Hotfix 1.004b is now live

[67thFBS_Heiden]

How do we install this hotfix?

[BlitzPig_EL]

It auto installs when you start the game.

[67thFBS_Heiden]

2 hours ago, BlitzPig_EL said:

It auto installs when you start the game.

Thanks.  My game is still saying 1.004 without the B, that's why I was asking.

 

[Voxman]

11 hours ago, JochenHeiden said:

Thanks.  My game is still saying 1.004 without the B, that's why I was asking.

 

You'll see the revision in the upper left corner in the hangar.

[JG4_Moltke71]

@Regingrave, you asked me in the closed 1.004 thread about my graphic settings regarding to the „strange colour issue“ while night in the game. These where my settings while this issue occurs:

 

However, either my current graphic settings the issue has gone:

I experimented a little with my settings because I tried the „cheeky DLSS“ external tool to improve my gaming experience but I think the external tool had no influence to solve the issue.

 

By that way I will give a big compliment to the devs how great you implement the night atmosphere and illumination in the game. I started a harbour attack mission, started with IL10‘s parked in the darkness while the flight was calculated to arrive at the target in the first daylight. 
What happened then in my VR googles as I started the mission was… amazing, stunning, breathtaking 😳

The cockpit lights, landing and nav lights, the airfield illumination, the flames from the engine’s exhaust while taxiing and flight, the illumination of the settlements and towns… WOW!!

…blown away by this fantastic experience I really would suggest implementing missions like this into the career.. Night attacks on airfields, harbours or whatever… Mission start in the darkness and arrive at targets in darkness or dawn..

You Devs created something great with that, this fantastic potential must be utilized.🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

I had my „Tora Tora Tora“ Moment when this mission starts on the carriers in the end of the night 🌅😎
 

The combination of IL2 Korea using DLAA together with the „cheeky fovieated DLSS“ mod shows what is possible with your great simulator. (And I don't even think I've got everything set up optimally in the „cheeky DLSS mod“ yet 😅)

Everything needed seems to be there—make something of it!!!!

Edited Sunday at 03:17 PM by JG4_Moltke71

[kmo1619]

 

The graphics are still pretty messed up.

I tried the config-file workaround. The preset seems to reset to “VR Optimized” anyway, but changing draw distance from the new default of around 0.4 to 1.0 fixed the worst pop-in, like bridges and vehicles only appearing from about 300 m away. Still, the rendering is very uneven and the landscape looks terrible at certain distances.

I’m running a 9800X3D, RTX 5080, 64 GB RAM and a Quest 3S. With VD USB I had a very smooth setup before, mostly on Ultra apart from a few heavy settings like shadows.

My real limitation has always been AI CPU load in single-player. Multiplayer runs extremely smoothly, while career and single missions are much more CPU-limited.

So now VR graphics have been heavily reduced to prevent crashes at extreme resolutions, but the actual single-player CPU issue is still there. For me that means the same performance limitation as before, just with much worse graphics.

That’s especially frustrating because the AI has improved a lot. “Home by Christmas” runs flawlessly, presumably because the scripted campaign is better CPU-optimized. I’d much rather see that kind of optimization brought to career and single missions instead of such aggressive VR graphics limits.

[YoYo]

Which option controls the draw distance in setup.cfg?

[KC23]

A voice comms bug I noticed playing skirmish mode: Enemies shot down and bailed with a good parachute ... you get a warning about an enemy on your 6 when he is floating down in his parachute.

[MiGCap]

9 minutes ago, KC23 said:

A voice comms bug I noticed playing skirmish mode: Enemies shot down and bailed with a good parachute ... you get a warning about an enemy on your 6 when he is floating down in his parachute.

He could shoot at You with his pistol … 😉

[kmo1619]

1 hour ago, YoYo said:

Which option controls the draw distance in setup.cfg?

Most likely the option draw _distance that seems to be set up in values between 0 and 1. But I'm not entirely sure about that. When I didn't lock it,the game reset the preset to value 0, but the draw distance was left untouched. But I just started messing around with the config after the update,and some things seem to be different from the GB startup.

[Dash,Polder]

Think setting draw distance to 0.0 turns it off and gives you maximum distance viewing on things like trucks, at least what I see.  I tried manually setting it to 1.5 to see if it would increase, it did, but upon opening the startup.cfg post game it was set to 0.000.  No problem seeing trucks at distance now.

[kmo1619]

14 hours ago, Dash,Polder said:

Think setting draw distance to 0.0 turns it off and gives you maximum distance viewing on things like trucks, at least what I see.  I tried manually setting it to 1.5 to see if it would increase, it did, but upon opening the startup.cfg post game it was set to 0.000.  No problem seeing trucks at distance now.

Interesting… did you set the config file to read-only?

I find it really hard to judge what’s actually happening at the moment. For example, I get the impression that the game automatically switches to the “VR Optimized” mode even if something else is set in the config. It seems to change the settings accordingly, but then doesn’t write those changes back to the config when you close the game.

Unlike GB, it also doesn’t seem to require a restart anymore, which makes the config-file workaround much less reliable. So it’s pretty difficult to tell what is actually being applied.

Without write protection, the game once changed my draw distance to 0.4, but later it kept the value at 1.0.

In the end it almost doesn’t matter though, because the truck may render farther away, but it’s still sitting in a blurry green mess. So the extra draw distance doesn’t help that much.

[pepper9881]

53 минуты назад, kmo1619 сказал:

Например, у меня складывается впечатление, что игра автоматически переключается в режим «Оптимизация для VR», даже если в настройках указано что-то другое. Кажется, она соответствующим образом изменяет настройки, но затем не записывает эти изменения обратно в конфигурацию при закрытии игры.

 

This is explicitly stated in the patch 1.004 notes:
VR Optimized mode is now enabled automatically when a VR headset is connected. 

I think this is just a manipulation by the developers: after receiving a lot of complaints about performance in VR, they couldn’t come up with anything better than to force players to lower the graphics quality and present it as a key performance improvement in VR. I’ve disliked the graphics in the “Optimized for VR” setting since the game’s release — because of the blurry LODs at a distance — and I’ve always set it to “High”. Why did the developers unilaterally decide for me what quality I need?

[Dash,Polder]

1 hour ago, kmo1619 said:

Interesting… did you set the config file to read-only?

I didn't, I simply changed the value manually in the file to 1.5, saved, than fired up the game to test it out.  It did allow trucks to be seen at longer distance, upon shutting the game down I intended to increase it higher, but the value was now set at zero by the game.  So logically one must assume any value over 1.0 isn't valid and the game reset it to off.

Anyway it fixed the short range visual contact problem and no further testing need be wasted, at least by me.

[Fabry_ASW19]

1 hour ago, pepper9881 said:

This is explicitly stated in the patch 1.004 notes:
VR Optimized mode is now enabled automatically when a VR headset is connected. 

I think this is just a manipulation by the developers: after receiving a lot of complaints about performance in VR, they couldn’t come up with anything better than to force players to lower the graphics quality and present it as a key performance improvement in VR. I’ve disliked the graphics in the “Optimized for VR” setting since the game’s release — because of the blurry LODs at a distance — and I’ve always set it to “High”. Why did the developers unilaterally decide for me what quality I need?

Yep for me that just diminished quality without improving FPS I had no problems before running on "High" why doing this?

[kmo1619]

1 hour ago, pepper9881 said:

This is explicitly stated in the patch 1.004 notes:
VR Optimized mode is now enabled automatically when a VR headset is connected. 

I think this is just a manipulation by the developers: after receiving a lot of complaints about performance in VR, they couldn’t come up with anything better than to force players to lower the graphics quality and present it as a key performance improvement in VR. I’ve disliked the graphics in the “Optimized for VR” setting since the game’s release — because of the blurry LODs at a distance — and I’ve always set it to “High”. Why did the developers unilaterally decide for me what quality I need?

I know… I thought maybe the config could bypass it, but like I said, the settings now seem to take effect on the fly while the game is running. In GB they were loaded at startup and couldn’t really be changed without restarting.

At the moment, though, it’s basically unplayable for me. Everything is extremely blurry, rivers disappear, and the whole landscape just falls apart at distance. It’s honestly starting to annoy me quite a bit, especially because it doesn’t even solve the CPU-limit problem.

Before the patch, the scripted campaign was probably the best thing I’d seen in VR so far: great graphics, clearly better optimized for CPU load, and no stuttering.

now when I start up the game, I really hate it and switch to GB or DCS after 20 Min

Its such a shame...

1 hour ago, Dash,Polder said:

I didn't, I simply changed the value manually in the file to 1.5, saved, than fired up the game to test it out.  It did allow trucks to be seen at longer distance, upon shutting the game down I intended to increase it higher, but the value was now set at zero by the game.  So logically one must assume any value over 1.0 isn't valid and the game reset it to off.

Anyway it fixed the short range visual contact problem and no further testing need be wasted, at least by me.

We definitely need more testing. My guess is that the config only gets changed when you actually change a graphics setting in-game; otherwise it seems to stay untouched. But that’s all speculation at this point.

And honestly, I don’t really feel like wasting hours constantly restarting the game just to troubleshoot graphics problems that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

As good as the AI fixes and the other improvements are, I think they really messed up the game with the new graphics setup.

Its getting close to useless for me.

[Dash,Polder]

But it's always been that way even in Great Battles, many of the settings aren't accessible in game, but you manually can modify and adjust them.  Like propeller RPM's and the main menu size, distance, and curvature and land details to name a few.   

I'd rather have them adjustable via edit than nothing at all if they aren't in the games menu.  That is a user friendly gesture by the design team, and I'm glad they allow it.

[kmo1619]

 

 

I know… I actually meant the fact that it worked perfectly fine before, and now we have to do extreme tweaking — not to improve performance, but just to get back to the state we already had.

Limiting the graphics options specifically for VR was, in my opinion, an incredibly bad decision. It gives the impression that the real underlying problem either isn’t being addressed or simply can’t be, so now everyone is stuck with potato graphics because some people kept trying to stream 8K VR — which, from what I understand, no current GPU can realistically handle anyway.

At that point, I think it would be better to just be honest about what is and isn’t technically possible, instead of imposing such aggressive limitations on everyone.

In its current state, this is basically the death of IL-2 Korea in VR for me. 

I mean, I spent the first two or three days tweaking everything until it finally ran really well, and in the end I was genuinely happy with it. Until that patch...

And honestly, we’re paying a lot of money for this. They clearly expect people to keep spending considerably more on DLCs, aircraft and everything else over time.

I have to admit, the more days go by and the more often I try it again, the more pissed off I get.The game has basically become unplayable for me.

[GiftGruen]

Hmm. Unplayable is imho to much to say - but im general I understand your critics.

Graphical / VR wise 1.004b was a step backwards. I am somewhat in heaven because that Cheeky stuff right now, but, yes, the game itself seems to suffer questionable decisions.

[86Cheese]

The game is unplayable for a lot of us now though. Ground targets dont render from distances of like 500 meters, hell half the objects on the map don't either. Spotting planes is virtually impossible. Half of the textures are at such a low resolution the gauges that are readable just look awful, even with 4k textures enabled. This has absolutely ruined the game for a lot of people and it needs to be rolled back, along with the fuel system changes. Until they can be thought out and implemented properly it needs to fixed. I genuinely feel like i got rug pulled. @LukeFF i really hope you guys are listening. This vr settings change is awful. Please change it back.

 

Not everyone was having performance issues in VR to begin. Blanket forcing the entire player base into potato mode doesn't fix anything.

Edited Monday at 07:00 PM by 86Cheese

[GiftGruen]

I had quite a beautyful evening now with some Mig15 early morning interception missions. That‘s not ground pounding, yes.

IDing a Sabre vs a Mig15 is somewhat hard, yes, but that‘s what it was before. IDing a Mustang vs a Sabre is easy going and my gauges are clear and my cockpit textures are perfectly beautyful, the best I ever saw in gaming.

It is for sure also a question of personal hardware setup, but for me personally, the gaming experience in Korea with improved AI evasive manoevers and Cheeky-driven GPU performance is on a really high level of Entertainment now. 

There‘s still open work to do for the Devs, sure. But ‚unplayable‘ is not what I‘d tell it from my actual point of view.

 

Edited Monday at 09:09 PM by GiftGruen

[67thFBS_Heiden]

Can't say I can relate to any of these doom and gloom statements.  I find the game extremely playable right now.  Granted, I am on 2D because the thought of wearing a VR bucket for hours is horrifying, but I am playing on 4K with a 5080 and I got settings turned way up, and it's flawless.  

[Husar]

44 minutes ago, 67thFBS_Heiden said:

Can't say I can relate to any of these doom and gloom statements.  I find the game extremely playable right now.  Granted, I am on 2D because the thought of wearing a VR bucket for hours is horrifying, but I am playing on 4K with a 5080 and I got settings turned way up, and it's flawless.  

 

Please ran this track on your system and report if it's  flawless.  

drop files in IL2Series\game\data\Tracks

https://limewire.com/d/HyVh3#ENWBA9nx1E

 

Edited Monday at 10:02 PM by Husar

[86Cheese]

Thats great you guys are having fun. That doesn't change the fact that a lot of us arent. I was having a great time before this update but I wasn't on here telling people the game is fine when they were talking about the problems they were having. Im happy for you but telling me game is fine in 2d doesn't really add anything to the conversation surrounding VR. Fact is, this update was bad. The fuel system is also broken now. Minor changes to AI dont really make up for that when you cant even change your fuel tank to keep the plane in the air.

The current state of things is frankly quite grim for VR. The most active topics on this forum are people using 15 different third party programs and sacrificing their first born to get marginally acceptable performance in VR, yet 1C is completely ignoring all of this while using VR performance as a major selling point at the same time.

Then there are folks like me and KMO1619, who are clearly outliers, that just weeks ago had no problem running the game in VR without any voodoo. Almost max settings on a 4080 super with a 7800x3d and no third party bs. Solid 90fps with some dips here an there.

On early access launch i was running at max settings with no Dlss or upscaling with a steady 90fps.

Now the game runs substantially worse and I am forced to run it on basically the lowest settings, which pretty much ruins the whole deal. I paid $170 for this game and the VR experience has gotten progressively worse with nearly every update. And now it seams the devs have just given up and decided to make VR worse for everyone who doesn't want to spend more time scouring github and editing config files than playing the actual game just so they'd stop complaining about VR performance. 

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE JUST GIVE US A DECENT GRAPHICS SETTINGS MENU AND LET US FIGURE IT. THIS IS NOT A SOLUTION. Its just pissing people off.

[Jaegermeister]

On 10/4/2026 at 11:20 AM, kmo1619 said:

 

That’s especially frustrating because the AI has improved a lot. “Home by Christmas” runs flawlessly, presumably because the scripted campaign is better CPU-optimized. I’d much rather see that kind of optimization brought to career and single missions instead of such aggressive VR graphics limits.

Thanks for the compliment, that was one of the goals. You are correct about being better optimized. In a scripted campaign or single mission it is relatively easy to delete all of the unneeded linked objects that are outside the Player's immediate area, because the mission builder always knows more or less where that plane will be. I also activate and deactivate AAA, airfield objects and vehicles with the Player plane, instead of "Eastern" or "Western" factions, which is the biggest reduction in CPU load. Instead of hundreds of calculations, it instantly becomes thousands when those linked entities all activate and deactivate each other all over the map. I also disable any objects that are not in use, and the career templates leave everything enabled all the time throughout the missions.

It is not possible to do any of those things with a career mission template that generates missions in many areas of the same map with various AI friendly and enemy combinations. The more versatile the career mission template is, the more memory it will take to run the missions on it.