Storm of War: The Battle of Britain
by Tom “WKLINK” Cofield, Jim “Hornit” Campisi
and Tom “20mm” Hayden
SimHQ: We know you are very busy so we appreciate your time to put together this second interview with SimHQ on Storm of War: The Battle of Britain. Many of our readers are excitedly anticipating it’s release and will very much appreciate any additional details you can give them.
Oleg: Thanks for contacting me again.
SimHQ: We’ve seen great shots of the new clouds and we understand there will be changeable weather with storm fronts as well as new air physics. Will players see a combination of these effects, so that if a pilot was to fly his aircraft straight into a thunderstorm, he could expect to find severe turbulence, updrafts and downdrafts? This would be amazing and cause pilots to rethink their flight paths should a storm appear.
Oleg: Yes, the player will see and feel it.
SimHQ: What about night effects? Specifically search lights and bombing runs over London or other targets at night. Will we see similar graphics improvements in these events?
Oleg: Yes, we plan to give it improved graphics compared to the IL-2 series.
SimHQ: The water screen shots look just incredible. Can you comment any further on the terrain and how that will look in combination with the water?
Oleg: It will look way better than in the IL-2 series. There is a very visible change in the modeling of the surface. The rivers will get banks. The sea will have rocks, cliffs and other different types of coastline. The minimal width of the rivers will be modeled more precisely due to the new 3D graphics engine. It will be possible to model different types of mountains which will not look like big hills.
The new 3D engine allows us to make a lot of new things for the flight sim. Currently one of our programmers makes realistic looking waves and the animation of them near the coastline. This will look very realistic, even up close.
SimHQ: The image “fields.jpg” looks amazing. Is that an in-game shot? Is it created with tiles? Any extended information or details would be appreciated.
Note: Image is not the final artwork.
Click here to download a 2048 x 2048 zipped image (1.1MB).
Oleg: It is close to what we will have in the final sim. It is just one sample of the tiles.
SimHQ: How about the image “town.jpg”? Same question, is it in-game and created with tiles?
Note: Image is not the final artwork.
Click here to download a 2048 x 2048 zipped image (2.2MB).
Oleg: That is it exactly — only one of many tiles. However, it is not the final looking texture. It is currently a great smart mix of manual drawings and satellite photos.
The final will be almost all manually done, because all the places with buildings must correspond to actual 3D buildings of the sim and not “switch” visually at different altitudes. We can’t directly use photos to get that photo realistic looking landscape from different altitudes simply because we can’t model so many different types of buildings, bridges and types of trees and forests. Everything should correspond to the set of the 3D database for our sim. In this case it will look similar and will not switch to the other landscape at low altitude.
SimHQ: How will the terrain look close to the ground?
Oleg: Very good. Better than in IL-2 series. The fact is that we make it with a greater amount of small details at all altitudes.
