Ten years ago today, Feb. 12th 2008...
 

IL2 was at it's peak in popularity.

These are screenshots of Spits_vs_109s server pages the morning of February 12th 2008. This is about the day that this server would reset it's stat-pages, which it did every month and they would start over from zero for everyone.

Notice how there were 1662 virtual pilots registered in the previous month. This means that besides the server regulars who would all be signed up very quickly, that on average over 50 new players joined it every day that month that had not been on it before! This was a busy server....

It was busy because everyone in the community at this time were all flying one version of IL2, the official patch, so it was very easy for everyone to get together and it was very easy for new pilots to figure out what to do and what version of IL2 to fly online.

By sheer coincidence I looked at these today and noticed the date I had saved them was the same as today but ten years later, so I thought it was worthy post, and maybe someone can look at it and reminisce and even see themselves on this old server list which I luckily saved as a complete web-page to a file that morning.

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net...f4&oe=5C4E29EE

The Teamspeak window is shown more than once on the left of the photos because I had to piece them together as they were too big to be grabbed on my small monitor all at once....!

https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net...d6&oe=5C5CE125

Those were the days. I recall how difficult it was to find available slot in the most popular servers.

I see a couple of my BlitzPig mates on that list, JimmyGiro and BlitzPig_Raven.

I'd be further down the list, but I had a ton of hours on the server too.

I miss those days a lot.

Thanks for chiming in guys. I wish I would have saved more artifacts from back then, but we were all busy having fun we thought would never end.

ElAurens I certainly remember you guys from back then. It was Blitzpig EL right?

I have no tracks of GreaterGreen which was one of the all-time great hard-settings servers, none of Aviar's dogfight server which was also hard-settings.

I lost a hard-drive years ago along with much stuff. My fault because I had them set up as raid-0, two IDE WD-Raptor 10,000 rpm drives, and when one of the pair burned out that was the end of that....LOL.

S!

Yeah, and I still wear the tag, as do most of the Pigs, even though we don't fly much at all anymore.

We dabble with the new "Battle of" series a bit, and a couple of us still have '46 installed and will fly it once in a while.

It's a pity that the flight sim world, as far as WW2 goes, is such a bloody shambles. We lived through the golden age of the genre, when IL2 was a benchmark in the whole world of PC gaming.

I still have a few screens from the old days...


Me, dueling with an F4F...

https://imageshack.com/a/img171/5033/ela6m2vw9.jpg

BlitzPig_Raven (background) and myself heading home after a ground attack mission...

https://imageshack.com/a/img117/15/g...oundersnp0.jpg


And, the BlitzPigs on the Kuban. And yeah that's really us.

https://imageshack.com/a/img52/4146/...5image0016.jpg

I'm third from the left in the front row.

:lol:

I still keep GreaterGreen in my "flightsim" bookmarks. Just for the memory.
There were two of them in later period. One with external views which allowed to fly "nonflyables". Great fun.

I agree.

I have at least one track from Spits_vs_109s from 2005 where Lixma is flying around in a 109g2 shooting people down in a fairly relaxed fashion. I will make it into a video and put it up when I get a chance.

I'd love to see that.

He would also do that with the P40 when it first came out. Circle at very high altitude where no 109 pilot would expect him and shoot them down with impunity.

Try this link. Hilariously because I am still running windows XP I can not watch this video on YouTube except for in 360p resolution even though I put it up.... Let me know if you can see it in high-def.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71-AqquUP3s


S!

:grin: