The latest IL-2 Korea update from 1C Game Studios is a relatively short one talking about a critical piece of any flight simulation – the sky! Visualizing the atmosphere in a realistic way requires important factors to be considered in the process and this update talks broadly speaking about how it all works.

Visualizing the sky

Featuring a series of comparisons showing off clear skies, heavy haze, afternoon and evening lighting and how altitude affects the visuals of the sky and the lighting on an aircraft.

Here’s a little of what they wrote on what elements come into play when considering the visualization:

The model must take into account the chemical composition of the atmosphere, the distribution of atmospheric parameters by layers, fine suspended particles in the lower atmosphere (dust, rain, fog, etc.), the inclination of the sun relative to the zenith position, the shading of the atmosphere by the Earth’s surface, and much more.

They make the point that all of this needs to happen in a real time render on PC which has quite a bit of computing power these days of course but also is spread out rendering not just the sky but many other elements.

A lot of this is technical and using scientific data that goes beyond my understanding but I think the core message here is that IL-2 Korea is intending to up 1CGS atmospheric visualization to be better than the work they did in Great Battles. Always good to see the technology pushing forward.

Read the full update here.