It’s been a few days since Flight Sim Expo 2024 in Las Vegas and while I decompress from all of the excitement and announcements, I thought I’d write a few retrospectives. For this one I’m talking about Combat Pilot which I know many who read this blog will be interested to hear about. This is what I saw, experienced, and learned over the three days of the expo.

Perspectives on development

What we saw at the expo this year was a technological prototype of everything that Jason Williams and the team that is working on this project has managed so far. I talked to many on the team over the course of the expo and they are enthusiastic, knowledgeable, fans of the subject matter. Some of them flew or fly IL-2 and other combat sims regularly. So, in a sense… they are us. Fans of this kind of simming. That says to me that it’s in good hands.

Combat Pilot is the first new ground up combat flight sim aiming at that a serious combat sim experience in decades. IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad, when it released in 2013, took a couple of years to develop and it had a huge advantage of having a technology base that it browed and evolved from Rise of Flight. Rise of Flight itself went through several iterations to its own technology in the several years before that. This is all to say that development takes a long time and so it’s already impressive that they have something, anything, working at all. No doubt the usage of Unreal Engine 5 is helpful in getting things started.

Chatting with Jason, Carlos and the rest of the developers I met on the weekend also made something clear. They have a long term plan with this sim. They know that Battle of Midway is the start, that the Solomon Islands is their next destination (announced during the expo), and that they want to be able to expand and capture other parts of the war in the Pacific and beyond that too.

Having that clear-eyed vision right from day one is going to inform design decisions that will have far reaching consequences. They won’t have big four engine bombers early on but without saying it I think they know that somehow they’d like to do that eventually too. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves too much but suffice to say I’m excited by everything I heard and saw.

With that in mind, here’s what I saw and experienced.

Hands on with Combat Pilot

At the expo the Combat Pilot team had three stations setup with large screen TVs, powerful gaming PCs, track IR sensors, and Thrustmaster Warthog sticks and throttles as well as the TPR rudder pedals. Big screen TVs aside, I’d call this a typical dedicated combat sim setup and it meant that we had a good opportunity to really fly them as I expect I will be able to on my own PC at some point.

After I was talked through some basic engine start-up (engage magnetos, starter, mixture to full, throttle cracked) the engine started up with some sound effects already integrated into the experience. Power up and away we went taking off from a ground airstrip.

After gaining some height and altitude I flew the F4F around and started doing some aerobatics. Loops, rolls, turns, and then I really started to mess with things. Stomping on the rudder, performing skids, and various other combinations. Fun!

Going in I was prepared for things to be so new that there may not have even been a detailed flight model. But that’s not the case at all. These aircraft are already beginning to take on life and the most telling for me was hard stomping on the rudder and watching what the nose did. The oscillations of the nose felt lively yet appropriately dampened. It returned to center but not without the appropriate swings left and right. This is clearly not on rails.

There are no instruments in the cockpit just yet, so we were reliant on visual GUI clues to get information on throttle, mixture, airspeed, flaps, gear, and various other data points. Again, early days. That kind of detail will be developed in time. It did tell me that, true to the stated goal, that there’s plenty of depth and detail going on behind the scenes. That it is doing so at this early stage is only a sign of what I think will be good things to come in the future.

Some other fun I had was doing flybys of both carrier models. I zipped past the Akagi and the Enterprise. I did touch and goes on both. I even attempted to land a Zero on the Akagi and very nearly managed to keep it on the deck but ran out of room and landed in the water. The ships don’t move yet (they will, don’t worry) and they have yet to develop the tail-hook and arrestor cable systems so for now this is just goofing around. Still, it was tremendous fun!

There are no weapon systems yet so nothing we could test there just yet. Again, it’ll come in the fullness of time. I remember being an early backer for IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad and having access to the LaGG-3 which at the time did not yet have any weapon systems yet either. That came later too.

Things are still so early in development that between Saturday and Sunday they did an updated build and enabled free-castering-tailwheels on the aircraft to enhance the ground feel and up the challenge and realism while on the ground. Things are new and coming together but I personally think that was very cool to see and even a bit brave by the developers to show things off in this state.

Final thoughts

It was a real treat this weekend to spend some time with the team and get a good look at the newest combat flight sim on the block.

It’s early days for this sim and game development is hard, often long, and torturous process. That difficulty level is even higher with flight sims. Still, what I saw on the weekend fills me with confidence that the Combat Pilot team have the knowledge and enthusiasm to carry it as far as they can. And they are listening too! They read the comments here, they read the comments on their own Discord server and Combat Pilot forums. They are looking for reasonable community input (I don’t think King Kong is making it into this one folks :)) and they are hoping that the community can help sleuth out hard to find information too. This is all a recipie for success in my book so I really hope that this will all pan out. I think they will get there and release an initial offering that will help carry this new sim far into the future.

Again, it was a real pleasure to see what’s been done before. I’m genuinely excited for this sim as it develops and I’m also bracing myself as we know that it will take a while to get it to the stage where were finally flying it, battling it out online, having fun with carrier traps in WWII naval aircraft, running torpedo runs and dive-bombing sorties on enemy ships and generally just having fun with this. That day will come! I’ll stop gushing and try and come back to Earth now.

Learn more about Combat Pilot here and find out about Flight Sim Expo here!