- Jason Williams @ combatpilot.com

DD 04:
(Posted November 30, 2023)

Dear Pilots,

The holiday season is now in full swing and we want to wish everyone in the Combat Pilot community a Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas! We hope that 2023 ends on a peaceful and prosperous note for everyone and 2024 brings great things to you and yours.

Progress on our initial prototype inches forward week by week and as usual we’d like to share some more images and news with you. Since our last DD we’ve seen progress on buildings for Midway, our aircraft carriers, and our airplanes. Let’s see what this week has in store.

Midway Atoll Infrastructure

Midway is often referred to as an island, but it’s really an atoll, consisting of two main islands (Sand and Eastern) and a coral reef system with a lagoon in the center. Several Pacific battles took place on atolls during the war which makes for some unique and exotic scenery, but a horrendous amount of blood was shed for their control. Battles on atolls such as Wake, Makin, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, and Tarawa come to mind. Midway was spared an amphibious assault due to the US naval victory out at sea, but it was attacked by air and took some serious damage.

One of our goals is to make a faithful recreation of the infrastructure and defenses found on Midway during the battle. In our opinion, other games and simulators haven’t portrayed Midway very accurately over the years so we hope to change that and set a new standard. Midway went through several stages of growth, abandonment, and decay before, during and after WWII, so depicting her as it looked in June 1942 is a challenge. Detailed maps and quality images are surprisingly rare. We’ve been able to dig up some good references though with help from the community. Which we greatly appreciate.

Midway was not only a naval base and military airfield, but it was also a civilian seaplane base for Pan-Am’s clipper service to the Far East. Additionally, Midway was an outpost servicing underwater telegraph cables. Therefore, not all infrastructure on Midway was military in nature. Here are a few images of buildings that Carl has created for Midway so far. They will be textured soon and really come to life.

Read the rest of Developer Diary-04 at the Combat-Pilot forums.

- Jason Williams @ combatpilot.com

DD 05:
(Posted December 27, 2023)

Dear Pilots,

Welcome to the last Developer Diary of our inaugural year. What a first year it has been! We’ve managed to form a team, set initial goals, build assets, establish a community, setup lines of communication, get a plane flying in the engine and lay the technical ground work for our playable prototype. We have a long road ahead, but we’re on the road or perhaps I should say that we’re taxing towards takeoff? That’s probably a better analogy.

This developer diary highlights more progress with building important assets that we’ll need and it marks a turning point in our internal and external operations that we’ll speak more about after the turn of the new year. We’re planning some new initiatives that we think you’ll be interested in along with pursuing additional development partnerships that can aid us in our journey. So stay tuned.

Now on to the fun stuff!

Read the rest of Developer Diary-05 at the Combat-Pilot forums.