The latest developer blog for IL-2 Korea is out and this one is focused on lighting. Great Battles dealt with lighting in a fairly limited way while Korea has more to deal with including cities with night lighting. Let’s see how 1CGS plan to handle this in the new sim.

New lighting and night flying

Flight simulators have always struggled with night lighting and low lighting situations. Things have gotten quite a bit better in recent times, however, IL-2 Great Battles has been a bit behind the curve on this in a number of ways. Mostly because it didn’t need to worry about cities and towns with night lighting (Europe was effectively blacked out throughout the war). Korea is different and so it looks like the 1CGS team have done quite a bit to improve lighting systems in general and setup a system to handle it all.

New to the sim is city lighting, the ability to process thousands of light sources across the map. There is also new high intensity lighting for “weapons” like the SAB-100 bomb (which can illuminate a target area of 3 kilometers for 5 minutes). Aircraft lighting, exhaust, search lights and other features all upgraded.

One item they haven’t talked about yet is how they intend to handle some of those darker scenes. Great Battles provided some brightening on screen while reducing colour to simulate the human eye and its effects on visibility at night. I thought it an effective way to make flying at night possible. Curious to see how this new sim handles that.

Read the full report here.