Welcome to Firebirds!

Meet Firebirds, War Thunder’s second to last 2024 major update!

There’s many fixes, new vehicles and other features — take a look at what we’ve included in this major update.

Ground Vehicles: SPAA & Lighter Vehicles Take the Spotlight

T77E1	Scimitar

PLZ05	Luchs A2

Aircraft: Stealth Technology Enters War Thunder with the F-117A!

F-15E	Su-34

Tornado GR.4	Mirage 2000 RMV

Helicopters: South African Super Hind & Cockpit Updates!

Naval Fleet: The Formidable Dunkerque Takes Center Stage!

Locations & Missions: Visually Updated “Abandoned Factory” Map!

Airfields & Test Flights: Greatly Improved To Provide A Better Experience

Graphics & Physics: Beautiful Visual Upgrades and Moveable, Non-Playable Vehicles

More Graphic Settings & Ray Tracing Comes to War Thunder!

• Ray Traced Shadow Maps (RTSM)
• Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion (RTAO)
• Ray Traced Reflections (RTR)
• Ray Traced Water Reflections
• Ray Traced Translucent reflections

Following the Roadmap: Portable Ammunition Boxes

Following the Roadmap: Profile Expansion!

Shot Replays: See Where Your Shots and Enemy Hits Landed Post-Battle

Awards: New Awards For Your Efforts

The end is near	One minute to midnight

There’s plenty more to see!

Due to spatial constraints, the full changelog cannot be listed below.

New locations and missions

• Aircraft test flight logic and locations have been updated. Now there are multiple locations as well as air spawn points available. Rank of targets presented in the test flight can now also be changed. Respawn logic, similar to the one present in tank test drive has been added for targets. Airfield models have been replaced with the new ones in all test drive locations.

Location and mission updates

• Abandoned Factory — the location has been visually reworked with new assets, redrawn ground textures and new effects.
• Flanders — adjusted the rock cover in square E7 where players could safely fire at the northern team’s spawn and its passages.
• Abandoned Town — in square C2, the mountainside where players could get stuck has been removed.
• Sun City (all missions) — play area in the location has been increased. Detection area at spawn points has been increased.
• Finland — positions on rocks near the northern spawn in the adjacent area of ​​squares B4 and B5 have been blocked.
• Second Battle of El Alamein [Domination #1] — positions allowing fire on the northern team spawn on the hills in squares C5 and B5 have been blocked off.
• Aral Sea — density of bushes on lines 1 and 2 have been reduced. A bug where bushes did not disappear when destroyed has been fixed.
• Wagons on maps are no longer static. They can be moved by a ground vehicle and from explosions.
• South Africa — the collision models of large islands, blurred shore textures and flying trees have been fixed.
• [Conquest #3] Karelia — the detection zone in the bottom spawn point has been fixed.
• Eastern Europe, European Province — incorrect destruction of fences near bridges has been fixed.
• Vietnam (the ground forces map) — the incorrect rendering range of trees in the aircraft part of the map have been fixed.
• Maginot Line (winter) — trees that had incorrect settings and ones where their visual model did not match their collision model have been removed. Additionally, the tree destruction model that led to an incorrect behavior when receiving damage has been fixed.
• All locations — oak trees that had trunks that behaved unnaturally when receiving damage have been removed.

Economy and research

• The mechanics of new vehicles have been extended to the requirement for the number of vehicles to unlock the next rank. If there are few vehicles at the current rank (less than 5 or 6, depending on the type of vehicle and rank) and a new vehicle is added there, this new vehicle will not increase the requirement to unlock the next rank for 28 days from the moment of its release. For example, in this update, when adding the Sabra Mk.I to rank VII of Israel’s ground forces tree, the number of vehicles required to unlock rank VIII will remain equal to three (based on the number of “old” vehicles and vehicle groups at this rank), until the Sabra Mk.I is no longer considered new.
• F-4F KWS LV — Battle Rating in all modes has been reduced to 13.0.
• Leclerc, Leclerc S2 — both have been moved from rank VII to rank VIII. The OFL 120 G1 APFSDS round, which was previously located at tier I in the modification research window is now available by default. Silver Lions and Golden Eagles spent on researching this modification have been refunded.
• Vextra 105, AMX-40 — both have been moved from rank VI to rank VII.

Interface

• A new full-screen player profile window has been added.
• The in-game shop for “Rookie trophy” now displays the exact drop chance for each item.
• The ability to move the range scale horizontally has been added to the sight settings menu. The scale is moved by dragging it with the mouse cursor.
• The ability to delete a custom sight preset has been added to the sight settings menu.
• The sorting in the lists for selecting a sight preset and selecting a reticle has been changed, now player-created files are displayed first.
• The ability to enable and configure the display of the type or name of the shell in the sight has been added to sight settings menu.

Game mechanics

• In Ground Battles at night, illumination shells that periodically fired over the map by mission logic have been disabled.
• Saving of player shots and hits received by the player to the replay log with the ability to separately play back each hit in the protection analysis after the battle has been added. The server point of impact, angle of impact and state of the shell are saved in this log, and then the result is played back in the shot animation using this data. Currently only direct hits are logged, hits by close explosions of shells, rockets, missiles and bombs are not.
• Following the Roadmap: Added mechanics for building boxes of ammunition with vehicles classed as Tank Destroyers, ATGM carriers (type listed in the stat card, not any vehicle with an ATGM), all SPAA vehicles and ground vehicles with additional rockets and bombs (Calliope, M26 T99, RBT-5, Cromwell V (RP-3), Matilda Hedgehog, Magach Hydra).
[list]
• Building and destroying boxes: Building boxes takes some time, during which the player must remain stationary next to it. The movement of the vehicle is not blocked. Boxes have a full damage model and can be destroyed by a hit or ram. The ability to destroy boxes is only available to the enemy and the player themselves. To avoid bad behavior, allies are not able to destroy the player’s constructions in all game modes.
• Additional box details: The number of built boxes depends on the number of vehicle weapon groups, from one to three: a separate box for artillery weapons and separate one for each additional group (SAM / rockets). For tanks with rockets and bombs, only one box can be built — the one for additional weapons, while the ammunition of main weapon can only be replenished at capture points, as before. Each built box contains as many shells / rounds as the player had at the time of respawn in battle, and will allow you to replenish the ammunition up to this amount. Only the player who built the ammunition box can replenish ammunition from it. After running out of shells in the box, it will automatically be destroyed. When enough damage is dealt to the box, the ammunition in it ignites, with the fire not only destroying the box, but also showing its position with a visual effect and causing damage to exposed vehicles if they fall into the radius of its destruction. Ammunition boxes can be rebuilt as many times as you like (including after they are destroyed), but there will only be remaining, unused shells inside. This means that at the beginning of the battle, the player could receive potentially double the amount of ammunition, which can be used at their own discretion through changing positions and replenishing ammunition from portable boxes.
• Arcade Battles replenishment changes: The mechanics of replenishing ammunition from boxes logically and technically conflict with the mechanics of arcade reloading of additional weapons, which activates after the complete use of additional weapons in Ground Arcade battles. In addition, the mechanics of arcade reloading blocked replenishment of ammunition for additional weapons at the capture point. The mechanics of arcade reloading have been removed, since replenishment of ammunition from boxes and at capture points are, in our opinion, more understandable with universal game mechanics.

Graphical

• New Graphics API options: [list]
• Direct3D 12 (beta): A more modern graphics API, which allows us to do optimizations and add new features, not available for Direct3D 11. This includes the use of FSR Anti Aliasing, Ray Tracing and more in the future. It also helps to optimize existing features, like rendering the scenery is less demanding on the CPU.

• FSR 3.1: The Anti Aliasing (including the native one) and upscaling solution from AMD. Works under Direct3D 12 and Vulkan (currently available for Linux only), on all capable GPUs. Opens the door for frame generation in future updates.
• DLAA: DLSS is now updated to the latest version. Has a Native upscaling option, which is also known as DLAA. Opens the door for frame generation in future updates.
• XeSS: The Anti Aliasing (including the native one) and upscaling solution from Intel. Works under Direct3D 12.
• TSR: The next generation of TAA Anti Aliasing we already had in the game. Has the same performance but better image quality.

• Ray Tracing (beta): War Thunder now has a Ray Tracing solution which doesn’t cut corners and works for all objects and map elements. It has allowed us to implement a wide range of high-quality graphical effects based on it. Ray tracing is currently available only for NVIDIA GPUs.

• Ray Traced Shadow Maps (RTSM): Replaces traditional shadow maps, for pixel perfect and physically accurate shadows. Works for sun shadows and also for dynamic lights, for high end GPUs.
• Ray Traced Ambient Occlusion (RTAO): Replaces traditional screen space ambient occlusion for physically accurate ambient shadows.
• Ray Traced Reflections (RTR): Replaces probe and screen space reflection techniques. Enabling physically accurate reflections and also reflections of objects off screen.
• Ray Traced Water Reflections: Replaces planar reflections used on water. While planar reflections were already good looking, this improves them, as the distortion is based on actual wave geometry.
• Ray Traced Translucent reflections: Replaces probe based reflections on translucent glass surfaces for accurate reflection of the world.