What improvements would you want to see in GBs?

[Enceladus828]

First of all, there are a number of things that just will never be in the Great Battles series and would take up a lot of work that is just not worth it right now, especially if these will be implemented in the Korea engine.

Examples:

- Drop Tanks -- after 2 development cycles of trying to implement them they were never in a presentable state/worked as intended.

- Parachuting into water will always be fatal -- Han told me via a PM years back that this could only be resolved by implementing a swimming model. Making it so that the pilot just didn't die in that situation would require many changes elsewhere that a swimming model would be the best option.

- Requesting help from your wingmen and being warned of enemy planes -- would require a major AI revision that's not worth it.

 

Anyway, some fixes/improvements that are still possible for the GBs engine:

1. AI planes have very precise onboard radar and or real-time tracking of you -- I've brought this up before but after bombing an airbase and are 5 miles from the nearest enemy plane, all of them will swarm on you after the last of your wingmen have been shot down and persistently follow you as if taking you down was far more important than some planes at the very least defending the base from a possible second attack. Even if you are 100 feet above the water, enemy planes at 8,000 feet will abandon their intended mission and descend down to take you down.

2. How a pilot and crew absorbs energy during a collision -- e.g. a wing clips a tree -- needs to be relaxed. Yes, this is not a crash physics simulator where trees, buildings, and other objects also have accurate damage models, it's just that I've done tests where at 80km/h my bomber's wingtip clipped a tree or pole and everybody was killed during the ground loop despite the plane remaining intact and upright. In another case I taxied my Pe-2 into a revetment at 30km/h and all 3 crew including the rear gunner who would have absorbed the least of the energy sustained by the impact were killed instantly. These objects are obviously near-indestructible in the game and the DM cannot be adjusted so that the wing snaps off during a collision but what can happen is that the pilot and crew are made to be able to sustain some more energy. In the link provided the Md-81 was a quality over quantity production but it flew through a forest which ripped off the right wing, plowed hard into the ground and the fuselage broke into 3 sections yet all 129 people onboard survived.

Even during World War 2, Unteroffizier Heinrich Rosner sliced off the cockpit of a B-24 with his Bf-109 and then slammed into another B-24 and was able to survive the whole thing. 

[R33GZ]

Flyable B-25/B-26

[Skycat1969]

Your comment about the AI sums up my thoughts about the single-player experience.

 

Drop tanks are a low priority to me unless the Normandy and Bodenplatte maps get merged. I doubt a merge will ever happen, but the work already done for the 1918 maps make it seem at least technically possible to bridge the WWII maps.

 

 

[sevenless]

Rework the Bodenplatte map on base of the FC assets released recently. That'll be great! Ugra did a great job on the FC maps.

[Kubert]

I would like to see CPU usage modernized. So that the game could utilize the full potential of modern systems. Imagine a campaign from BlackSix or Jaegermeister without object limits due to an outdated engine. Full skies, a frontline full of activity everywhere and buttery smooth gameplay without performance drop.

Edited Friday at 09:24 PM by Kubert

[LukeFF]

Guys, these suggestions are all well and good, but the fact is that the Great Battles engine is what it is and isn't going to receive any significant updates at this point in its life cycle.

[GOA_AveFenix506*VR*]

Bf 109 - G10 .. and i'm done.. 😄

[ITAF_Rani]

10 hours ago, LukeFF said:

Guys, these suggestions are all well and good, but the fact is that the Great Battles engine is what it is and isn't going to receive any significant updates at this point in its life cycle.

Hope new Korea engine will revamp IL2 WW2 contest...

[BMA_FlyingShark]

More radio navigation options like the possibility to choose what base you get guided to, control over course setters.

 

 

Have a nice day.

 

[FuriousMeow]

On 11/14/2025 at 4:24 PM, Kubert said:

I would like to see CPU usage modernized. So that the game could utilize the full potential of modern systems. Imagine a campaign from BlackSix or Jaegermeister without object limits due to an outdated engine. Full skies, a frontline full of activity everywhere and buttery smooth gameplay without performance drop.

 

That's not going to happen. The cpu usage isn't the issue, there isn't something missing in utilization that will process the calculations any faster. And that's why to get more planes in the skies in Korea the bombers are getting simplified FMs when in large groups as it's the amount of FM calculations that's the cause and not CPU.

 

If it were the CPUs just going from a Zen1 CPU to a a 9800x3d Zen5 would allow significantly more planes in the air but that isn't the case.

 

Its the amount of calculations and the requirement they be done in order with accordance to the overall game loop.

[Milktoast770]

As a noob to both VR and this game,I'd like to see smaller / less info on the plane icons. If I turn them off I struggle to identify aircraft, but if I leave them on I don't need huge icons with names, aircraft, and distance etc.

I've checked out the mods section but the the icon ones don't seem to be available any more. 

[Kubert]

8 hours ago, FuriousMeow said:

 

Its the amount of calculations and the requirement they be done in order with accordance to the overall game loop

But , these calculations are done by the CPU. I monitored it via MSI Afterburner and most of the 16 displayed cores of my Ryzen 7 x9800 were doing almost nothing. Above the busy front line, it didn't change, only the game started to stutter. From this I understand that the game is far from using the full potential of modern hardware. It's not that my CPU is used at 100%.

[Flashy]

2 hours ago, Kubert said:

But , these calculations are done by the CPU. I monitored it via MSI Afterburner and most of the 16 displayed cores of my Ryzen 7 x9800 were doing almost nothing. Above the busy front line, it didn't change, only the game started to stutter. From this I understand that the game is far from using the full potential of modern hardware. It's not that my CPU is used at 100%.

they are done by the CPU, but the number of calculations which can be performed doesnt scale linearly with CPU speed and cores. So, if a 2ghz single core CPU can do a million calcs per minute say(this is just a random number I made up), having a 4ghz 4 core CPU doesnt mean the game can do 8 million calcs per minute. In reality, the faster CPU might only be able to do 2 million calcs per minute because its limited by what the game engine can do, not the CPU. 

 

The engine has come a long way from the RoF days though.. back then you would start to get slowdowns with as little as 50 AA units in a mission, and you really didnt want to go higher than 100, otherwise you would get bad time warping and crashes. Now you can quite easily have 100 units without any noticeable slow down, so things have improved a lot! Hopefully they will carry on making improvements with Korea.. I think if you can have 500 units in a mission active at any time, then using some clever spawn-despawn tricks you can begin to create a pretty good illusion of a "living world" around the player.. something which isnt really possible when you are limited to 100-200 objects...

[Kubert]

1 hour ago, Flashy said:

In reality, the faster CPU might only be able to do 2 million calcs per minute because its limited by what the game engine can do, not the CPU. 

 

This is exactly what I meant by my original post:

On 11/14/2025 at 10:24 PM, Kubert said:

So that the game could utilize the full potential of modern systems.

 

I know that many AIs require a powerful CPU, but also for the game to be able to use it, which it currently doesn't seem to be doing.  

 

But it is what it is...I don't want to hijack this topic for a single wish. Because Luke will come and lock us in here. 

[giftgruen]

2 hours ago, Flashy said:

they are done by the CPU, but the number of calculations which can be performed doesnt scale linearly with CPU speed and cores. So, if a 2ghz single core CPU can do a million calcs per minute say(this is just a random number I made up), having a 4ghz 4 core CPU doesnt mean the game can do 8 million calcs per minute. In reality, the faster CPU might only be able to do 2 million calcs per minute because its limited by what the game engine can do, not the CPU. 

 

Parallel computing and splitting a calculation in efficient parallel computations is quite a complicated task.

It largely depends on the "problem" if a "problem solving algorithm" can be split up in parallel tasks/threads.

 

Generally I'd guess that simulating multiple AIs is a computational problem that can be parallized really well.

Which means then, that e.g. having 16 cores in fact really means that ( almost ) x16 #AI can be computed,

so the parallelization efficiency is near 100%.

 

However, years ago when the IL2 engine was designed and developed, CPUs had not that much cores so it probably

was simply not on the design paper.  Changing something like this "afterwards" is not so easy.

 

I'm quite sure that this will be changed in the new game engine for Korea. The IL2 engine is a really good engine - beeing still "competitive" after so many years!!

So in this point I absolutely trust the dev team that they will use/find 'state-o-the-art' techniques that put load on multiple cores for the new engine.

 

Edited 8 hours ago by giftgruen