Dear Friends,

Today we'd like to start this dev blog in an unusual way - with a retrospective. Over the years of work on IL-2 Great Battles we have created many aircraft, and for each of them we could write a whole article about how we searched for information, solved contradictions in documentation and drawings, built a visual model and designed a physical model and FM. But sometimes you can just show it - as they say, sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

With studio-quality lighting, rather than a real-time renderer, you can really see how much work and love went into recreating each of our aircraft. The Hawker Hurricane Mk.II, a collector's aircraft we built three and a half years ago, is still a model of excellence in both visual modeling and physical model perfection.

As for the latest news, the new update 5.204 will be released soon, in two weeks; its testing is almost finished. It will include the new Ta 152 H-1 Collector Plane from the end of the war, which we described in detail in Dev Blog #358, as well as a number of important improvements and changes.

Modern controllers have many buttons and encoders, and their total number may exceed the limit of 64 buttons or axes if multiple devices are connected at the same time. Therefore, to support such configurations, the maximum number of buttons supported by the game will be increased to 128.

Several bugs in the career mode will also be fixed, such as friendly aircraft attacking the player group, and a new type of combat sortie will be added for the Luftwaffe on the Western Front - covering the takeoff and landing of the jet aircraft. Since Allied piston fighters usually could not catch up with them in the air, they used the tactic of shooting them down on takeoff when they had not yet gained much speed, or on landing when they had already dropped it. To protect the jet-powered Me 262s and Ar 234s from such attacks, they were covered near the airfield by German piston fighters, including Ta 152s.