Not all planes had totally manual mixture control, for example most US aircraft usually had semi-automatic.
They had full rich for emergencies and start-up when the lever was all the way forward, cut-off to shut the engine down when the lever was all the way back and two intermediate settings: auto lean and auto rich.
In flight, auto lean was mainly used for cruise and fuel economy and auto rich for combat and climbing (richer mixture cools the engine, a good thing to have in prolonged climbs or when using high power settings, even if it costs a bit of performance).

However, not a lot had totally manual control, instead they would just choose between auto rich and auto lean and the engine systems would do the rest.

As for the rest of the aircraft that did have fully manual mixture, it's true that the increments of 20% we currently are not really precise. Leaning properly wouldn't be much trouble even without an exhaust gas temp gauge if the rest of the instruments gave you proper feedback.

If you watch the video in the other thread about prop pitch, you'll see that a constant speed propeller takes a little while to adjust to a new power setting: when you apply more power, the RPMs will rise a little before the prop governor adjusts the pitch to bring them back down, if you reduce power then the RPMs will momentarily drop before the governor brings them back up.

Using that knowledge one can lean the engine by simply watching the RPM gauge. You can lean until the leanest mixture that causes the RPM needle to momentarily jump up. If you go past that into too lean a mixture, power will be less and the RPM will drop a bit, you just enrich a little until it jumps back up again. Essentially, you over-lean once to see what's the peak RPM before the governor can correct it, let it stabilize, then enrich until you reach that momentary peak RPM value again. Also, with a bit of practice it's possible to do it by ear and as previously discussed in a Friday update, it's also possible to judge it from the color of exhaust flames if they are visible.

It's obvious however that for all this to work, we would need some kind of revamp in the way IL2 handles instrument feedback, its sounds and possibly the entire engine model. I don't know how much work that would be and most importantly, with CoD around the corner and the rumors about its improved engine model i'm not sure how much sense it makes to introduce "competing" features in the older series.

Don't get me wrong, i'd really like to have the features you propose, i just don't know if it's possible ;)

I'm not sure what your issue is. There are no seperate radiator controls for each engine.

Aviar

Regarding the whole mixture and engine management discussion... Personally I don't care much for all those features since I fly almost exclusively offline and since the AI cheats in that matter I often fly with complex engine management off. However, I think that adding any new features to the sim is basically a bad idea. The main focus should be fixing what is broken at this point. I recently played the old Forgotten Battles (1.02 version I think) and it seemed like the most polished version of Il-2 I can think off. The AI does not do any dumb barrel rolls as soon as you get within firing range, the P-47 does not go supersonic (fall apart at around 850 km/h), the AI does not outrun faster planes and basically the whole experience seemed deprived of any bugs that you can encounter with 1946 version.

I get the impression that the game began to get broken with Pacific Fighters - it was an incomplete addon IMO (lack of planes and ships, boring missions etc) and started a trend for the series when adding new stuff seemed to be more important than polishing what was already there. The last patch took quite long to develop and though it has some awesome features, the bug list it introduced is quite large.

So, please Dear Developers, focus on bug fixes rather than adding new planes and options. The AI needs some serious work, especially with new bombing procedures and such. Let's face it Il-2 is an old game and CoD is coming out in 2 months time (hopefully) - the best thing to do is to bring Sturmovik to bug-free state. Sure, the game still has huge potential, but maybe exploring this potential should be left to modders and official developers would be better off with just fixing this game once and for all.

Fw190D-9 cockpit problem
 

Attached is a jpeg showing a small triangular clear area on the RHS cockpit frame - as I reported on an earlier post.

DFLion

Not difficult at all. At least in some aircraft like the 109, use the auto prop and overrev just for few seconds (5 seconds or less) and the engine ll broke. The engine brokes very fast. Use auto prop in 190 and go for a dive in new 4.10, see what happens. When you just think to reduce pitch the engine already gone.

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11. Bf-109 G-6 Mk 108 cannons don't work.

12. Bf-109 G-6 Finnish version cannot use the Wfr.Gr.21 rockets.
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15. Ju-88 with empty loadout causes exception.

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Did you realy tested your patch intensively? Months over months testing .. and this kind of bugs??! You are the "official" ?! This kind of problems never happened in "official" ic maddox patches...

maybe if you do work more with the community then you would not have such a long list of bug fixes...

maybe open beta before release of the patch..

thumbs up for you that you will learn from this.

These kinds of problems didn't happen? You have to be kidding me... you don't remember when one of the IL-2 patches broke the rudder on some 109 models? Or when Pacific Fighters came out and the Ki-61 flew like it had lead weights attached to it? Sometimes errors happen.

Aiming point of all guns on the FW190A8 FW190A9 is below the center of Revi circle.


FW190A4 FW190A6 are OK.

By the way, if the records could provide wingtip smoke for aircraft , that would be better to review the quick records of fight.

LOL...

Maybe you were playing other games when the IL-2 946 DVD came out. It added to FB+AEP+PF 4.04 the "three russian add-ons" in one go, to version 4.07, definitely a lot of content and new features. Well, even then a hotfix (4.071) patch was needed to cure some bugs.

Yep, I/ZG76 emblem was on my 110 for years. Now it's not anymore.