Stunning NEW pics
 

From Gamespot here

This is turning out to be the Gran Turismo of console flight sims (at least I hope and pray:grin:)

Wow, those are the best yet.

You can see a parachute under the 109 in the third pic. Nice find!:-P

Gorgeous.

You gotta be kidding me. I think I might need a new TV.

Yep you're right gonna need a new tv!

These are great. Shame that they got the spit and hurri's wrong though...I hope they include the correct mark 1's in a dowload add-on pack...;)

how did they get them wrong?

;)Technically both aren't correct for the Battle of Britain. The only cannon armed spit used were the 1B, but they didn't have 2 .303's in each wing-and the Hurricane in the game is the later mark 2B model with 12 .303's.
The correct Hurricane should be the mark 1 with 8 .303's and the correct spit should be the 1A with 8 .303's or the 1B with 2 cannons ;)

Now cmon, there were twenty four variants of the Spitfire alone. The differences between most of them were so minor as to be insignificant. If it wasn't a major change to the engine, armament or airframe, who cares, honestly?

At some point, you have to say "ok, that is a spitfire with X engine and X armament" rather than "Hey, they didn't have 2 .303s in 1941, that was only in 1942!"

It's basically the equivalent of complaining in a warfare game about a Panzer IV being Ausf G when in fact only Ausf As were available at that particular month or something. Meaningless quibbling, in short :D

No disrepect, but at the very least the key ingredients for a Battle of Britain experience is the right planes, and a Spit Mk1 is one of them. Now I'm not complaining, but I have to admit to being a little dissapointed if the key aircraft in the Battle of Britain campaign are the wrong type.

Forgive me, I'm British, and aircraft nut and I'm passionate about our finest hour, pumping cannon shells into Heinkels over the docklands just won't feel right :(

Completely agree. Also, the difference between cannons and machine guns is staggering. I can live with the Hurricane in game, but literally blowing apart a heinkill with a 2 second burst from a spitfire mark Vb just won't feel right, as skii said, and it won't be realistic for the battle of britain. My opinion may sound as though I'm knitpicking, but I don't think it's an easy mistake to make..far from it. All you need to do is wiki search battle of britain, and the info on planes used will be there. ;)

That's my point. The guys making this game obviously know rather a lot about aircraft, and even if they didn't, a 2 minute search on wikipedia would tell them about even the most obscure aircraft variants.

These models and textures take a hell of a lot of time and money to create. They obviously choose very carefully exactly what kind of aircraft they want to make a model of. And for whatever reason, they chose these ones.

Remember, singleplayer isn't their only consideration. They probably want to have the Spitfires and Hurricanes balanced nicely with the Bf 109 for multiplayer, and if the Bf 109 has a cannon armament and the British planes don't, that could be a big problem.

Either way, remember that this is a flight sim, not a time machine. Shooting down He 111s over the channel isn't going to feel quite right, because you're sitting in a couch looking at at TV screen rather than flying the real thing. :D

Thanks for support - and you are right in most of your suggestions, including the one about time machine.
It is literally impossible to reproduce some of a differences between planes.
For example, in Mig plane, if plane goes to nose-diving canopy blocked, and pilot wasn't able to bail out, leading to death. That's why they flew with canopy opened, so the speed was lower, but it was safer, so texhnical limit wasn't achieved.
La-5 has an awful exhausting, and the temperature was 55-60 degrees (celsium) - making maneuvering harder for pilot. How it can be reproduced in the game?
I am not planes specialist, neither historical consultant, not British, and not responsible for planes in any aspect. Actually, I am not even PM of a project. But we are working with historical consultants, and if team have chosen one or other modification (even if it was actually unpopular, rare, or has some obvious disadvantages which were omitted) - than they had reasons for doing that.
The game, even flight sim game, is NOT encyclopedia by any means. It has to provide fun. If one plane is obviously 100% worser than all other planes in all realism settings and all multiplayer mode, controlling by AI or even novice players - than probably this plane should be replaced with its better modification, especially if we need this plane for specific campaign.

Even educational and documentary(!) films, have some certain mistakes, and nobody complains about that.
Most famous 'Battle for Britain' or 'Attack on Pearl Harbour', which are feature films, have a lot of mistakes - and still are great movies.

Sorry for being so lengthy, but it was one of our main headache - how much close to reality should we stay.
Sales and ratings willl show were we right :)

Well Marcho, as I'm sure you've read, we all care a great deal about the details. We don't need the Spits and Hurris balanced nicely with the BF109. That's Heroes Over Europe talk! :) Seriously tho, if they have all the little pros and cons they had in real life, the balance will be there.

Could anyone explain the difference between Cannons and Machine guns. Sorry i know this sounds quite naive, but honestly i don't know.

a cannon is 20mm or larger, a machine gun is 20mm or smaller

I'm sure glad I finally got my HDtv working with my Xbox yesterday!:)

The pictures are absolutely amazing. I love what you guys did with the ground details. Thank you guys very much for all of the hard work you put into this for us.

It is impossible to perfectly recreate the aircraft. Can't be done. Remember how few of these aircraft actually remain flyable in the world. Even if every developer had personally flown every Spitfire variant, they still couldn't program in every single variable in the world, because there are literally millions. Everything from weather to how a plane flies differently when its hydraulics are shot out in the left wing or something.

The best you can do is an approximation of reality. And since we all agree IL-2 BOP is a much, much closer approximation and more authentic combat flight sim than anything else out there, what's the problem? It's like complaining about a first person shooter because it doesn't look exactly like real life, even if this shooter still looks way better than all of the other ones.

Besides, the aircraft at many points weren't perfectly balanced in the actual conflict either.

Nobody wants to hear "Oh yeah, that Fw 190 can shoot down your Spitfire no problem because it could in real life for this brief period in 1942" or whatever to explain why one aircraft is overpowered in multiplayer. That's not a valid reason for unbalancing the game.

Hell, the fact that the multiplayer of any game will inevitably have internet lag alone makes it impossible to recreate real life flight characteristics, where there is no lag.

Anton explained it quite well, I think. As I said earlier, I think some of you are being unreasonably nitpicky about this.

While explosive bullets were developed for machine guns, all cannon shells were meant to explode. The hitting power was tremendous, as a cannon round would not merely penetrate and expend itself, it would detonate and take a piece of the target with it.

I dont know where i read it , but it said that a single burst of cannon fire from a ME109 could down a B17

Likely.
There is a statistics about WW2 planes available.
I don't remember exactly, but in average it took no more 2 bursts from less than 100 meters to get almost any plane (without heavy armour at least, such as IL-2) down.
The real problems were: accuracy of those bursts and get on a shooting distance without being shot.

As an illustration.
One day, someone (it was in Britain, afair) discovered, that most (almost all) planes were repaired from wins and (much less) fuselage damage.
Not pilot, wing control, or engine. Mostly - wings.
And they almost started a project of improving wings armour! Until someone, discovered, that all repaired planes were actually returned to base planes.

Good (short) burst from even machine guns from small distance to plane's engine or pilot - very likely will destroy plane.
If it is cannon - you can destroy even wing (not talking that distance increasing).

The Me109E relied heavily on its cannon armament, 2 x 20mm cannon in each wing, secondary armament was 2 x 7.92mm machine guns above the engine. The ammunition for the 109E's cannons was limited to only 60 rounds per gun - so the pilot needed to be accurate to make his rounds count, obviously a hit by a cannon shell was more devastating than the .303 browning bullet fired by the 8-gun spits and hurricanes, but the respective total armaments of the 109 and the Spit pretty much balanced each other at the time.

Anton, I don't want to labour this point for much longer as I very much respect the work you and your colleagues have put in bringing this sim to the console market , and believe you me I'll be spending many as many hours in the Fw-190 as the Spitfire variants, but is there any chance of the Spit Mk1 being added as a DLC in the future ? A Battle of Britain campaign really needs the right key aircraft ;)

It is possible. :)

Good stuff, I'll take that as a glimmer of hope

thankyou ;)

Thanks, Anton. I can understand, from a gaming standpoint, the choices you have made. However, I agree with Skii. I would like the option of flying the correct period aircraft.

A Spitfire Mk I and Hurricane Mk I would be very welcome, either in an expansion pack or as DLC.

The armaments themselves weren't exactly balanced, as you say, the cannons had very little ammunition. It might give the Bf 109 an advantage against the first fighter that it shoots at, but as soon as they run out of those 120 rounds, they'd be at a pretty big disadvantage against further aircraft with only 2 small machine guns.

If their positions had been reversed, imagine how long it would have taken Bf 109s with no cannon ammo left to shoot down even small bombers like the He 111, with only the two small machine guns.

Then again, they had some other advantages, like the fuel injecting and what not. My point is that not all of these factors can be represented accurately in a game.

yep gran turismo graphics

I understand what you are saying Anton, and I am not trying to be negative, as I understand that both the spit and hurricane models in game came during the latter half of the BoB. However, having the correct models would really make this game that much more realistic; i mean, it is a simulation ;)
On the other hand, as you said, the historical consultants must have had a reason for including whatever models they did. In my opinion, they just used the existing models from il-2 1946 but correct me if I am wrong :grin:

At the end of the day, i know you will do a superb job, but I just wanted to bring this to your attention. Maybe you could include the earlier model spit and hurris in a seperate dowload pack...although this would be a lot of work.

Sorry if I sound negative, really I am not. I just find that when doing a simulation, everything needs to be as realistic as possible. I would like to add that if you included the correct BoB skins for these aircraft, then that in my opinion would make this game something special. The skins that I have seen have been from the later period after the battle of britain, and so aren't historically correct. Such a change could have a dramatic effect ;)

The 109's had a stupid amount of ammo in their machine guns. They had a minutes worth or so. In my opinion, they could just spray and pray a bomber like this or-if they were good shots-focus it all on the engines ;)

Good news ;) thanks for reading my comments. I really respect that.

Spray and praying with 2 small caliber machine guns just isn't the same as spraying and praying with 8, like the Hurricane or Spitfire.

The original IL-2 for PC game out over eight years ago, the graphical fidelity on the aircraft models is much, much worse than what we've seen from BOP so far.

Look at these screens for example: the first one from IL-2 1946

http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/arti...5030440333.jpg

It's an La-5 or La-7, right. Here's the closest BOP counterpart I could find.

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images..._screen003.jpg

Note the low resolution textures and low polygon model of the IL-2 1946 model, it looks horrible when compared to the high quality BOP model/texture. Notice how much more detail there is with things like the exhaust of the engine leaving a mark on the fuselage, and weathering of the wings. Really no aspect of the game's visuals can be compared fairly to an eight year old game.

Also, wasn't the original IL-2 made by a completely different developer? I don't know if 1C has the rights to assets made for that game.

About your suggestions overall, the reason I don't think they're that useful is because making new aircraft variants with different armaments, different textures, is a TON of work and expense, and to be entirely honest, completely unnecessary expense and work at that. Developers don't have unlimited time and money. They decided to make a model/texture of this Spitfire with this paint scheme and that armament, they aren't exactly going to make another one just because a few people would kind of like it.

Considering how few quality combat flight sims there are (I can't think of ANY other than the original IL-2, so less than 2 in 10 years including this game), it's not as if there are other games doing more than IL2 BOP or something. There aren't any other games anything like it in development at this moment, at least that we've heard about.

looks so good, if its not edited, or high rest better than in the game

Wow i never even thought to compare the two, thats quite a significant difference between the two and it really shows off how far the IL-2 brand has come

Thanks for that

I don't understand why they would bother trying to depict period specific battles if they don't care about the period specific planes? They've obviously made a mistake or they're holding the correct planes ransom as DLC content.

It's unfortunate either way...

What, one of the developers himself telling you exactly why they chose the plane models isn't enough? They said they have to choose a balance between historical accuracy and gameplay.

The game is neither an encyclopedia or a time machine. I have no clue why some of you continue to not grasp this simple fact.

Yes, I'm sure they accidentally made the wrong variant of Spitfire, wasting dozens of hours of work and thousands of dollars because they didn't check the Wikipedia article carefully enough.

/sarcasm

Oh, and didn't Anton just say why they chose the variants? I thought so.

Perhaps for you it is. If technicalities this minor disturb you this much, I shudder to think of how constantly angry you must be at the world in general :D

bf109 G6/U4 = 30mm cannon in nose of the plane which = Amazing accuracy as apposed to leveling up wing cannons for the perfect shot.

Please tell me anton that the BF109G6 with the cannon in the engine is in the game !

Marchochias, give it a rest.

You are wrong :)

Haha! ;)

That's what I said, only with pretty pictures haha. :D

About planes (Spitfire and Hurricane).
I've asked our planes art-director.

The game has:
Hurricane Mk.IIb, Spitfire Mk.II, Mk.IX, Mk.XVI.

Spitfire Mk.II has NOT authentic camouflage (skin). The skin it has was used later, not during Battle for Britain.
The reason was the following:
In the begining of the game (Battle for Britain is the first chapter), we wanted to provide more differences for a new plane. The original skin was too close to Hurricane's, so the casual player probably wouldn't recognise, that he is now flying on a different plane (especially in arcade mode, where flight model is more forgiving).
The game appeals to both broad and hardcore audience. However, we were not able to make two assets for a game - we had limited resources.

I hope, that answers questions.

Good! :grin:

However, I still think that having the 100% correct aircraft would make this game that much more better.

Thanks for the info Anton. Would it be possible to have the correct skins available in a download pack in the same way that you can get character skins for Little Big Planet? ;)

Not the same way, of course.
But game is supporting DLC.

OK, so it is an option...? :grin:

The DLC releases and DLC release schedule will depend on how game performs and our publisher. Not only on us.

OK, thanks for being so helpful. :grin:

in-game but..
 

those screens sure look awesome!
I'm afraid tho, that they are being rendered with higher quality settings than we'll see during actual play.
probably the texture resolution, texturefiltering, the antialiasing and the plane models have the highest LOD in these screenshots.

like this screen from Halo3
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gal...lo3coop/01.jpg
If you played Halo3 you that it does not look that good during play

I hope BoP have some antialiasing on the planes during play, but dont think the xbox/ PS3 are very good at that

These are new pics for me. Looks absolutely stunning again for me! :)

Ok these pics look amazing cant wait for the realese!

Very nice find thanks for posting.

I can't believe we find these pics on other sites and they are not even on the main website. Thats how I would like to see them. Visit IL2game.com and see the pictures there. It gives us reasons to keep going back to the site.:-P

as an aside to the spit/hurricane mk1 argument, i see on the website that they have listed the battle of britain as running through to may '41, which may explain why they chose the mkII variants of those 2 a/c.

i must admit to feeling a little disappointed, especially as the 109 seems to be appearing in at least its e and f variants, but at the end of the day it shouldnt really make too much difference. i see the meat and potatos of this game being more centered around the later stages of the european air war, and in mp you simply wont survive in a mk1 hurricane anyway!

Screenshots of Halo 3 are taken in Theatre mode, which adds ridiculous amounts of anti aliasing, bumps the resolution up hugely, and just generally makes it look way, way better than the actual game does.

Halo 3 itself has 0 anti aliasing at all. One of the reasons why the game looks so sub-par.

Didn't Anton say in another thread that the 360 version has at least 2x (think it was 4x) and that the PS3 version has Quincunx type anti aliasing?

Tons of 360 and PS3 games have anti aliasing. Halo 3 is one of the few popular games to not have it.

Ah, excellent! Judging from the screenies this game will be one of the best looking games ever! can't belive how nice that mustang is looking...

I think this Il2 is gonna be a step forward in console simulation no matter how many planes they deliver in the final version.
I saw the aviator joystick for xbox 360 and ps3 at some shopping centers shelves, I think that is a good sign.