We’ve got some news from the 1CGS team developing the IL-2 series thanks to a new dev blog. The blog post focuses on some items coming up in the next update including some news on the Ta152. Meanwhile they also go into a bit of a retrospective and there’s some great renders of the Hurricane. Let’s have a look.

Features in the next update

The key update in this latest blog is news that update 5.204 is on the way and will be released “soon.” I would take that to mean that we’re probably less than a month out from release.

The biggest new piece of content is the Ta152H. This late war German fighter and development of the Fw190 series has is fans and detractors but it will nonetheless become part of the wide variety of airplanes available in the series.

Community manager LukeFF also confirms that the aircraft will indeed be a part of Career mode and that the aircraft will be available in March 1945. That gives it a few solid weeks of potential operations which is lengthy by late war standards and about right given the type’s limited use. A careful balancing act.

Meanwhile there are also a new mission type that will be available that will have you cover the takeoff or landing of jet aircraft. It was an important late war mission type for some defense units and were important to attempt to keep Allied fighters away from the jets as these early types were slow to accelerate and decelerate for landing.

There’s also a new update to hardware management taking the total number of per hardware buttons up from 64 to 128. An update that will please a huge number of people, myself included, who have hardware that can allow for large numbers of buttons.

Hurricane and retrospective

The dev blog actually started with something a bit different. A look back at the Hawker Hurricane Collector Plane that they produced almost three years ago. The retrospective very briefly glosses over their efforts to reconstruct the airplane and then offers up some renders of the Hurricane model.

These renders are done in 3D software and with pre-render quality lighting you can really see all of the details that have been baked into the airplane. I don’t know if this is just a look at the Hurricane as it is or a subtle message that it is possible that these current aircraft might function well in future engines with future real time lighting setups helping to make these models look better than ever. Whatever the case… it does look good!

All of this and more over on the latest 1CGS development blog.