Following the surprise announcement last week that Combat Pilot Executive Producer Jason Williams had departed the project, we’ve now had a follow-up statement from Entropy.Aero as well as a status check-in on a bunch of content that the team are currently working on. Let’s have a look!

New project manager

Frits Mosselman has been announced in the update as the new project and community manager for the project. The bio indicates that Frits, also known as “Herr Flick” or “FTC_Snafu,” has 25 years of flight simming and sim content production under his belt.

The update goes on to say that the direction and overall roadmap of the project remains unchanged following Jason’s departure saying the following:

Jason and the team never had any differences about where we all wanted to take Combat Pilot.

I know some speculation here and elsewhere in the community worried that the departure was over direction differences for the project with perhaps some voices calling for a more watered down sim experience. Going by the statements, it doesn’t sound like that’s the case.

Progress shown

The update switches to talking about content and here we’ve got some news that the SDB-3 Dauntless exterior model is now under production. The flight model is reportedly also now in development.

The TBD Devastator is also in progress with Digital Forms reportedly being brought in to do the 3D work for the project with the update noting that the aircraft is complex with four cockpit areas and some scarce documentation. They say that they intend to offer the most detailed depiction of a TBD in any flight simulator.

The B-17E is also in the works with the external model and textures nearly complete. The team are also busy adding the ability to support four engines and to model turbocharging into the physics engine. The B-17E is less well documented compared to other models and so is also a challenge.

Work continues on the IJN Hiryū and images have been shown of the Japanese pilot model which you can see below. More development shots are up on the update.

Flight model updates

Combat Pilot has its own flight model being developed to work with Unreal Engine 5. The update reports that they’ve been working on turbocharging for the B-17, buoyancy system for more realistic water landings and crashes, there’s new clickable cockpit updates and a new progressive system for auto-start with systems being enabled in sequence rather than all at once.

A video is provided showing off the system.

Read the latest developer diary here!