What Are Some of the Amazing Details You've Noticed?

[CUJO_1970]

OK, curious about some of the cool details you've been surprised with while flying? For me:

 

1. I shot up a IL/2, the pilot bailed out at low level - when the plane belly landed, the force of the impact caused the canopy to slam shut.

2. Speaking of the above experience, I love that planes don't alway explode when they hit the ground - sometimes they flip and roll and things break off, but they don't alway simply explode and I think that is awesome.

3. I shot up the engine in an He-111 while flying the MiG. The engine smoked and ran badly but right before it died it backfired and kicked out a big cloud of smoke and flame from the exhaust.

4. I love that they shoot flares at dusk and light bonfires along the runway to guide you home.

5. I shot up a Yak and it caught fire - the pilot bailed out and the Yak continued to burn on the way down - before it hit the ground it exploded in a huge fireball.

6. Friendly AAA will fire flares at you so you don't attack them

7. I shot a LaGG in the wing - after about 3-4 seconds some of the wing skin blew off and one of the landing gear dropped down and was torn off by the slip-stream.

8. The torque effect of a badly damaged engine will shake the place violently as it sputters on and off.

9. Fuel tanks and ammunition bays must be hit very precisely, but when they are, they will explode - I was shocked to see an IL-2 ammo bay blow up.

10. I was hit by AAA while flying the FW190 online - the wing initially bent, but gradually folded up and broke off.

 

What are some off the cool little details you've noticed?

[keeno]

CUJO,

 

I flew a mission the other day in campaign mode, the mission brief stipulated as flight leader to watch the fuel gauge. As I got back to base I was running on empty, as I got towards setting up for landing the automatic request for landing clearance was denied as the runway was busy. I was stunned to look down on my approach to see 2 i-16's with lights on waiting to take off. After what seemed like an age they got clearance to take off and I finally got in before I ran out of fuel. That was a really immersive, nicely detailed touch.

 

I too had my first explosive kill the other day too, I was below and behind a 110 in my yak and I managed to get a really nice hit right between his wings on the underside and BOOM! he exploded into pieces and I flew through the blast with my cockpit lighting up a bright orange in the evening sun, simply stunning!

 

Cheers

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

Too many to list, but I also can't remember most of them

 

One that comes to mind is an La-5 intercept on four Ju-88. After too close of a shave, I had my engine hit multiple times and lo and behold it caught fire. It wasn't your regular garden variety matchstick flame - the whole nose, cockpit and most of the aircraft were suddenly engulfed by flames, making for a very desperate scene. I already counted myself as a goner and opened the cockpit to jump when, after two seconds,  the flames suddenly died off leaving only a thick trail of smoke from my plane. Fortunately I was over my airfield and brought the plane down, but those were some very thrilling seconds.

 

Today flying on DED server a damaged Yak-1 landed the shortest way around (against the traffic) and came to a stop right by the end of the runway. A Pe-2 which was on final corrected its approach to touch down a little beyond it. As it came close, the Yak-1 pilot shot up a green flare to salute the Peshka and the Peshka pilot shot up a green one in reply as well. That felt nice.

 

The friendly positions firing flares to signal their presence are a favourite of mine as well.

[seafireliv]

1. I like the detail of the grass, no seriously, especially the way the prop wash blows it about.

2. I crash landed near a train rail line of the train I was trying to destroy. I heard it arrive and pass me by- Wow the detail of that was amazing.

3. Had my canopy open and dived- The canopy slammed shut. Nice touch.

4. I like the way oil on my screen gets progressivley worse until I have to open the canopy and fly by looking out. Lovely.

5. I absolutely love the flares, crossed torch beams and burning fire at night when landing. Adds a very Human touch. Need more of that.

6. Crashing into trees and feeling my aircraft tumble through the branches to the ground- and surviving it.

7. Suffering g-forces and hearing my pilot start puffing due to the stress.

8. Watching a replay of a battle where I was shooting at an enemy pilot, bullet tracer hitting around the cockpit, he suddenly slumps down in the cockpit and the plane goes into a death spiral.

9. The pilot movement in the cockpit is very nice. Adds an organic feel to the aircraft.

10. Stalingrad looks pretty good, with the random explosions and fires of the oild tanks, though I`d like to see more dense smoke and some of the river near the tanks should be on fire too.

11. Starting the engine from standing, watching the burst of fire as the engine starts. Love it.

12. Hearing the radio crackle with that `noise` that the old radios would make if you got too close to them. Nice authentic touch. Reminds me of an  old big radio thing my Dad had when I was younger.(No I`m not that old).

Edited June 5, 2016 by seafireliv

[Monostripezebra]

just the little crash physics details..

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ycXaUW6DFE

[No601_Swallow]

And the award for landing of the year goes to...  

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

One thing this sim beats any other is in the sound.

 

It feels so real and intense, and each aircraft has its own quirks. The LaGG-3 for example is quiet overall, has a low pitched roar at low rotations and then gets loud once you open the canopy.

 

The MiG-3 however is deafening even at nominal power, and it gets even louder when boosted. Sometimes you can't feel the difference between a closed and open canopy when flying it.

 

The gun sounds and tracers are very well made, also. You really do fight like those gun cam shots, firing early on and dragging the tracers ro the enemy in snaking bursts.

[coconut]

You can use roads to land a damaged plane with landing gear out. If you decide to go for the safer belly landing, the sound of your plane grinding against the road is the one you would expect, and it's different from the sound of a belly landing in the grass. It also takes longer to stop.

[Hoots]

Cut it too fine attacking a ship and caught the prop in the rigging but it turned out only one blade was damaged and bent back. Amazing collision detection.

[Guest deleted@50488]

The Moon phases and rise/set times and overall ephemeris - according to date - any date and time, tested up to May 2016 :-)

 

Weather modeling. I know the variables we can adjust are just a few, even when using the Mission Editor, but the effects, visually and aerodynamically are simply great - turbulence and shear...

 

And, of course, the Flight Dynamics and overall physics modelling which is for me simply the Best among all flight simulators I have ever used !

Edited June 6, 2016 by jcomm

[BlitzPig_EL]

I'm always amazed by the secondary explosions when attacking vehicles.  

 

You can get kill credit long after you have flown away from a column that you attacked.

[Dutchvdm]

I'm always amazed by the secondary explosions when attacking vehicles.  

 

You can get kill credit long after you have flown away from a column that you attacked.

 

That's true. A near miss from a bomb can still destroy a truck. Even nicer is the way the locomotive comes to an end. Exploding after you punctured holes in the boiler. 

[KoN_]

I was hunting for a train the other night as i flew over the railway tracks at tree top level ,  i heard the train whistle go ..!!

Also vehicles scatter off roads when a passing aircraft comes into view . 

[Nocke]

Already wrote this somewhere before, but it just fits too well here:

Once I saw how a locomotive was hit in the boiler. It did not simply explode, as it would have done in former times and games, but I saw steam streaming out of a hole produced by the bullet,

then the train slowing down and coming to a halt because of thre pressure loss. Martijnvdm wrote above about an exploding locomotive after beeing hit in the boiler, so there seems to be a variety of hit scenarios even for locomotives, perhaps depending on the number of hits, or calibre? This one did not explode, at least for several minutes.

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

Was it the locomotive Peterla filled with holes?

 

To add to locomotive variety, on Friday I was attacking a locomotive with Pod and despite it being hit by 20mm and 12.7mm rounds and visibly leaking steam, the train still kept going until we came back to dish out some 23mm cannon fun into it.

[KoN_]

Already wrote this somewhere before, but it just fits too well here:

Once I saw how a locomotive was hit in the boiler. It did not simply explode, as it would have done in former times and games, but I saw steam streaming out of a hole produced by the bullet,

then the train slowing down and coming to a halt because of thre pressure loss. Martijnvdm wrote above about an exploding locomotive after beeing hit in the boiler, so there seems to be a variety of hit scenarios even for locomotives, perhaps depending on the number of hits, or calibre? This one did not explode, at least for several minutes.

Also this was in Rise of Flight . 

[reddog=11blueleader*]

Soooooo many to list but I love the weather engine, with soft clouds.

[unreasonable]

I find the shock-waves effect from explosions on the ground to be compelling, something I do not remember seeing in any other game which usually just have the flash and smoke effect.

 

It does look just like the old footage of bombing runs.

[Jade_Monkey]

The variety of airfield types in the BOM map is pretty nice.

 

I haven't had much time to explore but some airfield designs are really cool:

 

[CF-105]

Trying to kill a P-40 in a stock Macchi, whittling away at its wing until I finally detonated its wing tank (this was also before exploding ammo was implemented).

 

Vehicles have headlights at night, and shut them off when you attack.

 

Sometimes, when you attempt a gear-down landing on rough terrain, you can break a wheel off of the gear, without collapsing the gear, leaving the wheel to bounce far away form you.  Reminds me of footage of the rougher carrier landings.

 

I haven't confirmed if this is the case, but the P-40 must have individual cables for the left and right ailerons, you can have one side jammed, with the other one still working, unlike other aircraft.  It makes the P-40 quite easy to fly with 1.5 wings.     Another detail I like very much in the game!

 

Soft landing on ice = Tokyo Drift, aviation style.  Hard landing on ice = a very cold bath! (you break the ice, then sink into it)

Touch down on water at high speed and you'll just bounce off, though its possible to briefly turn the Macchi into a 450 Km/h speedboat!  I call it.....  hydro-plane-ing.  

Edited June 7, 2016 by CF-105

[CUJO_1970]

I literally blew some dudes canopy off his Yak this morning. Looked like he was bailing out. Nope, just shot the entire canopy off.

[LLv24_Zami]

I literally blew some dudes canopy off his

Yak this morning. Looked like he was bailing out. Nope, just shot the entire canopy off.

Nice!

I didn't realize that can even happen.

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

I've been on the receiving end of that, it's intense to say the least.

 

Today I had a very nice campaign mission on the MiG-3 - I went up in a pair to intercept enemy bombers. The ground control did not spot them, but thankfully I eyeballed them on time. They had three He-111, covered by four Bf-109F. No big deal though, this is 6 IAK-PVO and we fear nothing! I told my wingman to cover me and went right for the bombers, shooting up a He-111 at close range. Full power, zoom climb. The four Bf-109s were catching up but I had a decent opening. Meanwhile, after distracting the whole enemy escort flight my sneaky wingman turned around and instead made a fast attack at the second He-111! That beautiful bastard, he smoked the Heinkel very nicely. I took the chance, and dove with the engine boosted, looking to finish the affair before the 109s closed in. Thankfully it worked - the n.2 in the formation my wingman damaged started a desperate dive and dropped all its bombs. With momentum from it, I similarly ripped apart the formation leader who also disengaged. Now I could go home calmly, so I set course 120 and proceeded to Kubinka at nominal power. The enemy escorts of course did not agree with that, and followed closely. I knew they could catch up eventually, but I ran a little until I saw five aircraft, meaning my wingman was nearby to help. I then started a zoom climb boosting the engine, taking two meaningless hits from a Bf-109, and dove behind one of them. I missed, but it scared it off for a bit. Realising the odds were against me I figured I had to get out of there so I dove 4000m down into the cloud cover. I felt bad for my wingman, of course. I lost an aileron in the process, but the clouds discouraged my pursuers from coming at me. I found the airfield, overwhelmed with guilt, when I see something popping out of the cloud and then out of nowhere the radio opens up - "Gannet 2, requesting approach!" We'd made it, alive! And it turns out those two Heinkels crashed, so our pair really did deal a lot of damage.

[Major_Hero]

Great reiteration of the engagement. This sim gives you a great feeling whilst flying a mission

[LLv24_Zami]

Yes, Lucas writes good stories about his missions. Nice reading!

 

Reminds me a lot of my own missions, there really have been many good moments in those. I'm just too lazy to

write about them

 

Normally just bad experiences are told on forums so I'm glad to read good ones.

[Rjel]

I'm impressed with how much further I slide on snow cover frozen rivers as opposed to crashlanding on bare ground.

 

 

[AndyJWest]

For me it's not so much the individual details as the way they run together to give a convincing narrative. I was online earlier today, demonstrating my usual ineptness as I sprayed MG and cannon fire everywhere but at the enemy, and fought a losing battle with planet Earth, which kept getting in my way at the most inopportune moments.   Anyway, one of my more successful outings with the FW 190 resulted in a rare win from a head-on encounter, leaving me with a wing looking like a colander and an engine throwing oil - not good, but better than the Yak that had come the other way, which was now a smoking crater. 'Time to head home', I thought, as I throttled back in the hope of at least keeping the engine running. Which it did, though it clearly wasn't happy. And the oil wasn't actually that bad, I even had some sort of forward view past the bullet hole in the armoured glass. The airfield wasn't far and I was soon on the downwind leg of the circuit. I dropped the gear - green lights, good - and then the flaps. All going swimmingly until the last few metres, as I straightened out from my curved 'keep the runway in sight' approach. At which point, the oiled-up windscreen hid the runway entirely. Not good. Trying to flare with limited visual cues didn't work out too well, and I hit hard. And bounced. And recovered control enough to actually land back on the runway in something approximating a reasonable touchdown. Except that the left landing gear had either been hit by gunfire, or the initial impact with the runway had weakened it. Or possibly both. Either way, it wasn't going to hold the wing up, and I slithered to an ungainly halt on one wheel and a wingtip. Alive, but now occupying something that was probably only fit for converting back to saucepans. A convincing narrative...

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

Glad you enjoyed it, Hero and Zami

 

To be honest I see a lot of negative stuff thrown at it but so far the missions have been nothing but enjoyable. Things get fun once you stop thinking about features and just fly the mission - up there with the sun and clouds you really get a sense of being in the cockpit, and the action represents that.

 

I've also come up with my own definition of a career without any add-ons: when using the official skins, I count them as aircraft in the regiment. If I get killed, shot down away from base or wreck the aircraft in any other creative way, that's it. After that comes a flight or two in the default skin to represent picking whatever is airworthy, then moving to the next one. Might sound silly at first but it really makes you work to bring the crate home. I'm at the black-striped MiG-3, my second since starting this, and still mourning my first MiG, the really cool black-nosed one which I lost due to dweebery in a Pe-2 escort 

[Guest deleted@50488]

I keep reading all of these really tempting "tales"  from you SP missions and since I almost never started SP in il2 ( or any other combat sim ), I feel that I really need to give it a GO. The same applies to Rise of Flight, where I have a lot of stuff, bought in promotional sales and including all of the maps, but never even started any career...

[Dakpilot]

Not really a small detail, but just finished playing one of Juri_JS excellent IL-2 missions 

 

http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/19048-sturmoviks-over-stalingrad-mission-pack/

 

It was the Bridge attack one, having updated drivers  I flew the whole mission as rear gunner just to see how things looked

 

Quite a change of pace, but I really enjoyed it, the 12 ship formation completed the mission successfully,  and the view out the back was great, Stalingrad summer in 4K is quite stunning 

 

May not be for everyone but worth a try, there are however  some great user made SP missions/campaigns that are really worth trying, whichever way you choose to fly

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[beepee]

Another couple of cool sound features...

 

Being on the ground near a village and hearing all the dogs barking.

 

Or being on the ground (call me Sir-ditch-a-lot),  and hearing exchanges of canon / AAA / machine-gun fire from the ground forces..

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

I keep reading all of these really tempting "tales"  from you SP missions and since I almost never started SP in il2 ( or any other combat sim ), I feel that I really need to give it a GO. The same applies to Rise of Flight, where I have a lot of stuff, bought in promotional sales and including all of the maps, but never even started any career...

 

Try it out, you might just enjoy it Considering you don't have the 'vices' from previous Campaign modes in other simulators your experience is likely to be positive because then you will be open to what they're presenting here, instead of hoping for a '2.0' of older titles.

[mort]

Not really a small detail, but just finished playing one of Juri_JS excellent IL-2 missions

 

http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/19048-sturmoviks-over-stalingrad-mission-pack/

 

It was the Bridge attack one, having updated drivers I flew the whole mission as rear gunner just to see how things looked

 

I would never have thought to try that but definitely will now. Sounds like something one could do while enjoying a beer.

[dingdingchavez]

http://webmshare.com/play/qAoVQ

[smink1701]

The variety of airfield types in the BOM map is pretty nice.

 

I haven't had much time to explore but some airfield designs are really cool:

 

They are missing parked planes

[Dakpilot]

They are missing parked planes

 

While that may be true, it is up to the individual mission design to place parked aircraft or even trucks etc. having every Airfield on the map fully pre populated adds a lot of resources, which would have to be taken into account 

 

But it is true in general that a bit more "population" at all airfields would improve immersion in many (default) SP missions. Some of the user made missions have very nicely created airfields

 

You get one virtual demerritt point for being the first to point out something negative in this thread LoL      (humour)

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[216th_Lucas_From_Hell]

One more, from yesterday. At the end of an excellent LaGG-3 sortie with Manu where he shot down a Bf-110 and damaged another, and we bombed and strafed an enemy AT gun battery, we spotted a Fw-190 low some 3km off our base. We dove to get speed and tried to bait him to turn against one of us so that the other would get a shot but no joy. As the speed from my dive started to wear off and the enemy started extending in a straight line I lifted the nose and attempted a burst. Missed, shots fell right beneath him. A little correction, squeeze the trigger and... boom! I'm guessing I hit the 20mm stores in the wings because the whole thing snapped off clean, sending the Fw-190 into the woods.

 

That felt good

[KpgQuop]

On the subject of populating locations such as airfields, did you know you can merge "blocks" in the mission editor to make bigger, more complex buildings, as in the screenshots below?

I'm new to mission-making but it seems you can introduce some of your own details via this route.

 

Edited June 10, 2016 by KpgQuop

[No601_Swallow]

On the subject of populating locations such as airfields, did you know you can merge "blocks" in the mission editor to make bigger, more complex buildings, as in the screenshots below?

I'm new to mission-making but it seems you can introduce some of your own details via this route.

 

 

Yep! It's completely up to the mission maker.

 

In fact, this is the first sim in which some ground objects come complete with accompanying moving humans. Admittedly the moving humans end up looking a bit like zombies-on-the-steppe, but it's still a bit of a step forward for sims. I liked one of the "campaign" scripted missions in which, having flown victorious back to base, I had to wait in the circuit for a flight of two 109s to finish taxiing to the runway and take off before I could finally turn onto finals and use the runway myself. This kind of thing is routine to set up in the ME, but apart from - I think - DCS, I can't think of another sim's FMB where you can do this (and don't NOBODY mention CloD's scripting! Grrrr!).

[seafireliv]

Yep! It's completely up to the mission maker.

 

In fact, this is the first sim in which some ground objects come complete with accompanying moving humans. Admittedly the moving humans end up looking a bit like zombies-on-the-steppe, but it's still a bit of a step forward for sims. I liked one of the "campaign" scripted missions in which, having flown victorious back to base, I had to wait in the circuit for a flight of two 109s to finish taxiing to the runway and take off before I could finally turn onto finals and use the runway myself. This kind of thing is routine to set up in the ME, but apart from - I think - DCS, I can't think of another sim's FMB where you can do this (and don't NOBODY mention CloD's scripting! Grrrr!).

 

Personally, I`m very disappointed with the moving Humans. It was actually a small selling point when I heard about, but I`ve seen little more than a ghost town.

 

After playing Grand Prix racers where you can have a whole pit team working feverishly around you, I was hoping for something at least half-similar in this sim- Guess I hoped for too much.