IL-2 Sturmovik Ultimate Edition

[fragger]

I know this post is a bit lengthy, but I'm sort of making it like a review. I promise I won't go boring the socks off non-sim aficionados with a zillion posts in this topic, but I thought I might be able to give anyone who's interested in sims a bit of an idea of where this game's at. I haven't figured out screen captures with it yet, so sorry, no piccies.

IL-2 Sturmovik Ultimate Edition includes a pile of EXPs and DLC that have been released over the years, which amounts to a pretty respectable bundle. 20 bucks for the lot, not a bad price for a boatload of sim.

I've had a bit of a play with it and while it's nowhere near as pretty as more recent titles like Wings of Prey, it's a way deeper affair. With the aforementioned EXPs and such, there are no less than 231 different aircraft types included, both Axis and Allied, from various theatres. That number includes many variants of single aircraft types, e.g. 14 versions of Spitfire (there were actually more than that during the course of the war), 15 versions of Bf-109, and multiple versions of various other planes, including 10 versions of the renowned IL-2 Sturmovik itself. Apart from the multiple models, there are scores of other aircraft, including some light to medium bombers such as the B25 Mitchell, the Heinkel He 111 and my three favourite twin-engine jobs: the de Havilland DH98 Mosquito, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the Bristol Beaufighter. There's even a couple of Italian Fiats and a few types I've never heard of (and I thought I knew them all... joking). There are rarities in the sim world like the Brewster Buffalo, the Dornier Do 335 and the Hawker Tempest. Aircraft which are crewed by more than one person have switchable positions, so if you're flying a Heinkel 111 and you decide you want to be the bomb-aimer or a gunner, you can jump to whichever position and let the AI take control of the plane (or let the AI handle the guns and bombs if you're happy in the pilot's seat). You can also get into a gun turret, w@&k the guns with the mouse and still fly the plane with your stick of joy. Haven't tried that yet, sounds like a juggle...

Early days for me, but it looks promising. Ground detail is pretty basic, not a patch on the near-photographic beauty of WoP, but I don't mind that if the sim is solid. Even so, the graphics are not too shabby for an older title (2001 orig, but modded, patched, embellished and updated over the years by a generation of faithful devotees). One advantage of an older title is that I can max everything out :-()

One thing I like is that you can put all kinds of missions together yourself and save them, and the possibilities seem endless. You can even create whole custom campaigns if you want. There are still pre-made single mission and campaign modes included, and the usual "Quick Combat" type mission which itself has tons of options. The whole mission-creation area has a very open-ended design to it and you can play around with all sorts of stuff, like setting enemy AA gunners' reaction times and making waypoints for enemy AI ground units to move towards, and when. Lots else. The mission builder/editor is very comprehensive.

In the Pacific theatre there are carrier-based missions. I always wanted to try a carrier landing (in a sim, not for real, thank you very much).

And one can free-fly! Yay! All that's needed is to put together a Quick Mission without specifying any enemies, and you can fly around unharassed to your heart's content and practice takeoffs and landings and crashings and so on. The mish will just keep running until you quit, run out of fuel, or drill yourself into the deck, whichever comes first (either a quit or a crash will come first if you've selected Unlimited Fuel). IMO a free-flight option is a must for a deep flight sim, to enable you to get familiar with cockpit layouts, an aircraft's handling characteristics, etc. It's essentially hands-on training, which all would-be pilots need. Attempting to put an aeroplane down on the ground is stressful enough without some ne'er-do-well trying to accelerate the process.

You can tailor the level of sim to your own taste, with lots of options governing various degrees of realism. You can go as arcady or as simmy as you like, or anywhere in between. Full-on sim mode is just that - the devs didn't overlook anything, not even the tendency of single-engine aircraft to want to go off to one side during takeoff due to engine torque (correctable by judicious use of the rudder) and radial-engine fighters to continually try to roll to one side in flight due to the flywheel-like effect of that type of motor, which is exactly what these aircraft did in reality (for instance the radial-engined Japanese Zero could turn faster and tighter to the left than to the right because of the flywheel effect, a characteristic that American fighter pilots learned to take advantage of). Changing airspeed will require elevator trim dependent on altitude, and fuel mixture and propeller pitch settings can enter the equation too. You may need to keep an eye on your radiator temperature and your manifold pressure at times. Engine management is an involved discipline in itself if you pull out all the stops on the realism level. Run the supercharger too long and your engine may overheat. If you're not careful you can knock your head and body around, if you set those toggles (red-outs and black-outs, and flutter-induced head-banging). Push the plane too hard and you might rip a wing off or overstress the airframe. Land too hard and you'll collapse your undercarriage. You can open and close your canopy. You can adjust your engine cowls. You can set delay fuses on your bombs and rockets. You can set your pre-takeoff fuel quantity. You can choose your engine-start magneto settings. You can specify the bullet convergence distance from your guns (prior to a mission start). I don't think there's anything that hasn't been taken into consideration and that can't be turned on or off according to taste. Turn on all the hard sim effects and you'll have to do everything by the book or risk ruining your kite, yourself, or both. Turn them all off and you can fling your plane around like a Whirling Dervish with no ill effects. Or you can go for any combination of real/unreal.

One drawback to the game is that it doesn't fully do widescreen (the vanilla game came out years before there were such things). I found a workaround online where you can edit the config file to force it into widescreen mode and native res, and what it will do is chop off a bit of the display at top and bottom to minimize stretching but it won't eliminate stretch entirely. However, the game itself has a "wideview" cockpit mode which negates the chopping-off and further helps to reduce the stretching effect, and this makes things very acceptable in the cockpit view. External views are still a bit stretchy, but I don't use external view modes anyway. I stay in the cockpit like an actual person :-() The stretching is not great enough to be an annoyance, and anyway the cockpit looks better in wideview mode, even though the stick looks weird while it's being moved around by your apparently invisible body.

The "Head" viewing in Sturmovik is what I wish WoP's was. In WoP, if you use a joystick hat or one of the preset head views (left, right, rear or above), your view will stay there until you move it back to the front. With Sturmovik, when you use the hat or select a preset view, as soon as you let go of the hat/key your view automatically snaps back to the forward view, so it can be like having a quick glance. Sometimes you need to face forwards again quickly and don't want to have to hunt around for the "Look Forward" button. There are eight view presets: Up, Down (not very useful in a fighter as it shows you the cockpit floor - it's more for a belly turret or bomb-aimer's position, I think), Left, Right, and four 45-degree views: Left Front, Right Front, Left Rear and Right Rear. These are gotten with the corresponding Numpad keys, with automatic snap-back when you stop holding down the key. If you want a prolonged angled view without your head snapping back, you can move your head around freely and smoothly with the mouse and it will stay where you leave it. Hitting "8" on the keypad will snap it back to the forward view. It's a far better viewing system than WoP's, especially in the heat of battle.

So it looks pretty interesting, with tons of customizing options. There's even a way of making your own aircraft skins and artwork in a paint program like Photoshop and then importing them into the game, which is something I'd like to look into. At first I was a little put off by the game's graphical simplicity after being spoiled by WoP's visual richness, but as Sturmovik's core sim personality is beginning to emerge, I'm becoming more attracted to it :-X

And I'm certainly spoiled for choice of aeroplanes now - got more than I can shake two sticks at 8)

[Art Blade]

+1 :-X for the detailed first impression fragger :) Sounds like a good game.

and you can fly around unharassed to your heart's content and practice takeoffs and landings and crashings and so on.

I have a feeling that you might become equally proficient as I used to be.. at demonstrating the utmost virtuosity when it comes to crashing a plane. :-D

[nexor]

I found this clip, It looks like the devs didn't care much about the scenery but put all the graphics into the combat scenes which is very good. 
I checked the local game shop for it but no luck

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJZbiIoCFPA

Then I also found this one, also very good, il-2 sturmovik battle of stalingrad

[fragger]

Cheers Art :) And I'm sure I'll pile up a few myself :-() It's pretty unforgiving on the more realistic settings. I tried to land a Mustang earlier and wrecked one of the wheels, then skidded to a stop resting on the remaining wheel and one wingtip. But hey - any landing you can walk away from is a good one ;)

nex, Battle of Stalingrad is one of the few major add-ons that the Ultimate Edition didn't come with. It comes with IL-2 Forgotten Battles (with Ace Expansion Pack), IL-2 1946, and Pacific Fighters. There's also all the most up-to-date patches and updates, and lots of separately added aircraft.

The scenery is pretty bare bones, about on a par with the old Battlefield 1942 game. It's not that crappy really, just very plain and unadorned. The focus was on creating as realistic a sim as possible, and I'm finding it's quite remarkable in that department. That's what I was looking for with Wings of Prey, but that game just didn't quite deliver. WoP looks a million bucks and the flight model is good, but it doesn't have the depth and customability of IL-2.

I still really like WoP though. I've sort of got the best of both worlds - WoP for fantastic-looking action and IL-2 for a more rounded sim experience.

It's not a bad choice to have 8)

[Binnatics]

Well, I checked some YT videos on IL-2 Sturmovik and that battle of stalinggrad, the game doesn't look half bad. In fact the planes and battle effects look very realistic, probably the landscape below isn't that detailed indeed. I find the world kind of flat. Who cares if all you see around you are mean bees trying to stick you :-()

[nexor]

That's what I saw with the clip I posted of IL-2 Sturmovik Ultimate Edition Binn, the combat graphics is what makes the game pretty awesome, nice game fragger  :-X 

[PZ]

Nicely written fragger!  +1  :-X

[fragger]

Thanks chaps :)

I won't go prattling on endlessly here, bit if anything truly worth mentioning about the game emerges, either good or bad, I'll drop a comment.

It is an excellent sim despite the lackluster scenery. The goal was to recreate a very realistic flying experience, so the emphasis is on function, not form. You also have to bear in mind that the core game is fifteen years old now, so you can't expect it to look like some of the visual extravaganzas of today. PCs and their hardware components back then just weren't up to handling the volume and complexity of graphical data that we've become accustomed to playing with today. Even if such advanced graphics were available back then, the PCs of 2001 (with GPUs still in their infancy) probably would have returned a frame rate of about 1 per minute had they tried to run them  ^-^

[nexor]

I agree with you fragger, watching the clip I was impressed with the combat scenes   :-X
after all, that is what the game is all about