Ah, okay.
Here's my brief take (as I said I would) on FB (and it's improvements over Il2) that I have noticed/messed around with since I bought the game (wednsday).
Keep in mind I've only invested maybe 3-4 hours on it so far.
Landing Lights/Navigation Lights- Something new, and interesting. It'll do wonders for online wars that have night missions, and also allows for something else to do if you get bored of combat (practicing night landings/navigation/formation flying). The AI will fly around with navigation lights while they are in, I'll call it, navigation mode. If you get too far behind them and can no longer make out their plane, you still see a slight glint of green/red off in the distance, so you can still locate your flight. The AI will also turn off the navigation lights when it goes into 'combat mode' and will leave them off. I did notice one glitch- once when attacking Pe8s, my AI wingman in a B-239 briefly turn on his lights while still right behind the Pe8. Dunno the cause of it.
The landing light is only on some planes, but is pictured above Russian's post. It also illuminates a small area in front of your plane and looks very similiar to how a real world flashlight would look on the ground... but not a flood light. It gets bigger and smaller, further out or closer in, bright or dimmer as you increase alt or get closer to the ground.
Spotter lights(?) are a very well done addition. They create beams in the skys and also illuminate the area around them on the ground (can also blind YOU if you look into them). They will track the targets to the best of their abilities, but every once and a while they lose lock and start scanning the skies for them- in the same area they lost track of the target. They also only illuminate the side of the plane facing the beam, and if you fly through the beam you can be lit up. Unfortunately the light shines through the bottom of the cockpit and reflects off your canopy, blinding you. They will also illuminate any clouds they pass through.
New planes- too many to list or go through, you can find the list on the Il2sturmovik.com website.. but I will say it's the most impressive list I've seen for any game with them all done in such great detail.
Campaign system is really good and done very well. Only two complaints- you can't choose the type of plane you fly in operations (or maybe you can, by editing the campaign ini files), nor will you be assigned different types of planes during the individual operations. Operations are ~30 missions long, and a full campaign can consist of 6-7 operations.
New maps- Very nicely done, great terrain, but one problem- on my machine (specs at bottom) flying over the city of Leningrad and zooming in on it caused a significant delay as textures transferred to, I assume, my video card from system memory. This caused problems later on in the mission as those building textures had to be unloaded from memory to afford room for each plane's damage textures. So for the first part of the fight, I was getting pauses any time a plane got damaged... but that went away after about 6 minutes. I didn't zoom in on Leningrad when I returned to base, and I didn't have any more problems. Also, going to external enemy view on the big maps is a bad idea. There's a pretty long pause as it loads the enemy side of the map into video memory, but after that you can switch between friendly and enemy external views pause free. It doesn't appear to degrade system performance in any way, except over areas with lots of different textures (cities on the new maps).
Damage model- much improved, it's a lot easier to down planes and damage critical parts. It's also easier to damage engines from side/rear angle shots, and planes catch fire more readily now than before.
Flight model- much improved at all alts, planes acceleration at low speed appears to have been tweaked. Planes also lift off into the air much more like AH than they did in Il2. As in they are actually catching more ground effect and generating more lift, before many of the planes took a lot of struggling to get into the air and keep it there (fully loaded Il2 for example).
Engine management- I haven't destroyed, damaged or otherwise hurt my engine by misusing it... and I did a lot of that as I tried to figure out how to operate some of the new planes. I can't really tell much of a difference in power output, but as the months wear on- I'm sure more testing will reveal optimum values for each plane, it's just too early to tell right now.
Negative G cut out, was rumored for Il2 v1.2 patch... but it either didn't make it, or didn't work. But it's in FB, and is very well done. No instant cut outs- but the engine will sputter, lose power and eventually die if you keep negative Gs on planes with gravity fed carberators.
Atmosphere, clouds, and terrain are all improved. The sunrise/dawn, sunset/dusk atmospheric colors and lighting effects have been vastly improved to make them much more believable and look fantastic. Something that Il2 really didn't do too well, but now it just has to be seen to be believed. The fogging in the valleys is also far superior to Il2. There are now more clouds than before, but they don't seem to hit the framerate any worse and they appear to me to interact with the game lighting better. The terrain distance has been pushed out much further, and now 20,000ft looks like 20,000ft instead of 60,000ft.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Forgotten Battles should definitely be on your list of games to buy if you really enjoy WWII aviation.
EDIT: Forgot system specs..
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (233Mhz FSB)
768MB PC133
Epox 8kta3Pro+ mobo
PNY GeForce 4 Ti4200 (300core/545mem 41.09 drivers)
SB Live!
Windows 98
Running FB at 1152x864x32bit in OpenGL using Highest detail settings for Il2, except "Perfect" for landscape (which is the pixel shader setting)
-SW
PS: This plane in this paint scheme is my favorite:
