Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Weekend Venture to the WWII Pacific Ocean ... And Skies

Pass the ammo. And the ritalin, because I was not able to focus on one game ...


HPS's Guadalcanal is a 2D simulation of WWII naval combat. I'm messing around with the Savo Island scenario and I needed to "see" how the area of operations would look like. "Seeing" meaning getting a better grasp of how big is the area and such other things you can't get from a 2D map.



So I launched my copy of IL-2 1946 and took off to the virtual skies of the Pacific Ocean, right in between Guadalcanal and Florida islands. The aircraft of choice was an SBD-3 Dauntless, a fantastic naval dive bomber.


Despite its age, IL-2 can be quite atmospheric. Here is my 4 birds flight, slowly climbing over Guadalcanal, some 3 nm east of Cape Esperanza.

Two Japanese destroyers are racing off north of Guadalcanal, but are caught in the lights of the early morning.

Diving towards one of the Japanese destroyers. I don't know if self-sealing fuel tanks are modeled in the flight sim, but my aircraft didn't explode.

An awful approach results in an awful drop. 3 bombs away.


My 3 bombs miss the target.

Cheers,

4 comments:

Chrisol said...

Did you see the recent semi-official patch for IL-2... Seamlessly supports TrackIR. Very impressive update

JC said...

Hi Chrisol,

Yes! Haven't got a chance to download. Did you get it?

Cheers,

chrisol said...

I did (from the SimHQ site) and got IL-2 from gog.com - which I think is probably the third time I've bought it (!). Forgotten Battles first, then on Steam and then gog (I find gog much easier to mod/fiddle with and more future proof than steam without the need for internet access to start playing, or DRM).

Works fine on Windows 7-64bit (for me) and the patch installed painlessly. I think a previous mod also allowed TrackIR but I could never get it to reliably work - this seems to without a problem (and adds a few planes and so on).

Of course I can't actually fly the planes or hit anything, so it's back to FSX for me for some flight lessons !

Chris

RangerX3X said...

Guadal looks an awful lot like another HPS game I have, War Over Vietnam...which is not neccessarily a bad thing. I like the HPS games but dang if they are not pricey.