CGS team step away. Andrey (An.Petrovich) Solomykin left for Asobo Studio in September and Executive Producer Jason Williams announced his departure in November. I caught up with Jason a couple of times after that including this most recent Q&A that I did late last year.

Jason was a key person in the connection of Team Fusion Simulations into an agreement that would see the mod team become an official development team with access to code and the ability to develop future content. That would lead to Desert Wings – Tobruk’s successful release in mid 2020 as well as the re-release of the Cliffs of Dover series under the Blitz title back in 2017 bringing forth many upgrades.

With the 1C Game Studious team seemingly going in some new directions and acquisitions and geopolitics upending the status quo, many of us where Team Fusion Simulations would fit into all of this.

Now we know a bit more!

The update

Posted yesterday across multiple platforms, Team Fusion Simulations gave us a pretty big update with quite a few details. It starts with the immediate question on the progress of the vast visual update that the team have been working on. VR, 4K skins, and trueSKY cloud tech headlining the update.

Team Fusion continues to make great progress towards completing the Visual Update as well as TF 6.0, our next DLC. We are also working on other DLC’s in the development schedule.

The implementation of VR, trueSKY and Speedtree continues to make excellent progress, the many bugs we have encountered adapting these programs to the unique CLIFFS engine designed by Oleg Maddox has been a challenge but we are systematically addressing the bugs and issues and resolving them.

There was also an address of why there had been so few updates recently explaining that the team used to provide updates with code signing software provided by 1C. In the background, 1C Entertainment had been renamed to Fulqrum and the new owners wanted Team Fusion to take on a direct role in signing updates.

As prequisite for the purchase of Code Signing Software, the proprietary company requires proof the purchasing company and its executives are in good standing… this required TF to provide notarized documents, as well as encrypted details to Digicert, the author of the Code Signing software and have these verified by Digicert. And finally our programmers have to install the software and learn how to add the certificates to our releases.

This is the reason the community and the VR Beta have not seen any updates or releases in the past month or so. And this has also delayed some of our planned announcements.

The update continues with mention that things are changing with Fulqrum noting that the company was both ‘friendly’ and ‘accommodating.’ That said it does sound like the process has had its turbulence.

All of the above discussions have been complicated by both the departure of Jason Williams, who was TF’s main liaison and the gatekeeper for all our efforts and PR, and who continued in this role for a period under Fulqrum before leaving, and his replacement by Fulqrum staff, which has seen quite a few new faces appear in the partnership role… sometimes for a short while before being replaced by others. This has required restarting the process twice, and unsurprisingly, lengthened the discussion period needed to determine what if any, potential changes in the relationship of TF and its Publisher might be useful.

The end of the update lands on a positive note with news that Team Fusion Simulations continues to move ahead with their work and that they are ‘optimistic’ about the future. That optimism comes complete with a new render of an engine – one that some eagle-eyed engine enthusiasts says is a BMW801 radial engine. A Fw190 might be in Team Fusions future!

A few other updates

I’ve also missed out on a few other updates from Team Fusion Simulations in the last couple of months. While some screenshots were posted just yesterday, a batch of them featuring the Mc.202 I missed previously. In-case you want to see where Team Fusion are at with their various visual updates, here are some great reminders.

Every one of these updates and the full quote from Team Fusion Simulations is available right here on their Facebook page.