What’s in store for the New Year?

[Jaegermeister]

Now that Christmas is over, what does the future hold for us as far as fighter combat over Western Europe in IL2 Great Battles?

 

To back up a little bit, I gave away lots of nice stuff over the Holidays. My daughter got an iPhone 11, and my son got my old Oculus Rift R7 that will run on his laptop. I bought him an Oculus S, but there is no DisplayPort on his computer, so he couldn’t get it to work. I tried to set it up on my tired 10 year old computer that has been upgraded as far as it would go. USB 3 was brand new back then and it was a little lacking in bandwidth to get the Rift S to run right. No joy there so what am I going to do? I really can’t bring myself to fly on a flat screen anymore. I thought about it over the Christmas holiday and decided a new flight simulator upgrade was in order. I am working on a campaign, Battle of Normandy is on the not so distant horizon, and times have never been better to be a virtual World War II fighter jock.

 

So I hit the internet and did some research. How could I upgrade my existing setup without breaking the bank and going broke. All the peripherals were good, but the real problem was the motherboard, CPU, and maybe some other key ingredients. Enter the AMD Ryzen CPU with its 8 cores, and the B450 chip on an A4 motherboard. That also meant I had to upgrade my ram to DDR4 and let me put in a M.2 SSD Hard Drive. I already had a Radeon RX 5700 8GB video card so that was it. A quick swap for under $800 and I had a blazing fast game rig to run my Rift S.

 

Fast forward a few days and it’s a cloudy overcast day just before New Years in the Southeastern US. I’m sitting in my chair in relative comfort, flying over some obscure part of Belgium in close formation with 11 other roaring twin engined fighters. It’s cloudy and overcast there too, and as I bumped the throttle and made minute trim adjustments, it occurred to me that my family and friends had no idea why I spent the holidays rebuilding my computer and crawling around under the desk. We were on the run in to the target area, and the scattered clouds were ripping past at 70 FPS as the droplets of condensation streamed away on either side. No more struggling to stay at 40 FPS over Cologne, and the steam cloud from the train ahead was getting closer by the second as I turned the dial and set the rockets to salvo in pairs.

 

I think it’s going to be a good year to be a virtual pilot, and try to stay ahead of the learning curve. We have lots of material to cover in the Rheinland, and Normandy is going to be rough for the fighter bomber boys hopping the hedgerows. I can’t wait to see what’s coming so you guys (and girls) get ready! I’ll be picking up my copy of BoN as soon as I recover from this latest round of keeping up with the Virtual Jones’.

 

My new system specs are listed below, and believe me, it was worth it. Happy New Year!

 

 

Edited December 30, 2019 by Jaegermeister