One of the big areas where combat flight sims diverge from their civil aviation focused cousins is in the area of damage models and damage effects. While some civil aviation sims do this to some extent, sims like the IL-2 series have always gone above and beyond with things like soft-body effects, G-induced failures and of course modeling what happens when an aircraft comes into contact with everything from trees, ships, enemy fire, and the ground. A new ‘Brief Room’ episode for IL-2 Korea shows how effects have been changed and improved over the Great Battles sim. We also have a compilation video showing off the effects as they pertain to crashing into the ground. Let’s have a look.
Modeling damage effects
The latest Brief Room Episode 31 shows us what the 1C Game Studios team has been doing in the area of damage effects. Quite a lot has changed starting with the move away from probability based simulation of damage effects to direct effects. I was interested to learn that Great Battles uses quite a bit of probability in how the damage effects are calculated. Angle, area of the hit, and other effects factor in on how something might be damaged such as the main spar holding the wing together. In essence, a roll of the dice to see if what you did caused the specific effect. IL-2 Korea moves away from that with a direct simulation of the spar itself. The same detail expands to other systems as well.
Some of the diagrams provided in the video show off some of the systems that are being modeled. The below shows off the engine and cooling systems for the F-51D for example. They also have similar diagrams for the control surfaces and trim controls.
The episode goes into considerably more detail on how it will all work but its clear that it is an evolution over the familiar system.
Another big change is how they do damage effects for wear and tear on engines. The Great Battles methods used timers based on suggested use of aircraft written in the aircraft’s historical documentation. Now they are moving to a more specific system that uses heat to manage how much accumulated damage from overdoing it on the engine will affect its operation. It sounds like it’ll be a more organic system from the current one that will still penalize players for overdoing the engine for too long while not being quite as artificial as the engine breaking after a set amount of time.
Released today is a new short video that is a compilation of crashes in the sim that help to underscore the more academic discussion with something a little more… visceral. Wings get bent, engines fall out of their mounts, and particle effects do their thing to make it all look quite interesting.
Have a watch and see what you think!
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