I have it on good authority that all production of the game has been held up while they try to fix a bug in which the farmers that bail you up with pitch-forks and the civilians that offer you cigarettes keep getting stuck in behaviour loops, not allowing you to race off to the pub at all. Most frustrating. But I've been assured that when you include a hip-flask in your pilot's load-out you can still get pissed on the spot anyway, so not to worry.
Incidentally, along those lines, I still haven't been able to convince Oleg to allow pre or in-flight drinking from said flask, but I suspect he's just holding out so he can include it as a new feature in the Eastern Front expansion. I know for a fact they've got all the game mechanics worked out for it, blurred vision and altered responsiveness of the controls etc. There's even a part of the campaign where your drinking gets out of control and you're grounded until you straighten out, then, ironically, later on in the campaign when you've become flight leader you have to discipline your wingman for doing the same thing, after one unfortunate incident too many, shooting up friendly ground-targets I believe.
Anyway, to sum up, yes, on-ground collision detection has been written into the game engine, but won't be included in the initial release and neither will be the realism setting whereby you must control your pilots level of sobriety. Technically though, the drunken pilot thing has been in Il-2 from the start, but people just assumed when the pilots and crew bailed out and ran for a while before keeling over it was out of a sense of relief or self-preservation. No, they're just too pissed to go any further. But Oleg and the crew had to cut out the pre and in-flight drinking animations to keep the game's PG rating, and the old Il-2 engine wasn't really up to giving you the necessary level of realistic drinking control anyway, and you know what Oleg's like, if the feature can't be done properly, it gets ditched.
Cheers.
