18th winter flying IL2, who's left?

[Jumoschwanz]

What is left of my hair is now grey, and my eyes don't let me see the monitor during flying well anymore, still enjoying IL2 here and there though.

I can still remember my first online flight with the full(non-demo) version of IL2 back in the winter of 2001/2002. We were flying CFS2 on Hypberlobby too sometimes, but IL2 quickly sent it to the scrap-heap.

I got onto some server in an La-5 and 609IAP Relentov was on there with his buddies chasing me around trying to shoot me down, the La-5 was fast though and I kept running away, looping back and doing head-ons with them. I can't remember now but it probably ended up with me getting blown out of the sky.

We flew on dial-up for years and had to download all those big patches with a 56k modem! I would start a patch download before I went to bed and hopefully it would finish up sometime before noon the next day without dropping the line so I had to continue it or start the whole thing over....

Everyone was flying the official patches, there were no mods, and the servers were packed full, lot of them, and there were a LOT of hard-settings servers too.

Jumo.....

[Marabekm]

I am afraid the list only seems to be growing smaller. Though occasionally we get a new old guy, or an old new guy. Some people come back from COD and BOS every once in a while.

[Treetop64]

Still here. Been around since the old Ubi forums days, and raaaid's hilarious "science" threads.

Never flew that much online. Primarily Offline.

Still play the game regularly, now in modded form though I prefer the ala-carte method with ModAct v6.4 over the bloated mega-mods.

[Jumoschwanz]

The other thing was our hardware, my first IL2 computer was an AMD Athlon 900mhz with a 200mhz front-side buss and a pretty crappy video card, like a GeForce MX. Some people flew with Pentium II or III rigs too, and it was really borderline running IL2 on those machines!

The crappy CRT monitors used to burn your eyes out after so many hours, if they had not come out with alternatives I would have had to quit ten years ago.

I learned that if you are buying a gaming video-card, then save up for something really good because it is cheaper than getting a so-so card then a pretty-good card then a really good card later. I think I may have been the first one to have a GeForce 3 Ti-500 for flying IL2, and it was heaven for sure.

[DKoor]

Eh, those were the days.
During that time one could enjoy UBi Zoo slaughterhouse as much as one could enjoy actual gameplay. I think it really culminated somewhere around that time when Hristo's have been banned from WarClouds because of actually listening to allied TS chat ... at least for me. In spite of me being attached to the game years after, for me it never got so heated like it was during those days.

But yes, sooo many things happened in the meantime (one of the most important things for me is that I've become a dad of twin girls), so much time passed as Jumo said... I remember both of you Tree and Jumo from those days. Can't really believe how much time has passed.

I think WarClouds were the peak of my experience with the game... I still have quite a bit of online TRK's ...
Long ago I even uploaded one where I miraculously ended up alive flying one of my fav ac types after getting pounded by the oppo I lost sight of;

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e9bNiq07kw

[dimlee]

DKoor,

Good fight. As someone who flew P-38 a lot (and FW 190 was my no.2 "blue" a/c) I really enjoyed watching it.

You could take a look at Orel (http://www.letkaorel.eu ) if you have time. Currently there are 2 or 3 maps with P-38 in rotation. And with FW 190

[DKoor]

Originally Posted by dimlee

DKoor,

Good fight. As someone who flew P-38 a lot (and FW 190 was my no.2 "blue" a/c) I really enjoyed watching it.

You could take a look at Orel (http://www.letkaorel.eu ) if you have time. Currently there are 2 or 3 maps with P-38 in rotation. And with FW 190

I'm pleased that you liked it. I will certainly upload some more of the old ones, from the golden IL-2 era.

As far as WarClouds go, and if my memory serves me right, I'd just go for Bf-109, sometimes while on allied side I was either in Tempest/P-51B/C (GB) or P-38 & P-51B/C... those were my fav aircraft. I'd probably fly Typhoon too if it was in game at that time

I'm not really sure how it is possible that I remember many people from say UK-dedicated-1/2, WarClouds and forums... those were the days that, regarding my pc gaming, will never happen again.

Thanks for link, I'll check it out.

[Janosch]

Letkaorel does lots of things right - they rotate existing maps and sometimes update them, for example. Unfortunately, some of the maps are cluttered with AI planes and soft ground targets. It's a double whammy. Still, it's probably the best server today.
Vinni Puh (a Russian server) was unfortunately neutered by long absence, the removal of 99% of the maps outside the 109/190 vs La/Yak formula and lack of HyperLobby presence, so there aren't any players.

[Music]

well, i have not been flying for the entire time the il-2 series has been out, but I remember when the first shipment of Pacific Fighters came into a warehouse I was working at, I stood looking at that box for a long time, looked around at all the computer equipment, and though, "one day"
That day came 8 years later, when I had a crappy computer, and a 32bit video card, one frame pre 2 minuites,
There were a lot of F4F's that ploughed into the mountains of the new Guinea map, the Pilot career for the F4F mission, one frame of the cockpit, and next frame was it smoldering on the ground, but it looked great.
I took a month and a new video card to get any part of the game to run, even FMB. and even then, it was 8 years of crappy small monitors and 15fps, lower when I was engaged.

Now, I have a 32 inch monitor, a 1gig video card, and know what a Conf.ini is, and how to manipulate it to get the best performance, or visuals. Have Free Track working fine, (but never use it), and still the same joysticks from back then. A Attack3 as my main stick, and a interactive Raider Pro for a throttle rudder.

And I can't hit a thing, last missions, two maps of the AleXserver, about a hour and a half, and my gun stats were 1 hit out of 600+ bullets fired. And that is par for the course.

I don't know if it's latency, or online timing is different, but offline, I can hit almost everything I shoot at, and shoot in the 3% range w fighters and 12% with bombers.

But, shooting down A.I. is no fun, not even good practice it seems.

But I can Land and take off like a pro, and have many hours of chute time. And I am making who ever shoots me down happy, so there's that.

Lets hope 4.14 brings some players back, though if your in north america, and have the days free, the Russians are still playing like crazy, AlexServer has 20-30 people every day at 11-2pm east coast time, and the Il-2 official server, Front Skies (full switch with icons) has about the same.

here is a list of servers, with the Russian ones as well. Ignore the pilot count for the last two, it is wrong.

http://il2.com.ru/en/links.php

Cheers!

[Jumoschwanz]

Originally Posted by Music

And I can't hit a thing, last missions, two maps of the AleXserver, about a hour and a half, and my gun stats were 1 hit out of 600+ bullets fired. And that is par for the course.Cheers!

Hit percent was never that high for myself either, but it did not seem like a lot of hits were needed to do well online.

In February 2008 on Spits_vs_109s, a month which had 1,662 different virtual pilots fly there, my percentage of hits in air-to-air combat was only 4.74% ! With 1,741 rounds it said I shot down 101 aircraft, but I had fired almost 36,000 at air and ground targets combined. 12% of those hit ground targets, obviously easier to hit things that are not moving....

I was just reading that biography of Hartmann's and he said that after WWII when he was head of Germany's first jet-squadron that the average percent of that squadron was 24% and some of the pilots had personal averages of 60%!