We’re into our final 48 hours of 2025 and Combat Pilot is coming in hot at the end of the year with a big developer diary showing off the latest efforts by the development team. We’ve got great new renders of the D3A, the A6M, B-17E, and information on plans for the new year. Let’s go!

Val and Zero

The latest renders are coming in showing off the D3A1 “Val” dive-bomber exterior textures to great effect. Executive Producer Jason Williams says that this is the most detailed Japanese warbird, outside of the Zero, modeled for any simulation and from the renders that we’ve seen (both inside and out) it really does look incredible.

We’ve seen newly updated textures on the A6M2 as well, however, these represent the more typical (for Midway) pale-olive scheme used on carriers. Again, looking really sharp and impressively detailed.

The B-17E is also getting shown off here at the end of the year with the model that the team was working with, a B-17F, being modified to fit the earlier B-17E models that were present and in action at Midway.

Carriers, buildings, and more

Meanwhile, we’ve also got some great new shots (these are just some) of buildings for Midway. Quonset huts, barracks, and other buildings were all constructed for the Midway island facilities and we’ve got some great visuals of them. We’ve also got an image of the M3 3-inch AA gun with USMC style carriage system.

IJN Hiryu is the second Japanese carrier of the project. It is reportedly fully complete from a model perspective except for some deck details, the aircraft hangar, and, of course, textures. This carrier will be added in 2026.

End of year wrap-up and next steps

Executive Producer Jason Williams helped to wrap-up the year that their team has had.

One of those items was building EntropyFM, a proprietary physics engine for Unreal 5, aimed specifically at simulating vintage warbirds and piston powered airplanes. Another piece of the puzzle is a custom engine damage model with three components: mechanical, thermal and lubrication. In other words, if you overheat the engine, run out of oil, or overdo the manifold pressure or RPM, the engine will become damage with a persistent wear and tear system.

Another big item is their Ace Tier Patreon supported pre-alpha which has now moved to alpha test stage. Here’s Jason with some details on how that went:

We’ve gone well beyond the initial Experimental Prototype stage and are now working diligently towards Carrier Qualification release. Since we moved to Alpha we’ve released eight timely updates, about one every two weeks. In each update we’ve moved the ball a little further down the field. This includes many back-end items that aren’t obvious to users, but also some publicly released items like Cockpit Instrumentation which we implemented recently for the F4F-4.

Coming up next, they plan to move towards a release of their Carrier Qualification first release which Jason says is currently scheduled for Summer 2026 with an early access phase kicking in before that.

There’s a lot to be excited about with Combat Pilot. Read the full developer diary with even more renders and details here.