IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad

123

Hello everyone!

With Battle of Moscow project being close to its finish, we have some time to spare on the tasks that were postponed for a long time. In the developer diary #120 we told you about our plans to improve physics and aircraft systems, bomb sights are also being worked on. In the recent update 1.107b we added the more flexible modifications filter system requested by many multiplayer server owners and the additional logging to assist us in the search of hard to find issues like invisible planes in multiplayer and crashes that happen sometimes.

Among other things for the next update 1.108 we're preparing aircraft information that will be accessible for each plane in player profile and in full screen map mode during a flight.

Collecting the data required for it wasn't that simple since many of the reference values are 'soft data', many depend on an aircraft mass and configuration which are different in different tests performed back then, so it was needed to do ingame tests to measure them. These characteristics aren't specified in the game code: they are the integral result of a really complex physics simulation system. When our engineers build a plane, they set and tune aerodynamic elements and engine parts, aiming to meet the reference data available (such as maximum speeds, climb rates, lift-drag and trim curves, takeoff and landing run lengths when available, etc.). Moreover, the reference data analysis is always a research task, so there could be different cases. In some cases there is not enough reference data available and thorough engineer analysis is required to make an educated guess while keeping other values close to the reference data. In other cases, there could be several contradicting sources and we need to determine which one is more credible.

Characteristics presented below were measured in the game, which took almost two weeks of hard work. In the end we've got informative and standardized data for all planes in the game we'd like to present you below:

Airplanes of "Battle of Moscow":

http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/168-developer-diary/?p=336140