Jump to content

LATEST NEWS

    Il2 DD Update Dev Blog 198
    76.IAP-Blackbird
    By 76.IAP-Blackbird,
    Dear Pilots,

    It’s the summer holiday season and many team members are taking their hard-earned vacations. So, as a result our ability to give you super detailed Developer Diaries is diminished a bit. However, we have the first shots of our American P-47D-28 “Jug” in the engine. The cockpit is under development and these shots are of course Work In Progress. She’s turning out to be quite the beauty! We hope you enjoy!







    You can discuss the news in this thread.

    Quick Aircraft Facts: A-10 Warthog
    Skyviper
    By Skyviper,
    Do any of you remember a show that used to air on the Discovery Channel called Wings? When I was younger I would make sure to watch as much as that show my mother would allow me. I loved it and miss it. I also had a couple of these information cards that you could put in your 3 ring binder. These cards had information that was easy to understand and direct to the point. So in the spirit of Wings and those cards, here's Quick Aircraft Facts, a new series that will feature an aircraft, it's history, and if possible, it's future in 3 minutes or less. First up is the A-10 Warthog. Enjoy.    

    IL2 Update 3.005 Update and (preorder)
    76.IAP-Blackbird
    By 76.IAP-Blackbird,
    Update 3.005   Dear Pilots,
    After months of preparation and planning following our big announcement this past Fall, we are proud to announce the Release of version 3.005 and launch of Early Access for both Flying Circus- Volume One and Tank Crew - Clash at Prokhorovka. They are now both available for purchase in the IL-2 webstore and making a purchase gives you access to new content as we roll it out and before the product is final.       Flying Circus – Volume One
    Let’s first talk about Flying Circus and what the Early Access includes. As of now, you’ll get the SPAD 13 and Fokker Dr.1 to fly and fight one another in. The Lapino maps are acting as a stand for the future French map for now and both planes have been re-built and re-mastered by our partners at Yugra Media from earlier less complex models. This means improved mesh, textures, damage and other small enhancements of the same aircraft from previous products. However, you must remember that FC content is still a work in progress and more work will be necessary before WWI aircraft are fully supported in IL-2. As with all our Early Access periods more flyable aircraft will follow in the coming months. Time to get the goggles and scarves out of the closet!
    Flying Circus Early Access can be ordered HERE.
    We’d also like to take this time to explain our discount plan for special Rise of Flight users who purchase FC and qualify for a special discount code. We have chosen to give those ROF users who supported us in our darkest, most difficult days some special recognition with an additional discount. Without this support we would not be here today and is a small way to say thanks to those that supported us when it mattered most. Some customers really went above and beyond in their financial support and that is reflected in the discounts below. We only wish economic reality would allow for it to be more.  
    First, everyone who orders during the Early Access period gets a $10 discount off regular MSRP no matter what. Second, if you are an existing ROF customer and meet certain criteria you qualify for an additional discount. The criteria are as follows.
    Anyone who purchased content for ROF between it’s launch in 2009 to Jan. 1, 2013 from our website or a boxed or digital copy from an official retail partners (Excluding STEAM. ROF was not available on STEAM during this period) during that time frame will receive an additional discount.   If you spent between $0.01 and $70.99 you will receive an additional $5 OFF. If you spent between $71.00 and $200.99 you will receive an additional $10 OFF. If you spent greater than $201.00 you will receive an additional $15 OFF. The special discount period ends September 15, 2018.
    To get your special discount you’ll need to access your ROF user account on the ROF website and retrieve a promo code we have placed in your user profile. Then return to the IL-2 website and place your order for Flying Circus. Enter your discount code at check out. The additional discount will be reflected in the final amount.  
        Tank Crew – Clash at Prokhorovka
    Next, we are excited to begin Early Access to Tank Crew and the initial release of our first two tanks – the mighty Kv-1s and the fearsome PzKpfw. VI Ausf.H1 "Tiger "
    Tank Crew Early Access can be ordered HERE.
    Due to development and gameplay considerations we have decided to create a separate AAA vehicles add-on featuring the GAZ-MM + 72K and Sd. Kfz. 10 + Flak38. We will prepare them as a separate product to be released later and work to make them a more interesting addition to IL-2 Sturmovik Great Battles then initially planned.
    In addition to the two tanks released today, over the next 14 months we will release the full line-up of tanks included in Tank Crew. Ten tanks in total will be created. T-34-76 model 1943 KV-1s M4A2 “Sherman” SU-122 SU-152 PzKpfw. III Ausf.M PzKpfw. IV Ausf.G PzKpfw. V Ausf.D "Panther" PzKpfw. VI Ausf.H1 "Tiger" Sd. Kfz. 184 "Ferdinand" In addition to the tanks we will be creating our specially designed Prokhorovka map and releasing that once it is finished. In the meantime, we are including the Lapino maps as stand ins.
    We have also added drivable tanks to the QMB including the new Kv-1s, Tiger 1 and existing T-34 and Pz. III tank models. Please note that the existing T-34 and Pz. III tanks are the original models previously released. Tank Crew will eventually include updated versions of these tanks.
    And the Kv-1 and Tiger tanks now support custom skins. Templates will be along soon for skinners.
    And we’d like to take this time to introduce you to our talented development partners at DigitalForms in Saint Petersburg, Russia who have taken on the task of building these amazing tanks for you. They have worked tirelessly since our announcement last year to put you inside some of WWII’s most deadly and fearsome weapon systems. They have helped us re-invent our tank technology and built some truly stunning tank exteriors and interiors. They hope you like their work!    
      Fw 190 A-8
    We continue our work on the coming Bodenplatte project and this time its customers get a new toy - German fighter/bomber Fw 190 А-8. It comes with many modifications: 30-mm Mk 108 guns, additional armour, bomb holders capable of carrying up to three 250 kg bombs, heavy rockets 21cm WGr. 42 and up to 12 anti-tank rockets R-HL Pblz. 1 "Panzerblitz". This makes the airtcraft the most packed one among the other Focke-Wulf models.   Battle of Bodenplatte can be ordered HERE.         Other Improvements
    In addition to FC and TC Early Access we have spent some time working on minor improvements to ground AI, bullet damage calculations, small graphical corrections to the He-111 H-16. A-20B, Spitfire Mk. IX and Bf-109 G-14. And of course, many other small enhancements, fixes and changes, which are too many to list in this post.
      Please discuss the update in this thread.

    DCS News & Modern Air Combat
    MigBuster
    By MigBuster,
         Modern Air Combat by Eagle Dynamics Coming this Autumn! Developed by the same studio that brought you the wildly successful Lock On, Modern Air Combat (MAC) brings you one game with 14 unique combat aircraft to own the sky! MAC aircraft include: F-15C Eagle. US air superiority fighter with 104 kills to 0 losses record. Su-27 Flanker B. Russia's dominate heavy air superiority fighter. Su-33 Flanker D. The Russian navy's carrier capable version of the Flanker B. J-11 Flanker B+. The Chinese version of the Flanker B, with R77 active homing missiles. MiG-29 Fulcrum A. Russia's widely exported light air superiority fighter. MiG-29S Fulcrum C. The modernised version of the Fulcrum with latest weapons and defences. A-10A Warthog. The USAF's massively successful 'flying tank', designed to kill ground targets. Su-25A Frogfoot. Russia's primary ground attack and close air support jet. Su-25T Frogfoot. A modernised version of the Frogfoot with enhanced sensors and weapons. F-86F Sabre. America's iconic top fighter during the Korean War. MiG-15bis Fagot. Russia's 1st generation jet fighter that opposed the Sabre over Korea. F-5E Tiger II. The US light-weight fighter that has been operational since the Vietnam War and operated by over 30 countries. MiG-21bis Fishbed. Russia's most successful fighter of the Vietnam war. A supersonic fighter that closely matches the Tiger II. L-39ZA. A Czech designed, two seat trainer that was then adapted to a light attack aircraft.   Each aircraft's flight model, sounds, external model and cockpit is recreated to an exceptional level of detail and accuracy. Great care has been given to offer scalable gameplay that suits your personal levels and wishes. This includes intuitive and consistent keyboard controls between aircraft, selectable difficulty settings, option for more forgiving flight dynamics, and even the ability to fly these aircraft with just your keyboard. As with Lock On and the Flaming Cliffs series, MAC is focused on east and west counterpart aircraft, and this includes such legendary match-ups such as the Eagle and Flanker, Warthog and Frogfoot, Sabre and MiG-15bis, and the F-5E and MiG-21bis. MAC is a blend of both east and west, and this allows you to re-fight historical conflicts from the Korean War to today, and to create your own "what-if" missions. You can generate an unlimited number of missions using the Fast Mission Creator and Mission Editor. MAC also includes numerous instant action and single missions, as well as campaigns for most of the aircraft and is fully compatible with DCS World online! There are no limits to content. In addition to the full Caucasus map, MAC also includes a limited part of our Nevada and Persian Gulf maps. Key Features of MAC: 14 exceptional combat aircraft from the United States, Russia, China and Czech Republic. Shallow learning curve with consistent key controls between aircraft, and easy to fly with just a keyboard. Professional level flight models, but with option for forgiving flight dynamics. Play instant action, single missions and campaigns for most aircraft in single player or fly online. Supports Virtual Reality like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows Mixed Reality. Includes the Caucasus map and portions of Nevada and the Persian Gulf. Purchase MAC aircraft individually or as a pack at a reduced price. Flaming Cliffs 3 owners can purchase the MAC pack at a great discount. DCS World 2.5 Update This week we merged the current DCS World 2.5 Open Beta to the DCS World 2.5 Release version. Next week, 18 July, we plan the next DCS World update to include many fixes and improvements to the Hornet, DCS World 2.5, the Persian Gulf Map, and other modules. DCS World Dedicated Server Update With the launch of 2.5 earlier this year, we have been working diligently on an item we've been wanting to bring to DCS World for quite a long time: a dedicated server. It however was not until the launch of DCS World 2.5 was this possible, and hence the length of time this has taken. As a dedicated server, the software will not require any graphics rendering, so no dedicated graphics card will be required and there is no audio requirement. This all greatly reduced server load overhead. There will be a new web GUI to control the server. Operation of the dedicated server through the web GUI will operate much as the existing online server does now, but allow you to make changes remotely. We plan to release the dedicated server in Autumn 2018. Afterward, we will investigate adding additional features to expand its capability. Sincerely,
    The Eagle Dynamics Team

    Il2 DD Update Dev Blog 197 "Flying Circus" WWI
    76.IAP-Blackbird
    By 76.IAP-Blackbird,
    Dear Friends,   Today I would like to tell you about what we plan for Flying Circus – Volume One and show you some WIP screens of our first two aircraft which are ready for Early Access release this month! But first let’s take a minute and talk about how we came to make Flying Circus and the challenges that we face in developing it.   Of course, Flying Circus is going to essentially be our spiritual sequel to our ground-breaking WWI simulator Rise of Flight: The First Great Air War. ROF was the first product we ever made and over the course of several years we greatly expanded its content and created some really cool features for it, many of which were ported or updated to work in Sturmovik. We have not lost our affection for WWI and we have always hoped to be able to bring WWI combat to our updated Digital Warfare Engine.    When we eventually ended work on ROF and shifted our focus to WW2 many WWI fans were disappointed. At the time, we had no intention of abandoning ROF or her fans, but the requirements for WW2 overwhelmed us and we had no resources to manage two projects at the same time and the technology we developed for WW2 was extremely difficult to retrofit back into our WWI engine without causing major delays to Sturmovik. Retrofitting WWI would have required an entirely new team of developers that we could not afford. So, we marched forward with WW2 hoping to someday find a way to come back to WWI and do a sort of parallel development. That opportunity has finally become available thanks to some creative planning and so we decided to create Flying Circus – Volume One with the help of our friends at Yugra Media. Yugra employees have been training with our team learning how to re-build our WWI content and make maps with our current technology. This has taken several months already, but our plan is to get WWI up and running as quick as we can and get WWI content brought up to our new standard. We hope to generate new revenue to fund more WWI development and general development of the common engine which benefits all of our products. We also wanted to give WWI fans something to cheer about after a long drought of development.   Now it should be said that trying to bring all content and features of ROF to Flying Circus in one fell swoop is impossible. This will be a marathon, not a sprint and new features or old features found in ROF will take time to make in the current engine. Bringing WWI to our current engine which has been re-worked and modified for WW2 is a big challenge and some things can be ported relatively easily and others require all new work. As with Tank Crew, several months of work behind the scenes has already taken place laying down the foundation to support Flying Circus. This will take much time, but we will endeavor to make Flying Circus just as awesome or even more amazing than ROF ever was. However, for that to happen we need your support!   Both Flying Circus as well as Tank Crew are experiments and first steps in working with qualified and trained third parties on new content and gameplay features that users have asked for or we feel have potential to help our overall cause. Our team is still small, relative to our competitors and we are still a self-sustaining team. Meaning, we sink or swim on our own, there are no bailouts if we fail regardless of who our benefactors have been in the near past. So, if you like anything about Flying Circus please support us by buying a copy. We want to make WWI great again inside the Sturmovik universe.    So now that you know the background of how Flying Circus came to be, let’s take a look at the actual product.    As you have previously read in other announcements here are the planes that will be included in Flying Circus – Volume One. We have decided to choose a plane-set that represents the period of April-May 1918. This period offers some great planes that will provide lots of fun match-ups.    Planes:   Spad XIII 
    Sopwith Dolphin 
    Sopwith Camel
    RAF S.E.5.a
    Bristol Fighter 
    Albatros D.Va 
    Fokker Dr.1
    Fokker D.VII
    Pfalz D.IIIa
    Halberstadt CL.II.   The first two planes off the assembly line and into Early Access will be the venerable SPAD 13C.1 and the Fokker Dr.1 triplane!    All of the planes in Flying Circus have their roots in ROF, but the models have been re-worked by Yugra Media to be brought up to our current visual standard. That means improved mesh and new 4K textures.    Map and Technologies   Included will be a map that is approximately 100 km x 100 km that has is generally centered on the Arras sector of the Western Front. The map will include towns such as Arras, Cambrai, Lille, Amiens and St. Quentin and the dreaded No-Mans-Land along with several airfields to fly from. This map will be created using all our latest map making technology that is found in current IL-2 Great Battles products. It should make WWI a much more beautiful experience scenery wise. Matter of fact, Flying Circus will benefit from all current and new technologies in our updated engine. This means more than the graphical updates, but also improvements to AI and of course our amazing VR support is included! The difference from ROF will be quite remarkable.   The plan is for future volumes of FC to include larger maps like we had in ROF. Exactly how big, is yet to be determined.   For us to bring WWI to you in any reasonable amount of time, we have decided to use the Flight Models from ROF for our Flying Circus planes. We have done this for a couple reasons. First, we have spent a lot of time researching and building these FMs over a period of several years and unlike the 3D models, they stand the test of time and there is no reason to toss them and start over. Second, these FMs were built for an engine that was created solely for WW1 speeds and maneuvers etc. It was more prudent to build support for these FMs in the current WW2 focused engine, then to completely re-make these FMs with an engine designed for heavier and faster aircraft in WW2. In essence, we’ve been able to make both regimes co-exist side by side within the same environment without compromising the feeling of flight or their unique characteristics. Our engineering team as done a marvelous job building this support in just a few months! Without this work, Flying Circus would not be possible. Our Flying Circus planes will still have all the interesting quirks and characteristics that many of you know and love from our previous title.   Finally, I must mention one of the driving motivations for making Flying Circus at all - VR support! There was simply no way to retrofit VR support into ROF properly. So, to bring our awesome VR support to the WWI battlefield we had to work on a new title with the tech already included. The end result did not disappoint, we really like how our open cockpits look in VR! This will be a really awesome experience for those that love VR.    Features   As I mentioned above, getting WW1 up and running again takes a lot of work, so Flying Circus will initially include support for the Quick Mission Builder and our Mission Editor. We will also create and include some custom single-player missions as we near completion of FC and if Volume One proves popular and we move to make future volumes, we will introduce the Pilot Career to FC. And Scripted Campaigns can be built for FC by anyone using our Mission Editor just like in IL-2.    If you are concerned about the Pilot Career, please know this. We can’t support the Pilot Career for FC yet because we are still building support for WW2 and other general features and mission types it needs. Remember, it’s still new tech for the Great Battles series and we have to build this support in-house so we cannot place this task with a third party. We also have to build support for WW1 style missions and this will take time. If we include support for the Pilot Career in say Volume Two of Flying Circus, it will of course become compatible with Volume One. That is the beauty of our one client approach.    All of our Flying Circus aircraft will come equipped with all field and factory mods that we used to sell as separate items way back when. This also includes pistols, scarves, streamers and special gunsights like the Aldis and collimator style gunsights.    And last but not least, our pilot models for Flying Circus will be completely new and they will look really cool in our updated aircraft. They of course have yet to be animated, but the finished pilot models look to be really great!      We hope this overview of Flying Circus is helpful and gives you a good idea of the great effort we are undertaking to bring WWI development back to our amazing WWI fans who enjoyed Rise of Flight so much.    So please enjoy the following images of Flying Circus. Remember this is still a Work-in-Progress and the maps is obviously not WW1 France. For Early Access we will be including the Lapino map as a substitute until the French map is ready. 
      You can discuss the news in this thread

    DCS Weekend news and Sale
    MigBuster
    By MigBuster,
         DCS World Summer Sale! Our DCS World Summer Sale will only last seven more days, and this will be our last e-Shop sale until the end of 2018. If there is a module you have your eye on, now is the time to act. Save 50% off on most DCS World titles from our e-Shop! Summer Sale Trailer Get great savings now at DCS World e-Shop DCS World Open Beta to Release This week we made the big step of updating the release, "stable" version of DCS World from our current DCS World Open Beta version. Not only does this bring all modules to the release version of DCS World (like the Hornet and Persian Gulf Map), but it also integrates many fixes and updates that have been addressed in the Open Beta over the past several weeks. Some highlights include: Support for new campaigns Added new USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier Implemented initial version of video memory manager Added new OFFLINE mode Added China Pack Added moon light effects Added Static Object templates A-10C flood lights corrected Updates to the Normandy 1944 Map Added the new World War II Asset Pack units Corrected tail wheel behavior for the Spitfire Many improvements and fixes to the AV-8B Harrier N/A, M-2000C, MiG-21bis, C-101, SA342 Gazelle, Hawk T1, and Flaming Cliffs 3 aircraft You can read the complete, lengthy change log in the dedicated thread. Next week will bring an update that includes many additions and improvements to our Hornet. DCS: Black Shark 2 – 2018 Trailer In 2011 we released DCS: Black Shark 2, which is still the most authentic simulation of the Russian Ka-50 attack helicopter. Seven years later, the Ka-50 is still one of the most fun and exciting aircraft to fly in DCS World. With the graphical and updated world (like the new tree system and grass) that DCS World 2.5 brings, the Ka-50 is better than ever. To highlight just how great the Ka-50 is to fly in DCS World 2.5, we’ve created an updated trailer video. Later this year, we’ll also be updating the Ka-50 cockpit (and A-10C!) to use our very latest graphic technologies. Black Shark 2, 2018 Trailer Purchase the Ka-50 now at 50% off F/A-18C Pilot Explains How to Land on a Carrier in DCS World Former F/A-18C Hornet pilot Lex Talionis talks about his experience flying and landing a Hornet in DCS World, and he shares his thoughts on PC flight simulations, virtual reality, and being a real Hornet pilot. Sincerely,
    The Eagle Dynamics Team

Portal by DevFuse · Based on IP.Board Portal by IPS


×

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue..

  I accept