IL-2 Korea Career Service Record

[Viking1]

Unbelievable!! Thanks for this ill give it a good run tomorrow ive been immersed in campaign building.

Edited September 22 by Viking1

[Viking1]

This is so great. One of the better mods I can remember seeing, practical and easy to use. But I am wondering something, now that you have crossed the rubicon so to speak. Since you are allowing us to impact the im-game award system, why not the next step? Why not allow us to make the awards right in the mod itself? We have everything we need here to make those decisions, so it seems like a natural. 

[Arrow_1974]

@Viking1 Thanks — glad it's proving useful.

Short answer: making the awards isn't the hard part. Everything in this mod was built with a text editor and a DDS tool (and Photoshop). The game reads it all as plain loose files under `data\`, which shadow the `.gtp` archives while modifications are enabled — nothing to repack, nothing to re-encrypt.

A new award needs five pieces:

1. The rule — a block in 

data\scg\2\awards.cfg:

[Award=601045]
    name="Distinguished Unit Citation and Two Oak Leaf Clusters"
    IsSquadron=1
    RequiredAward="601044"
    AwardInProc="(Country=601)&(Efficiency>=3)&((AirObj>=180)|((GrObj+BldObj+SeaObj)>=2100))"
    AwardByDef="(RND<0)"
    AwardRemove="(ExAw=601042)|(ExAw=601044)"
[end]

2. The artwork — pasted into one of the `Awards6xx*.dds` atlases (2048×2048, BC7/DX10, four mip levels).
3. A crop entry in

nsdata\assets\images\awards.xaml

saying where in the atlas it lives:

<CroppedBitmap x:Key="award601045" SourceRect="4,1284,440,120" Source="{StaticResource AtlasBitmap.Awards6xx2}" />

4. A name in every language —

nsdata\assets\locale\awards.locale=eng.json

and its ger/spa/fra/rus/chs siblings. Miss one and the player sees 

AWARD601045!LOCALIZE!

on screen.
5. A description —

nsdata\assets\awards\6xx\601045.locale=eng.txt

This can simply be #601042, a redirect reusing the base decoration's text; 80 of the game's own 99 descriptions work that way.

AwardInProc vs AwardByDef — the two condition lines in that block are the same language, evaluated by the same loop, with the same RequiredAward, AwardRemove and already-held rules. What differs is when the game looks at them.

AwardInProc is checked at mission debrief, once for each pilot who flew, with that pilot's actual sortie in hand. It's the only place the per-sortie tokens mean anything — `AirObjSortie`, `GrObjSortie`, `WIASortie`. If your award is "did something notable on this flight", it belongs here.

AwardByDef is checked in the roster sweep, which runs over every pilot on strength whether he flew that day or not. The legend in `awards.cfg` says this one applies only when a character is created — that's wrong, it runs again and again throughout a career. Two things follow from how it works:

- The sweep hands the evaluator an empty sortie, so every *Sortie token reads zero there. Only career figures survive: `ComplSorties`, `AirObj`, `FlTime`, `CareerDays`, `CDate`, `RND`.
- It passes over the whole award list six times in one go, so a ladder can climb several rungs at once, and it writes the award as already received rather than pending.

Practical upshot: use `AwardInProc` for anything about a single flight, and `AwardByDef` for anything cumulative — "200 sorties", "commanded for 180 days". A cumulative award given only an `AwardInProc` rule is tested solely on missions that pilot personally flew, which for AI pilots can be seldom, so it tends to arrive late or not at all.

That also explains something you'll notice all over the stock file, including my example above: `AwardByDef="(RND<0)"`. `RND` is never negative, so that's a deliberate "never" — the modder's way of switching the second path off, so the award can only ever come from a real sortie.

BTW -  RND is a random number between 0 and 1000, so RND<600 means a 60% chance of getting the award. Note it is rolled fresh for each award evaluated — two RND terms in one condition are two separate rolls, so (RND<500)&(RND<500) is 25%, not 50%. If you want one roll shared across a whole mission, there is a second token, RNDsortie, rolled once when the mission ends.

One last thing if you go digging in a career file to check your work: an award event with `missionId = -1` came from the roster sweep (`AwardByDef`); anything else came from the debrief (`AwardInProc`). Handy for working out why something fired when it did.

So a tool that writes those five things is entirely feasible. The catch is the criteria language and that's where I'd temper expectations, because it is only partly reliable — the legend at the bottom of `awards.cfg` documents tokens that don't do what it says, and a wrong one fails silently: an unknown identifier is created as zero, so your award simply never fires and nothing appears in the log. Maybe the developers from 1C Game Studios will fix some of this in future updates. I can't touch it from outside - the conditions are evaluated inside careerProcessor.dll, so all a mod can do is steer around the tokens that do not work, which is what this one does.

Some examples from building this mod:

- `AirObjSortie` works per pilot, but not for a squadron award. With `IsSquadron=1` the engine builds a fresh, empty sortie before evaluating, so every `*Sortie` token — `AirObjSortie`, `GrObjSortie`, `WIASortie` — is hard zero, along with `RankID` and `PCP`. A unit citation on "two ground kills this sortie" can never fire. Unit awards have to use cumulative totals, `Efficiency`, or the operation flags.
- `OpSuccess` doesn't exist. It's in the legend, but the engine only knows `OpGood` and `OpTotal`. I had a whole Navy unit-award ladder (Navy Commendation Medal) written against it that would never have fired.
- `FlTime` is hours, not minutes — which makes the stock Legion of Merit far harder to earn than it looks (therefore I created the time creditor for warped missions in this mod).

And the one worth knowing about most:

- `noAwards=1`. The intent is good: "only one decoration per sortie, don't hand out four at once." The implementation defeats it. It means "nothing has been awarded yet this sortie", and the engine clears it after any grant. The problem is the Air Medal: it's cumulative, and once you hold a cluster, the cluster's `AwardRemove` has deleted the base row — so on every later sortie the engine finds the Air Medal "not held", grants it again, clears the flag, and deletes it again before it reaches your career file. You never see it happen. Net effect: for any pilot past a handful of sorties the flag is already zero by the second award in the file, so every guarded award below it is dead. That's why several stock decorations effectively never appear, and why this mod strips the guard from most of them.

Related: file order decides. The first award whose condition passes takes the slot, so an unguarded award earlier in the file always beats a guarded one below it.

None of that stops an award editor being built — but it would need a curated list of tokens that actually evaluate, rather than the legend, or people will spend evenings wondering why their new medal never arrives.

Alex

Edited September 23 by Arrow_1974

[Viking1]

Complex and interesting. Well, see how things develop I guess!

[Arrow_1974]

@Viking1 If you are interested in a certain award - let me know and we can figure something out

[Viking1]

Actually my interest was more in whether its possible to assign the awards that exist WITHIN the service records mod. I think it would be a natural next step, although some might prefer to continue to assign them within KOREA. But either way Service Records adds a lot of depth - very cool. I'll stick with building missions myself I dont have that mathematical mind!

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.6 — where he flew, the hours he logged, the paper that came
with the medal, and a word for the men who did not come back

Gentlemen,

1.6 is out. As before, everything below is new or changed since 1.5; the earlier posts
describe the rest, and none of it has changed.

THE MAP

Every mission now has a map, and it is worth saying plainly what it does and does not show.
The flight log the game keeps is a log of events, not a continuous track — it records the
moment something happened, not a fix every few seconds. So the line you see is the places
the plane is known to have been, joined in the order it was there: the take-off, the
kills, the hits it took, the bail-out if there was one, the landing. Each mark carries the
mission clock, so you can read the sortie as it happened.

Where you used the game's time skip, the jump is drawn as a dashed line rather than a solid
one, because the plane did not fly that stretch and it would be a lie to draw it as if
it had.

Two other things are on it. Your squadron's losses that day are marked with crosses, and
where two men went down in the same place the cross carries a count. And the front line is
drawn as it stood on the day of that mission — the game carries nine dated front lines for
the war, from Operation Rugged in April 1951 to the armistice, and the map picks the one in
force. It moves a great deal over two years, which is the point of drawing it per mission
rather than once. The operations map has a toggle for the losses; the mission map zooms
with the wheel.

THE FLIGHT RECORD

A pilot's hours were not a number in a database, they were a form, and he signed it every
month. So there is now a flight record: AF Form 5, the individual flight record the Air
Force actually kept, one sheet per month, with the grade he held that month, the aircraft,
the hours by day, and the remarks column carrying the mission symbol and what he shot down.
It pages by month and prints one sheet to a page if you want it on paper.

Soviet and North Korean pilots get their own flight book instead, in their own form.

The Form 5 stays in English whatever language you run the tracker in, because it is a form
and the form was printed in English. The page around it speaks your language as usual.

THE CITATION AND THE CERTIFICATE

Every decoration now has the words that came with it.

Click a medal and you get its citation, composed from what the man actually did — for an
award earned on a single sortie, that sortie; for one earned over a period, the period; for
a unit citation, the squadron's work. A second button opens the certificate itself, on a
drawn form transcribed from the originals, and signed by the men who would have signed it
on that date: Truman or Eisenhower, Finletter or Talbott, Vandenberg or Twining, and the
Fifth Air Force commander of the day. Repeat awards are worded as the period worded them —
"is entitled to wear a second bronze Oak Leaf Cluster in addition to the Silver Star
previously awarded" — rather than being given a fresh certificate as if the first had not
happened.

Soviet and North Korean decorations get the наградной лист, the award recommendation sheet,
filled out as the regimental clerk would have filled it: the man's particulars, his service,
what he did, and the commander's conclusion, with the unit's stamp and two signatures. It
stays in Russian, as it would have been, and every line has a translation on hover in
whatever language you are reading.

Unit citations open their certificate too.

CAPTURED

Swoose asked for this one, and he was right to.

When one of your pilots is shot down over enemy territory and survives the crash, the game
marks him as evading, and a day or two later it walks him back to his own lines and returns
him to the squadron — the tab will tell you the date he is due back. Now and then it does
something else and takes a man for good: missing, not killed, gone from the roll. I have
seen that once in some five hundred sorties.

What it does with the commander I would not care to claim — it has not happened to me, and
two careers are not a statistic. What is certain is that it never asks. However a man comes
down, there is no moment where you get to say that this one did not make it back.

The Career Helper now has a Captured tab. It lists the men who went down over enemy ground
and came through it — the evaders the game is walking back, and anyone who lost his
aircraft on a sortie he survived — and lets you say that this one did not make it back.
You can only do it while that sortie is still his latest, which is to say before he has
flown again.

The game takes it from there, and handles it properly. If it is the commander, the next
day brings up the Commander Captured screen with the usual choices: postpone, end the
career, or assign a new commander.

Whether a man walked out or spent the next two years in a camp was not something the
squadron got to choose. But you do, and a war in which nobody is ever taken prisoner reads
wrongly.

THE MEDALS

All the decorations have been redrawn, and both the artwork and the way it is worn follow
the regulations of the Korean War period rather than modern practice, which differs more
than you would expect.

The devices are sized as the regulations size them, and the difference is visible: an oak
leaf cluster on a full-size medal is 13/32 of an inch, on a ribbon bar 5/16, so the same
cluster is noticeably larger on the medal. A campaign star is 3/16 whatever its metal, so
the silver star that stands for five bronze is the same size as the bronze beside it. Army
and Air Force service stars are worn one point up. The cluster's stem points to the
wearer's right. A Bronze Star's Combat V sits to the wearer's right of any clusters, and
during Korea the V belonged to the Bronze Star alone — the Air Medal and the Commendation
Medal did not get one until later.

Where four clusters must go on a full-size medal they are worn three in a row with the
fourth centered above them, not four across, and a silver campaign star sits on the center
line with the bronze ones around it, the first to the wearer's right. Ribbons are three to
a row, which is the normal arrangement, going to four only when three would stack
implausibly high. Nothing is ever shrunk to make it fit: a row of four or five medals is
fitted by letting them overlap, with the senior one inboard and fully exposed, because that
is how a rack is actually mounted.

The USAF coat has been redrawn as well, and now wears the officer's rank on the shoulder
loops.

THE NAVY AND THE MARINE CORPS, WITH A CAVEAT

One more thing, and I will be straight about it: the Navy and the Marine Corps are in this
release, and there is nothing you can do with them yet.

The game has no naval careers — no Navy or Marine squadrons to fly — so none of it can be
earned. It is here because the work was worth doing once rather than twice, and because on
the day those services do arrive, this will already be waiting for them.

What is in it: the naval decorations drawn and placed in the game's own atlases and named
and described in all six languages — the Navy Cross with its gold stars, the Navy
Distinguished Service Medal, the Commendation ladder, the Presidential Unit Citation, the
Navy Unit Commendation, the Bronze Star with its Combat V. Their certificates on the Navy's
own forms, signed by the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations or the
Commandant of the Marine Corps according to the date. And three more uniforms: Navy service
dress white, Marine service green, and Marine Blue Dress "A", which is the order that
carries large medals — each with its own rank insignia and its own rules for where things
sit. The naval services wear their stars point down, which is the opposite of the Army and
the Air Force, and a Marine rack hangs from the line midway between the first and second
coat buttons rather than a set distance above the pocket.

Since none of it can be earned, none of it has been tried in anger either. It has been
checked every way I can check it from outside the game, and that is as far as it goes until
there is a naval career to fly.

GETTING IT

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.6.0 --> outdated, newer version available
 

SHA-256  52493a4b2381e5e33cf4a10a5170cb32e340a10d328f7f73f24769c95d906b29

The installer carries both the tracker and the awards mod; the mod is optional and the
tracker works without it. Upgrading over 1.5 is safe — your settings, your photographs and
your flight-time corrections are kept.

As ever, tell me what is wrong with it.

Alex

Edited September 23 by Arrow_1974
New version 1.6.1

[Viking1]

You are not an AI, right??

😉

You have brought our Commanders to life!

Edited September 23 by Viking1

[Swoose]

Thank you so much for your amazing work on Career Helper @Arrow_1974especially the new "Captured" feature!  

[BoeingVertol]

Major Randall thanks you!!! Amazing work!  Was really bummed when my career wouldn't show stats anymore, even with the repair tool.

Edited September 23 by BoeingVertol

[Viking1]

Lets see some more service records!

 

[BeneQ]

I even created account on forum just to post it and show my support to this project! For me it is must have

[Swoose]

Here is Major Young-jae Ryoo, Commander of the 57th ShAP KPAF flying the Ilyushin IL-10 (NATO Code Name "Beast")

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.6.1 — a decoration that was being given for the wrong thing,
two that were missing, and paperwork that did not say what it meant to say

Gentlemen,

1.6.1 is a maintenance release. No new screen, nothing to learn. It corrects a decoration
that was being awarded for something it was never awarded for, adds the two medals that
gap left behind, slows the unit citations down to something like the real rate, fixes
four faults in the citations and certificates, and stops the Career Helper passing over a
mission you warped through. Everything in 1.6 is unchanged and the earlier posts still
describe it.

THE BRONZE STAR AND ITS "V"

This is the one worth reading.

The Bronze Star Medal can be given for heroism or for meritorious service, and when it is
given for heroism it carries the bronze letter V. What I had not understood is that the
regulations exclude participation in aerial flight from the V. An airman could earn one,
and some did — defending the field, pulling a man out under fire, fighting after coming
down on the wrong side — but never for anything he did in the air. Heroism in the air is
what the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal are for, and a man does not get both
systems for the same act.

Every rung of the V ladder was firing on exactly the wrong things: one air victory, or
twenty-five targets strafed, or being wounded while still scoring. And the paperwork
repeated the error — the citation read "while serving as pilot of an F-86 ... in action
near Sinuiju" and the certificate said the same, which is precisely the sentence the
regulation forbids.

It is fixed. The award now asks only for some service behind the man and then leaves it to
chance, because the game models no ground combat and there is nothing in a career that can
stand for the deed. The citation and the certificate use the formula the regulations give
for an airman decorated for a non-flying act — "heroism not involving participation in
aerial flight" — in all six languages, and the award no longer draws a narrative from that
day's sortie, because there is no day. So if you are lucky, you might get one,,,,

If you already hold one, you keep it. Nothing is taken back.

THE SOLDIER'S MEDAL, AND THE NAVY AND MARINE CORPS MEDAL

Taking the flying out of the V leaves a gap, and the period filled it with a medal of its
own: heroism with no enemy in it at all. A man pulled from a burning aeroplane on the ramp,
a rescue from the sea, a fire fought on the flight line.

The Air Force had nothing of its own for this until the Airman's Medal of 1960, so in Korea
an airman was given the Army's — the Soldier's Medal, authorised by Act of Congress in July
1926. The naval services have their own, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Both are in now,
worn after the Distinguished Flying Cross and before the Bronze Star, with their art, their
names and descriptions in six languages, and their own certificate transcribed from a
filled original.

Neither citation mentions flying, for the same reason the V's no longer does.

Also here (like for the V device for the Bronze Star) - a minimal chance might grant you or your fellow squadron comrades this award.

THE UNIT CITATIONS CAME MUCH TOO FAST

The Distinguished Unit Citation and its clusters were written against the squadron's
running total of targets destroyed, and I had guessed at the numbers. Then I measured them
against a real squadron.

Twenty-five missions of a fighter-bomber outfit working over airfields and supply dumps —
the 12th FBS, April 1951 — came to 1,310 surface kills. Upwards of fifty a mission. The
old ladder started at 600 and put the first cluster at 1,300, so the squadron had the
citation and its cluster inside five weeks of a war that ran three years. The 4th Fighter-
Interceptor Wing, the most decorated Sabre wing there was, was cited twice in the whole
war.

The thresholds are now 3,000 / 8,000 / 14,000 / 21,000. The first citation falls somewhere
near the squadron's fifty-seventh mission instead of its seventeenth, and the third cluster
is a long campaign's work. The air-victory route is untouched at 50 / 110 / 180 / 260 — it
was always about right, and only looked generous because the ground route was firing six
times sooner. Whichever fits your unit is the one that decides. The Navy's Presidential
Unit Citation moves with it.

Again, anything already awarded stays awarded.

THE PAPERWORK

Four faults, three of them found by a second pair of eyes going through the Air Force set
one award at a time.

A repeat award was resolving to the base decoration on every Air Force ladder, so a second
Air Medal produced a certificate for a first one — no device named, no entitlement line.
The cause was a lookup keyed by the family name of the decoration, and the Air Medal exists
in both the Air Force and the naval tables, so one quietly overwrote the other.

On the Distinguished Unit Citation and both naval unit citations the entitlement line was
inserted in the middle of a sentence, leaving the rest of it dangling after a stray "and".
It now closes the sentence properly and lets the order line — "By order of the Secretary of
the Navy" — stay where it belongs, at the foot.

The Navy Unit Commendation's text ran straight through the commission pennant printed on
the blank. The heading now sits above the pennant and "Washington" below it, as the real
form has it.

And a Republic of Korea citation issued to a sailor produced "U.S. United States Naval
Forces".

Every certificate in the program — a hundred and twelve of them, Air Force and naval — was
then measured line by line to confirm that nothing overlaps anything and nothing runs off
the sheet.

FLIGHT TIME

The Career Helper offers you the missions you warped through, so that it can credit you
the hours the game hands your wingmen for nothing. It chose which missions to offer by a
rule of thumb — anything flown in under half the briefed time — and only read your flight
log afterwards, to work out where the jumps had been.

That is the wrong way round, and it showed. Two missions on the same day, both flown to
50.5 per cent of their plan, both passed over: one by twelve seconds, the other by
eighteen. The first had been flown straight through and deserved to be passed over. The
second was warped, and its log said so plainly — two jumps, some twenty-four minutes of
route skipped — and the detector that would have proved it never ran at all.

The log decides now. Any mission that came in under its plan has its log read, and a log
with no jump in it means the mission was flown through and nothing is owed, however far
short of the briefing it came in: a plan is a plan, not a promise. The ratio survives
only as a fallback, for a sortie whose log has gone.

THE NAVAL RACK

Still nothing you can earn, for the same reason as last time: the game has no naval careers
yet. Three corrections to it all the same. The unit ribbon on the right breast was set by
the edge of the pocket rather than its centre and sat visibly inboard. The full-size medals
were drawn a shade small against the Medal of Honor and are now ten per cent larger. And
the gold star on the Medal of Honor's neck pad, which marks a second award, was the wrong
way up — a repeat star is worn with one ray down.

A NOTE FOR ANYONE WRITING THEIR OWN AWARDS

Several of the above are the same mistake in different clothes: I trusted the list of
criteria printed at the foot of the game's own awards.cfg. Some of it is wrong. So the
whole list has now been checked against the career processor itself, variable by variable,
and the result is in the repository as docs/AWARD_CRITERIA.md — one table saying what each
criterion actually measures, and whether it can be used for a squadron award, a personal
award, or neither.

The short version: one documented variable does not exist in the program at all and always
reads as zero, several are available only to squadron awards despite the legend suggesting
otherwise, and several that work are not documented anywhere. If you are writing award
conditions, read that table before you spend an evening wondering why nothing fires.

GETTING IT

The download has moved to GitHub. It now sits on the release page beside the source it was built from,                                                                                                                so the file you get is the one the checksum below describes - MediaFire is no longer used.

https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record/releases/tag/v1.6.1 --> outdated, new version available

IL2_Korea_Service_Record_Setup_v1.6.1.exe:    4af29e153718e68d9ddd1495e8d887e7cb031bed4c70b37327e92cfca4009b2a

IL-2.Korea.Service.Record.v1.6.1.zip:         119da2fec751fbc97185f24b390ba0635037b73c3819a0ce122ba0c9f8ea1878

The installer carries both the tracker and the awards mod, as before. Upgrading over 1.6 is
safe and keeps your settings, your photographs and your flight-time corrections. If you run
the awards mod, do install this one over it — the Bronze Star and the unit citations are
changes to the game's award definitions, not to the tracker, and they only take effect once
the new awards.cfg is in place.

As ever, tell me what is wrong with it.

Alex

Edited September 25 by Arrow_1974
Hash changed due to new build 1.6.1

[Viking1]

SUggestion for small re-organization of the resources section --

 

[Arrow_1974]

@Viking1

Is put onto the to-do-list. Will be implemented with the next update.

Edited September 24 by Arrow_1974

[Patricks]

Wish there was some way to Award ALL to an entire squadron, I have 8 careers going (🙃) and it can get a bit tedious!

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.7.0 — a seating board, and what the career engine actually
does with your pilots' numbers

Gentlemen,

1.7 adds a seating board to the Career Helper. More usefully, it comes with what I
believe are answers to something none of us can see from inside the game: which of a
pilot's numbers the engine reads, and what it does with them.

A word on how much weight to put on this. Some of it I read directly out of the career
executable and can quote; some is a pattern fitted to my own squadron's numbers and could
be a coincidence of one career. I have tried to say which is which as I go, and where I
am guessing I have said so. I have already been wrong once in this investigation and
corrected it below. If any of it does not match what you see, say so and I will go back
and look again.

Five findings, then, with that caveat over all of them:

  * A pilot at skills 5 appears to fly exactly like one at skills 4. The rating the
    mission file gives him tracks his skill and then stops one short of the top, so 4 and
    5 come out the same. Fitted to one generated mission.
  * Only one man's boosters count on a sortie — whoever holds the lowest-numbered seat
    in the force you send. Every other leader's are dead weight for that mission. This is
    the one I am most confident of: the game shows it on the mission screen and the code
    does the same thing.
  * Courage buys kills and costs lives, through equal-sized coefficients in the same
    table. That is the table's plain reading; I have not watched it happen.
  * Fatigue appears to do nothing. I could find no read of it anywhere; every
    reference I can identify is a write.
  * The commander's boosters look worth about forty per cent on my own eight-ship
    force — small per man, but he is boosting seven at once. See the caveat on that
    number further down.

The awards mod is unchanged from 1.6.1, byte for byte — 1.7 touches the Service Record
and the Career Helper only, so there is nothing to merge or redo on the award side.

WHAT THE ENGINE READS

Two separate reckonings, using different numbers.

In the air: skill alone. When a mission is built, each of your wingmen is written
into the file with an AI rating on a scale of its own, running 0 to 4. That is not the
same scale as his skill, which you see as 1 to 5, and the two do not line up one for one.
Every pilot in one of my generated missions:

        skill shown      1     2     3     4     5
        AI rating          ?     2     3     4     4

It follows his skill exactly, and then runs out of room. Skill 5 has nowhere higher to go
and lands on 4 beside skill 4, so the fifth point is spent for nothing in the air. A
wounded man comes out one lower.

The question mark is honest: I had no AI pilot at skill 1 to test. The only man in my
squadron down there is me, and the player is written as 0 whatever his skill — the game
simulates none for a human — so my own aircraft says nothing about what a skill-1 wingman
would be given.

Courage and discipline never reach the mission file at all.

One gap I should own: the commander in that mission had no skill booster, so I cannot say
whether a booster can carry a man up that scale the way it does in the reckoning below. It
makes no difference to the point about the ceiling.

Off screen: all three, plus the commander's boosters. There is a function in the
career executable that reads a table of coefficients out of the campaign data — it names
the file in its own error messages, so there is no doubt which file — and it is asked for
three categories by name: fightkills, bombkills, losses. I take that to be how AI results
are reckoned, though I have not followed the numbers all the way to a result:

                     attribute as the game shows it, 1 ....... 5
    FightKills   skill       0.10 → 0.30
                 courage     0.00 → 0.20
                 discipline  0.00 → 0.20
    BombKills    skill       0.05 → 0.25
                 courage     0.00 → 0.20
                 discipline  0.00 → 0.20
    Losses       skill       0.20 → 0.00     more skill, fewer losses
                 courage     0.00 → 0.20     more courage, MORE losses
                 discipline  0.20 → 0.00     more discipline, fewer losses

Read the Losses row twice. Courage is the only attribute that cuts both ways: the same
0.20 of coefficient that buys you victories buys you funerals. A bold squadron scores more and dies more,
and nothing in the game mentions it.

Before that lookup, the commander's boosters are added to each man's three attributes and
the result is clamped at 4.

THE COMMANDER

The purple arrows are what a man gives the pilots flying with him. He never boosts
himself, and exactly one man's apply to any mission: the occupant of the lowest-numbered
seat in the force. Not each flight's leader. One man, covering everything you send.

You can confirm this without the tool — the three chips on the mission screen change to
match whoever ends up in command as you vary which flights go. I checked four
combinations, predicted a fifth before looking, and then found the code doing the same
thing.

Two things the game does not tell you. The chips are printed skills, discipline,
courage, while the values are stored skills, courage, discipline — the middle two are
crossed over, which will catch you out if you compare the screen against anything else. And the boosters come from promotions —
an ordinary decoration raises one of a man's own attributes, a promotion raises one of his
boosters instead. The most-promoted men are the ones worth putting in charge.

WHAT THAT IS WORTH, AND WHERE PEOPLE SHOULD SIT

Before the numbers: what I am adding up is each pilot's three coefficients. The engine
sums those across the force and then multiplies the total by other things entirely —
aircraft effectiveness, ammunition, and more I have not traced. So these figures are a
proxy for the pilot part of the sum, good for comparing one seating against another, and
not a prediction of anything that will happen to you.

One booster point is 0.05 against an attribute's full span of 0.20, so per man it is
small. But the commander boosts seven other men at once, and mine are 0/2/2 — two
attributes, seven pilots. On my squadron that adds +1.30 to an eight-ship force whose
unboosted score is about 3.25. Your own mileage depends entirely on your commander, your
pilots and who you send, but it makes choosing him the largest single seating decision
there is.

It is clamped at 5, though — the top of the scale you see in game. A pilot already at 5
gains nothing. Six of my twenty are at skill 5 and two are at 5/5/5, for whom no commander
does anything whatsoever, so boosters land hardest on a force with room to grow and are
half wasted on a flight of veterans.

Seating itself matters less than that, and in a way that depends on how you play. Scoring
the best eight-ship force I can put up, per AI pilot in it — you are not in the count,
because the game keeps no simulated skill for a human and your results come from your own
flying rather than from that table:

                                  you flying     you on the ground
    as it stands                     0.636            0.631
    strongest man from slot 0 down   0.664 (+4%)      0.556 (-12%)

If you fly every mission, stacking your best men into the first flights is slightly
better: you can send them as one force, and you are in command either way. If you often
sit one out, it is considerably worse, because it leaves the later flights under men with
no boosters to give — and on those missions one of them is in command.

Note what does not appear in that table: which flight a pilot sits in relative to you.
Your boosters cover everyone in the force, wherever they are seated. Seating decides who
can be sent together, and who commands when you stay behind. Nothing else.

The board's proposal hedges — good fliers spread so any pair of flights is sendable, best
boosters on the leads so whoever ends up commanding has something to give. Searching for
the best arrangement that exists beats it by about four per cent, which is not worth a
setting.

FATIGUE, WHICH IS NOTHING

It moves — 0 to 9, a sortie adds one, a day on the ground takes one back — and nothing
reads it. Every reference to the field is a write. Nothing in the generated mission varies
with it: two of my pilots flew at 6 and were rated the same as men at 2.

I am wary here, because I said the same about the boosters and was wrong — I had missed
the function that reads them, sitting next to the database routines. So for fatigue I went
back and enumerated every instruction that touches the field. They are all writes. If
somebody can demonstrate an effect I will gladly put the rest threshold back.

THE BOARD ITSELF

Your squadron laid out as the Combat Units screen lays it out, with the numbers you would
otherwise open twenty pilot files to read on every card — attributes, what the game will
rate him as in the air, his boosters, whether he is fit. The reserve sits underneath, best
first, so you can see whether somebody on the bench out-flies somebody in the line-up. On
mine, two did.

Click two pilots to swap them; click a man on the bench then a seat to exchange them. A
button proposes a whole seating. Apply takes a backup and writes in one transaction, and
refuses while IL-2 has the file open. Exchanges are one for one, so nobody is ever left
without an aeroplane.

THE REST OF 1.7

@Patricks Present every pending award at once from the Award points tab — the full list with
each man's standing beside it, handed over in one go, spending the points and adding the
attribute point the game adds. The killed and the missing are listed in red and not
ticked; a posthumous award should be a decision.

The Career Helper is dressed like the Service Record now instead of being a grey
utility beside it, and it closes when you close the Service Record.

@Viking1 Aircraft and materiel on the squadron panel are laid out properly, with drawn icons.

A parsing fault of mine, fixed. Six stock awards — the Order of the Red Banner in all
three awarding, Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin and the DPRK Hero's Medal —
write their condition across two lines, which the engine joins back together and I did
not. That made the top Soviet and Korean decorations look malformed when they were fine.

DOWNLOAD

    IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.7.0 --> outdated, newer version available
    SHA-256  247d3deec705c1ed92ae96e77d237746c7aadd8ca729ddcee18a919ae0ab03f2

Install over 1.6.x; photographs, settings and corrections are kept. The awards mod is
unchanged, so leave your awards as they are.

Corrections very welcome — on fatigue especially, but on any of it. This is one man
reading a disassembly against one career, and I would much rather be put right in the
thread than leave something wrong standing.

 

Alex aka Arrow_1974
 

Edited September 27 by Arrow_1974
New version available

[Viking1]

So I've been right to keep feeding my Flight Leads.. promotions are the ticket thats good to know! Great improvements here, thanks!

The Career Helper is now an indispensable tool. Simply outstanding work on this mod Alex but also on sharing what you have learned about how it all functions. really helpful! All I need now is a tool to transfer your pilots to my squadron heh..

Edited September 25 by Viking1

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.7.5 — what you are working towards, and a case to put it in

Gentlemen,

1.7.5 is mostly artwork. One new thing: the record now tells you what your pilot is
working towards, and how far off it is.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Under the awards on a pilot's page there is now a short list: for every ladder he is
already on, the next rung and the distance to it. Not a catalogue of everything in the
game — only the things actually in front of him.

Most rungs are a number, and the bar says which number:

    Bronze Star Medal                     16 / 35 sorties
    Legion of Merit                     15.8 / 200 hours
    Distinguished Unit Citation        1,551 / 14,000 targets
    Promotion to Lieutenant Colonel       35 / 75 days · 229.8 / 500 points

Some are not a number at all. The Purple Heart wants a wound, so it says "Wounded in
Action" rather than pretending you are a percentage of the way there. Others want a
rank, or squadron command, and say so.

Plenty can be earned more than one way, and that is the rule rather than the exception
outside the American set — of the Soviet and Korean decorations, five routes to the same
medal is ordinary. The nearest one is the bar; the others fold away under a chevron,
each showing its own progress. So the Order of the Red Star may head with nine sorties
of the fifteen it wants, and open to show that thirty ground targets or three air
victories would have done as well.

Three things to know about it before you rely on it:

  * It reads the same conditions the game does, out of awards.cfg. If you run the awards
    mod, it reads your modded file, so the figures are yours and not mine.
  * Where a condition rolls dice, it says the odds per mission rather than a date. That
    is the honest answer, not a hedge.
  * It only shows the ladders a pilot is already on. A decoration he has never touched
    does not appear, because the engine will not consider him for it either.

One finding while building it, which may save someone else the puzzling. Some awards in
the file have a second route written as AwardByDef. Reading it, that route looks live —
a coin-flip on every sortie. It is not. Across a full career I could find no pilot who
had ever received an award by it, for any of the decorations that offer it. Something
gates it that I have not identified, so the list ignores that route entirely. If it
ever fires for you, I would like to know.

THE DISPLAY CASE

There is a new button under the awards: a glazed case with the pilot's decorations
mounted in it — medals, his badge, unit citations and squadron insignia, with his rank
and name engraved on the brass.

Three of them, for the Air Force, the Soviets and the North Koreans. The eastern cases
are not the American one recoloured. Soviet awards divide by how they are worn rather
than by seniority alone — the orders that hang from a ribbon in one row, the screw-back
orders that have no ribbon at all in another, the Gold Star above them — so those cases
are built that way.

Each plate is engraved in the language of the air force that issued the awards, not in
yours. A Soviet case reads Майор whatever language you have the page set to; hover the
brass and it tells you the rank in your own. The name is never touched, whatever it is.

The one air force this cannot serve properly is the North Korean. The game ships no
Korean strings at all — its Chinese for the 503rd is 少校, which is the Chinese rank and
wrong on a Korean plate — but its English is not "Major" either, it is "Sojwa", the
Korean rank romanised. So that is what a North Korean plate carries: the right word in
the wrong alphabet, which is the best the game has to offer.

Nothing for the Navy or the Marines yet. The artwork is drawn and sitting in the
release, but the game has no career for either service, so there is nothing to put in a
case and no way for me to check one.

SERVICE DRESS

The uniform view now shows the right coat for the occasion. Service dress for the Air
Force is the silver-tan; for the Navy, khaki. Blue and white are full dress, which is
what carries the full-size medals.

Each wears its own rank. The Navy's khaki shows it twice, on the shoulder boards and
again on the shirt collar, as it was worn.

MEDALS AND RIBBONS

All seventeen full-size medals are redrawn. They are also no longer wearing two shadows
each: thirteen of them had one painted into the picture on top of the one the coat
casts, which is a good part of why the rack used to look uneven from medal to medal.

Ribbons and drapes are lit now rather than flat. The cloth bows over its mount the way
it does in life, brightest a little above centre and falling away to the edges. The
weave is untouched — it is only the light that is new.

THREE FIXES WORTH KNOWING

If you have been looking at a medal in the tracker and thinking it did not match the one
in the game, that was real and it was mine. Award pictures were being cached in your
browser for a year against an address that never changed, so a decoration you remodelled
never reached the page. Fixed properly: the address now moves when the atlas does. If
you have modded award art, it should finally show what you drew.

The Career Helper's Revive tab has a way back for your own pilot. Its Captured tab
will always mark him missing - that is the point of it - but Revive used to list only
your squadron mates, so marking your own man was a one-way door, and one of you walked
through it. He is on the list now.

The window also widens from the day of the loss to that day and the one after, for your
pilot and your squadron mates alike. That mistake is nearly always noticed one click too
late, with End Day already pressed. One day and no more, though: a man brought back a
week on walks into a squadron whose war went without him, days of sorties he was not on
and losses he never saw. If you are past the window, your last backup is the way back -
the Helper writes one before every change it makes.

And the Career Helper no longer offers awards for withdrawal as "#188 pilot 20 award
601014". It names the man and the decoration.

BTW: Backups live here: X:\Users\<your name>\AppData\Local\IL2KoreaTracker\backups\

and your career db: <path to your game>\data\Career\<career>.db

THE MOD

The awards mod is unchanged from 1.7.0, byte for byte. Nothing to merge or redo.

DOWNLOAD

    IL-2 Korea Service record v.1.7.5

    SHA-256  96ee9703db6061f87acfa7ec2237f2df4b1970f7a8f56aceda50be0a0891db4d

(GitHub writes the zip's name with dots where I put spaces. The file is the same one.)

It is a bigger download than 1.7.0 — 76 MB against 51. The lighting on the ribbons and
every measurement the cases take of a piece of art go through a numerical library that
now has to ship inside the exe. I would rather hand you 25 MB than a release whose
medals do not draw.

As ever: if something does not match what you see in your own career, say so and I will
go and look.

Successful flying,

Alex aka Arrow_1974
 

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.8.0 — the squadron's war diary, and a seating chart that
fits your regiment

Gentlemen,

first at all I'm sorry to have two version releases on one day. But two things in this one. A new page that tells the story of your squadron day by day,
and a fix to the Career Helper that anyone flying a Soviet, Chinese or North Korean
unit needs.

THE WAR DIARY

There is a new button beside the flight record on a pilot's page. It opens the
squadron's war diary: the whole career, written up a day at a time.

    17 April 1951
      Mission 14   Attack Frontline   Hagalgye · 15 targets destroyed   ★
        — Hugh Gillespie lost his aircraft
        — Jose Castro lost his aircraft
        — Jose Castro was killed in action           [KIA]
        — Hugh Gillespie was killed in action        [KIA]
        — You earned and were presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross
        3 decorations earned, squadron-wide · 2 presented

Every line is something the game wrote down. Nothing is generated, nothing is invented.
Sorties and where they went, who reported for duty, who was wounded, who was lost,
which aircraft arrived and which came out of the shop, when an operation began and
ended, and when the squadron was ordered to move to a new field.

The missions you flew yourself are marked, and your own decorations are the only lines
in colour, so you can find your own thread down a long career at a glance. Quiet days
collapse to a single line — one aeroplane back on strength does not deserve the same
space as the day you lost four.

It prints, and the diary stops at the day your career has reached. It never shows you
tomorrow, even though the game sometimes writes tomorrow down in advance.

Three things I had to get right, which are worth knowing because they would each have
made it lie:

  * An award event is not an award. Of the 1,718 in the career I built this against,
    244 are decorations earned, 229 presentations, and 1,245 are removals — the
    bookkeeping behind a cluster replacing the medal it supersedes. Counted together
    they said the squadron was decorated 99 times on a day it was decorated 29.
  * The game writes some casualty rows twice. One pilot's Mustang is logged as lost
    twice in the same second on the same sortie. The diary folds those; it does not
    fold kills, because two kills in one second really are two things destroyed.
  * An unscheduled sortie is numbered -1, -2 and downwards internally. It says
    "Unscheduled" rather than "Mission -1".

One discovery along the way. Event type 30 was unidentified until I checked what the
game was telling me: it is the squadron being ordered to move to another airfield, and
the diary now says so by name.

THE DISPLAY CASE, TO KEEP

The shadowbox has two buttons under it now: Save picture and Print.

The picture comes out at 2050 x 1860 — the size the artwork was drawn at, not the size
of your window — with the engraved plate and everything in place, named after the pilot
and his squadron. Post it wherever you like.

THE CAREER HELPER: EASTERN REGIMENTS

This is the important one if you fly for the VVS, the PLAAF or the KPAF.

An American squadron is 24 seats: six flights of four. An eastern regiment is not the
same thing with fewer men in it — it is a commander and his wingman, then three
squadrons of twelve, thirty-eight positions in all. The seating chart only ever drew
24 of them. If you flew a MiG regiment or a ShAP, a third of your unit was invisible.

It now reads the establishment from your own career file and draws the whole thing:

    Commander Flight
    1st Squadron                        2nd Squadron
    3rd Squadron

Six columns, and the tab scrolls, so the bench and the buttons stay reachable. Every
part is named the way the game names it, in your own language.

Worth saying plainly: the game's own Combat Units screen cannot show you the 3rd
Squadron at all. It lays the regiment out sideways, runs out of width, and has no
horizontal scrollbar. That is not something the tracker introduced and it is not
something you were doing wrong.

My thanks to @Swoose, who reported that his 57th ShAP had 38 positions and asked whether
the chart could hold them. It could not, and chasing that turned up three further
defects in the same code.

 

DOWNLOAD

IL-2 Korea Service Record v1.8.0 --> outdated, new version available

          SHA-256  dad2c349ced9a67fc433a8c0fe703d34f222b2dff285b9da686b512c88a49148

(GitHub writes the zip's name with dots where I put spaces. It is the same file.)

One known nuisance, unrelated to this release: Windows Smart App Control blocks the
Career Helper on some machines, because the build is not code-signed. If you turn Smart
App Control off to get past it, be aware that Windows will not let you turn it back on
again without a reinstall. I am looking at getting the builds signed.

As ever: if something does not match what you see in your own career, say so and I will
go and look.

Edited September 29 by Arrow_1974

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 1.8.1 — signed, and the Award points tab shows its work

Gentlemen,

A small release, but one thing in it matters more than its size.

IT IS SIGNED NOW

The setup program, the tracker and the Career Helper are all Authenticode signed.
Right-click the setup program, Properties, Digital Signatures, and it will tell you
who made it.

This is why: a user found that Windows Smart App Control refused to start the Career
Helper at all, because nothing in the release was signed. He turned Smart App Control
off to get past it — and Windows will not let you turn that back on again without
reinstalling, which is a poor thing to have to spend on a hobby tool. That should not
happen to anyone else now.

SmartScreen is a separate thing from signing and works on reputation, so a brand-new
release can still raise a warning until enough people have run it. It will settle.

THE AWARD POINTS TAB SHOWS WHAT IT CHANGED

Presenting a batch of awards raises the pilots' attributes, and until now the list
simply emptied and left you to guess what had moved.

The tab now carries three attributes — skill, discipline and courage — each as a pair
of columns: what the man stood at before, and what he stands at after.

    Pilot              Award                     Skill  after   Discipline  after   Courage  after
    Hayden Burkhart    Pilot's Badge                1     ↑ 3        1       ↑ 2        2       2
    Erik Greiert       Air Medal and Three Oak…     4       4        5         5        3     ↑ 5

The right-hand column of each pair is blank until you press Present. Then the rows stay
on screen with both sides filled in and an arrow against everything that actually went
up, instead of the list clearing and telling you nothing.

Boosters are deliberately absent. A decoration never moves them — only a promotion does.

TWO SMALLER FIXES

  * A very long pilot name is no longer cut off mid-word on the display case's brass.
    It shrinks to fit, and where even that will not do it ends in an ellipsis, so you
    can see that something was shortened rather than wondering.
  * In a narrow window the combat results strip clipped the word ARMAMENTS. It now
    tightens, and then wraps, rather than cutting the label short.

DOWNLOAD

    https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record/releases/tag/v1.8.1 --> outdated, new version available

Installer  IL2_Korea_Service_Record_Setup_v1.8.1.exe
           SHA-256  07962df8b2972e81934b920a472b1680a5b5e8b7e9f72dd1aff709c29f60b560

Zip        IL-2.Korea.Service.Record.v1.8.1.zip
           SHA-256  9a47ef1a87c078cc834a25185b562ba636064e588d0103878718b75b663c660d

(GitHub writes the zip's name with dots where I put spaces. It is the same file.)

The project lives at https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record — the source,
the issue tracker, and every release. If it has been useful to you, a star there costs
you nothing and helps more than you would think. Thanks in advance.

As ever: if something does not match what you see in your own career, say so and I will
go and look.

Edited September 29 by Arrow_1974
Newer version available

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 2.0.0 — and a warning about the 29 September game update

Gentlemen,

Read the first section even if you never touch the tracker. It concerns your
career files.

THE GAME UPDATE IS THROWING AWAY YOUR SORTIES

Since the 29 September update, IL-2 Korea does not save the record of the
individual flights in a career. The mission is saved. Your awards are saved.
Your sortie counter goes up. But the detailed flight records underneath —
who flew, for how long, what they hit — are discarded before they reach the
career file.

Nothing looks wrong in game. You fly, you debrief, you collect a medal, the
numbers move. It is silent.

You can check it in ten seconds. Open

    ...\IL2Series\data\_career.log

and search for "escapedJail". If you find lines like

    [SQL ERROR] sqlSave; 1; table sortie has no column named escapedJail

then that is it — one line per pilot per mission. Those are your sorties
failing to save.

It affects everyone on this build, including careers started after it. It is
not something about your installation, and it is not caused by any mod. I
traced it to a single mistaken column name in one of the game's own database
statements and reported it to the developers with a reproduction. It is a
small mistake with a small fix, so I hope it comes back quickly.

Until it does: do not fly a career you care about. The missions already
affected cannot be recovered — the data was never written. Your career file
is not corrupted and nothing else is at risk: awards, promotions, the roster,
aircraft and operations are all fine.

SO THE RECORD NOW TELLS YOU

Several of you reported the tracker as broken, which was fair — a flight
record with holes in it and hours that disagree with the game looks exactly
like a broken tracker.

Open a career the game has damaged and the record now says so at the top, in
plain words, with the number of affected missions and the date they start
from. It will not blame itself for the game's mistake, and it will not blame
the game when the fault is its own: a mission you have not flown yet is not
counted.

2.0.0 READS THE NEW BUILD AT ALL

This is why the version number jumps.

The update changed how the game stores its text and artwork, and 1.8.1 simply
cannot read any of it on the current build. Award names, rank names, mission
names — all of it would come back blank or as raw codes. 2.0.0 reads both the
old and the new format and works out which your installation has, so it runs
correctly whether or not you have updated.

While fixing that I found a second, older fault: the tracker kept its own
copy of the game's text and never noticed when the game changed it. On this
machine it was serving names that were eighteen days stale. It now refreshes
whenever the game is patched — which also means the two new mission types,
Strategic Object Cover and Enemy Harbour Attack, appear by name rather than
as a number.

OPERATIONS

The squadron statistics now show how many operations the unit has seen
through and how many it won:

    OPERATIONS    8 (5 successful)

Be warned that this is harsher than it looks. An operation your squadron flew
nothing in still counts against the total — that is the game's own scoring,
not mine, and it is why a good unit can sit at five from eight.

The war diary now says which way each one went, instead of closing every
operation with the same line. And eastern careers no longer print "EB" in
front of every operation name, which was my mistake: it means Eastern Bloc.

THE PAGES HAVE BEEN DRESSED

The front door now shows a different aircraft each time you open it — six of
them, from the Mustang to the MiG-15 — standing on a faint briefing table.
The service record sits on a restricted navigation chart, the war diary on an
operations map, and the flight record on a flight line with a Mustang and its
ground crew. All of them are turned well down and none of them print.

The flight record is also signed now, in a period hand, above the line where
the typed name sits. Russian and Chinese pilots get a signature in their own
script rather than a block of sans-serif.

If the chart behind the service record is not to your taste there is a small
switch beside the language picker to turn it off. It is remembered.

THE MOD

Unchanged. The 29 September update altered several award conditions on the
game's side and I am working through what that means for the mod, which will
follow separately once I have tested it rather than guessed.

DOWNLOAD

    https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record/releases/tag/v2.0.0 --> outdated, newer version available

Installer  IL2_Korea_Service_Record_Setup_v2.0.0.exe
           SHA-256  5998ce43690910f79a41faf64c6e39c2399bc8c83e816ac53eec8f0dbcf2d6e7

Zip        IL-2.Korea.Service.Record.v2.0.0.zip
           SHA-256  659daa02b157bc997af778a5a12105d5c95abc702d97b1ef874ad65b8fba3b3f

(GitHub writes the zip's name with dots where I put spaces. It is the same
file.)

Everything is Authenticode signed, as it has been since 1.8.1. SmartScreen
works on reputation rather than signatures, so a brand-new release can still
raise a warning until enough people have run it.

The project lives at https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record — the
source, the issue tracker, and every release. If it has been useful to you, a
star there costs you nothing and helps more than you would think.

As ever: if something does not match what you see in your own career, say so
and I will go and look. That is how the sortie problem above was found.

Edited October 1 by Arrow_1974
Newer version available

[Sneaksie]

Thank you for finding this error - it has slipped past us because it doesn't affect the permanent counters like kills and awards, only the daily report list. It will be fixed in the next update.

[Arrow_1974]

IL-2 Korea Service Record 2.1.0 — one medal per sortie

Gentlemen,

This one is mostly about the awards mod, and it changes how medals are given
out in careers you are already flying, not only in new ones. If you use the
mod, read the first two sections before you install.

ONE MEDAL PER SORTIE

Until now a single sortie could pay you several decorations at once. Shoot
down two aircraft and you might collect a Silver Star and, in the same
debrief, be walked up two or three rungs of the Air Medal — each rung
awarded and then immediately retired by the one above it, so the only trace
was a ribbon that had jumped three places while you watched.

That is finished. The decorations are now ranked in the order of precedence
the Air Force actually used — Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross,
Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, Soldier's Medal,
Bronze Star, Air Medal, Commendation — and a sortie pays the highest one it
earns. The others wait their turn.

So a four-kill sortie is a Distinguished Service Cross and nothing else. The
Air Medal rung you also qualified for arrives on a later flight, which is how
it should have read all along.

The awards that are not decorations for the sortie — your wings, the Purple
Heart, the Korean Service Medal, the unit citations — are untouched and still
arrive whenever they are due.

FIGHTER-BOMBER PILOTS NO LONGER HAVE TO BE LUCKY

The Silver Star and the DSC have always needed the citation to be approved as
well as earned: a 60 or 80 per cent roll on top of the kills. That is right
for a fighter squadron, where meeting aircraft is the job. It is not right
for a fighter-bomber squadron, and the game's own data says so plainly.

I went through 418 sorties flown by the pilots of a Mustang fighter-bomber
squadron. Exactly one of them produced two airborne kills. Not one produced
three or more. The reason is in the mission tables: a Mustang fighter-bomber
unit is given no interception work at all, while a Sabre wing flies a fifth
of its missions as intercepts. The two are not doing the same job.

So in a fighter-bomber squadron the roll is waived. The kill thresholds are
unchanged — two or three for the Silver Star, four or five for the DSC — but
a pilot who gets there is not then asked to win a lottery as well. Fighter
squadrons roll exactly as before.

This applies to every USAF fighter-bomber squadron in the game, and it keeps
applying to a unit that later re-equips with Sabres. That is deliberate: the
squadron is still a fighter-bomber squadron and you joined it as one.

THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS MUST NOW BE FLOWN FOR

In the stock game the DFC is handed out by the daily roster pass, on career
totals, without reference to any particular flight. It is a valour award and
it should be earned in the air, so all six rungs are now granted only by
flying. The Medal of Honor, the DSC and the Silver Star already worked this
way.

The Bronze Star with the "V" device and the Soldier's Medal stay as they are,
and that is not an oversight. The "V" is for valour on the ground and
expressly not in the air, and the Soldier's Medal is for heroism with no
enemy in it at all — a man pulled from a burning aircraft. The game models
neither act, so neither condition can look for one.

THE DISPLAY CASE AND THE RIBBON RACK

Three things were quietly wrong.

A pilot who had been awarded the Medal of Honor twice wore the plain ribbon:
the rack was showing the first rung of each ladder instead of the highest, so
the oak leaf cluster simply vanished. It now shows the highest award you
hold, on every ladder.

The awards list below it did the same in reverse — it listed every rung
separately, so "Medal of Honor" and "Medal of Honor and One Oak Leaf Cluster"
sat side by side. It now shows the highest, with the earlier ones folded
underneath it where you can still see their dates.

And the brass plate in the display case was engraving the rank in full and
then running out of room for the man, which is the wrong way round. It now
reads "2nd Lt. Meade Bennett" rather than "Second Lieutenant M. Be…". The
rank is still in the language of the air force that issued the awards, and
hovering it gives you the full rank in yours.

THE CAREER HELPER

Two fixes.

Reviving a commander now works. It restored the pilot but left the career
itself still flagged, so the game went on offering to postpone, end the
career or assign a new commander every time you loaded it.

And promotions no longer appear in the award points tab. They were sitting
there looking like medals, and handing one over did all the wrong things at
once — it raised a random skill instead of the rank, wrote the wrong kind of
record, and spent an award point for nothing. A promotion belongs to the
game, which lets you choose the attribute yourself. The helper now leaves it
alone.

STILL OUTSTANDING: THE 29 SEPTEMBER SORTIE PROBLEM

The fault I described in 2.0.0 — the game discarding the detailed record of
each flight — has been acknowledged by the developers and a fix is expected
in the next game update. As far as I know it has not shipped yet. The check
is still ten seconds:

    ...\IL2Series\data\_career.log

and search for "escapedJail". The tracker still warns you at the top of a
career the game has damaged.

BTW - I have a fix. It is a small script that corrects the faulty
statement in your own copy of the game; it backs the file up first and
refuses to run twice. Write me a personal message if you want it.

DOWNLOAD

    https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record/releases/tag/v2.1.0 --> newer version available

Installer  IL2_Korea_Service_Record_Setup_v2.1.0.exe
           SHA-256  6c0c6159621060354b34d0b2f86fab29868fe0a29093878a824977162ecbd283

Zip        IL-2.Korea.Service.Record.v2.1.0.zip
           SHA-256  ea3bbb4cc40c93436ebf4723a4cc6b5bf842edd114e60f17c0ee033ecbee1039

(GitHub writes the zip's name with dots where I put spaces. It is the same
file.)

The installer still offers the two promotion systems and ships one awards.cfg
for each; everything above is in both.

Everything is Authenticode signed. SmartScreen works on reputation rather
than signatures, so a new release can still raise a warning until enough
people have run it.

The project lives at https://github.com/1-Arrow-1/IL2-Korea_Service_Record — the
source, the issue tracker, and every release. If it has been useful to you, don't forget to give me a star.
That will help me in future to sign the code WITHOUT using a service I need to pay for. 

As ever: if something does not match what you see in your own career, say so
and I will go and look. Two of the three display faults above were found that
way.

Edited October 2 by Arrow_1974