Hello everyone!

There is not much time left until the planned release date, which means that we will be able to show you the almost final results more and more often. Some time ago we promised to surprise you with the new visual quality level of airplane cockpits — and today is the day we fulfill this promise. The first aircraft whose cockpit model we can show you in near-final form is the F-51D Mustang. As you can see, this is a huge step forward compared to Great Battles, made possible by the introduction of technologies such as DirectX 12, PBR (Physics Based Rendering) and several others. Yes, we have yet to see how the cockpit will look in-game, but even when rendered in a graphics editor, it is impressive in terms of overall realism and attention to detail.

In the spring we plan to show you the cockpits of the F-80C-10 Shooting Star, MiG-15bis, La-11 and Il-10, and in the fall we will show you the rest. In the fall we will also bring you some very pleasant news about the composition and development of the Korea project, because we don’t plan to stop at the release and it is not a coincidence that two of the announced aircraft are carrier aircraft. And not only them… But for now — let it be a little secret: as usual, we will announce something only when we are absolutely sure that we will fulfill everything we announce.

In addition to the renders of the final cockpit model, we would like to show you a model of a red jet pilot. In this case, he is wearing a winter outfit with the following elements:

• Soviet winter flight helmet ShZ-50,
• Chinese winter flight helmet Type-50 (a copy of the ShZ-50, but with a different color of leather),
• Soviet OP-1M goggles with separate eyepieces,
• Chinese single-eyepiece goggles, a copy of the American B-8,
• KM-16 high-altitude oxygen mask,
• MPLK-49 parachute system (including inflatable boat and KP-23 oxygen tank for high-altitude bailouts),
• Standard Chinese winter flight suit consisting of insulated trousers and jacket with fur lining),
• Chinese-type winter boots with laces and molded rubber soles,
• Leather flight gloves.

At the end of this diary, we would like to show you a short high-resolution video demonstrating one of the graphical innovations our producer and lead programmer talked about in the recent Dev Brief #19 video: a new lighting system for the volume of the atmosphere and the shadows of mountains and hills cast into this volume (mountain shadows in the atmosphere).

Please stay tuned for new updates in the upcoming Developer Diaries and Brief Room videos!