Notes from building a browser multiplayer dogfighter — the netcode, the flight model, and the decisions that let one person ship it.
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July 21, 2026
The horizon is not a shelf: naval mobile, decluttered for real
A captain's phone screenshot said it all: the naval HUD was a wall of chrome and you couldn't see the sea. The probe put a number on it — 25% of the central battle band was UI, most of it one conning panel parked on the horizon. The whole tray now stacks as a slim column on the left rail between the speed readout and the engine telegraph, torpedo readiness rides the BOMB button itself, and a warship stops being shown an aircraft's TRIM gauge. After: under 5% — plus the score-bar wrap bug the re-measure caught on small phones.
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July 20, 2026
Jets that fly like jets
“I have to constantly pull up to maintain altitude, and it climbs very slowly — is that intentional?” It was three bugs in a trench coat: prop-style thrust falloff bolted to turbojet engines, airframes that never trimmed, and a mouse-aim instructor whose “reticle at rest” quietly commanded a shallow dive that props shrug off and jets lose. The probe watched a hands-off Starfang sink from 450 m into the Brick Gulf in nine seconds — auto-trim on — and after the fix pin altitude for twenty straight. Plus the bot mass-casualty report the first version of the fix filed, and the bisect that found it.
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July 20, 2026
Jets that sound like jets
“The jets still have the propeller sounds” — five words, completely right. Every airframe shared one synthesized piston drone; a Rhino at full burner hummed the same 123 Hz as a Sparrowhawk's radial. The jets now carry a real turbojet voice — a broadband thrust roar and a turbine whine that spool with the lever, Doppler on flybys, and wind down when you chop the throttle — plus the trap the obvious fix would have hit: the eight-engined Arclight draws no burner plume, and keying sound off the visuals would have left the biggest jet in the sky droning like a Leviathan.
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July 18, 2026
The sky grew teeth: SAM rings, ship-killers, and the burner signature
The jets era's second pass ships the whole menu: SA-2-style SAM rings with a real RWR and a dive-under-the-beam counter, warship pickets that extend the umbrella, the Hornet missile boat and its sea-skimming ship-killers, chaff-laced smoke, the land war aged fifteen years, and a throttle lever that doubles as your infrared signature. The probe's best number: flak kills doubled, because the rings push everyone onto the deck — exactly the sentence the design wrote before the code existed.
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July 18, 2026
The update that never arrived
“The mobile controls only work in Vietnam” — a report that unraveled into three bugs: a gesture router that turned any second thumb into a pinch and froze the sailor dead (0.00 m walked, in all five missions), held buttons any stray finger could release, and the real headline — a service worker that has silently failed to install every update for weeks, freezing installed phones on a shell that predates the touch controls entirely. Two thumbs now walk and turn at once, and v149 is the first generation that will actually ship.
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July 18, 2026
The Early Jets era: the same war, fifteen years later
The first time period lands:
Read →-era jetshands the combined-arms sky to the early jet age — four jets, boresight heat-seekers that miss like it's 1965, and the flares that lie to them. How an era became an axis orthogonal to the theaters, and the three bugs of mine the new balance probe caught before anyone else could: jets flying into WW2-sized terrain margins, a flare model that was an immunity spell, and a missile that mathematically couldn't catch its prey. -
July 18, 2026
Four theaters, one channel
The 24/7 stream called itself Warbirds but only ever showed the air game — naval, land, and combined arms were dark to viewers. Now it runs like TV: each theater gets an equal timeslot on a fixed UTC clock, the guide is printed in the description, and the channel switches without the encoder ever blinking. The blunt version would have poked the square-stream bug 48 times a day; this one doesn't.
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July 18, 2026
Big J in a pocket
The walkable battleship drops her “grab a mouse” shrug and goes to sea on a phone: a joystick that appears under your thumb, pinch-to-binoculars, a contextual gold prompt as the only action button, and every console rowing its keyboard as real buttons. Plus the honest bug: a director drag that shipped dead because the auto-tracker could outrun a finger — 0.0002 radians of slew — and the one flag that gave a thumb the same courtesy as the keyboard.
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July 18, 2026
The town that fell silent
The land probe kept logging a war that stopped: twelve tanks frozen, six scoreless minutes, three kills in ten. The diagnosis took two locks — a tall-mounted gun that couldn't depress onto anything closer than a town block, and garrisons standing a contested flag against ghosts. Both are open now; the probe logs twice the shots, twice the kills, and rounds that actually end.
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July 18, 2026
Real guns, real numbers
The new kill ledger read 79% of all air kills coming up from the ground. The hunt went through the wrong battery, a dead greenhorn-farming theory, and one rejected fix — before the answer turned up in the history book: our 88 fired like a Bofors, our Bofors hit like an 88, and both flew half-speed shells. The guns got their real WWII numbers.
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July 18, 2026
The sea was inside the ship
A Big J bug pass from a good report: a periscope “obscured by structure,” orders naming a CIC the teleport menu had never heard of, pitch-black compartments at night, a powder room that wasn't one. All real — and beneath the first, a depth-precision bug letting the ocean render across the inside of the ship at level pitch. Fixed, measured, and pinned down by a new battleship e2e spec.
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July 17, 2026
The ghost captain
We taught the test suite to grade the war itself — bot mobility, flak share, convoy headway, doctrine — and on its first full run it caught a captain spawning at a dead helm: 45 seconds of full ahead, zero metres made good. The wrong theory (a wedged spawn), the one-tick race that eats your own
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July 17, 2026
The case of the square stream
For weeks the 24/7 stream sat boxed in black bars while the encoder provably sent perfect 1920×1080 — YouTube's ladder read 1080×1080, square at every rung. Five wrong theories, one zombie hunt, a byte-identical A/B test, and the conviction of the one component nobody could see: the tee muxer on the RTMP path.
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July 17, 2026
A few easy kills
Players said the game was too hard. We’d already rebuilt the guns; this pass adds a mercy wing. A quarter of the fighter lobby now flies the greenhorn doctrine — flat and lazy, wide bus turns, no vertical, a slow wobble instead of a break when you’re on their tail, and a standing willingness to drift over and hand you their six. The probe says the novice’s kills-a-minute more than doubled; the skies stayed just as lively.
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July 17, 2026
The elevator that waited five seconds
“Inverted mouse only kicks in a few seconds after takeoff.” A boolean doesn’t warm up — but pointer lock does, and the un-locked cursor branch never learned the invert flag. The mid-flight elevator reversal, why the normal elevator is the shipped default again, and the O key that opens Settings without dying first.
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July 17, 2026
Go down with the ship
Your death replay used to orbit an oil slick: the anchored armada foundered in style while a player's warship blinked out of the world 1.5 seconds after death. One missing event on the wire later, a killed hull now settles, heels onto a rail, and boils steam along the waterline for thirteen seconds — and the killcam pulls its orbit out to hull size and rides her under.
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July 16, 2026
The kill that took twenty minutes
Players said air-to-air kills were too hard. The offense funnel agreed: your bursts were landing and your kills were starving anyway — 25 connecting rounds on one plane, through a hit sphere that’s sub-degree aim at gun range. What we measured, what we shipped, and the fifth of all kills that were vanishing from the ledger.
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July 15, 2026
The fleet was in reverse
We built an automated test pilot that joins every theater in a real browser — flies, sails, drives, dies, rolls back out. On its first naval sortie it reported the battleship made 16 meters in 45 seconds at flank. Every hull in the game had been driving backwards on W for two days, and no server metric could see it.
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July 14, 2026
Big J at night quarters
The battleship fights in the dark: a fifth mission under a starfield where radar tracks and eyes don't, star shells burst beyond the target to silhouette the hull, and destroyers press in with Long Lance spreads you comb by rudder. Plus a crew that talks — in text over a murmur synth, no robot voices — a 1MC that runs the ship's day (chow call actually moves the crew), and a gunnery grade with ship's records to defend.
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July 13, 2026
Big J learns rate control
The battleship's fire control stops solving itself and starts working like the real Mk 8 rangekeeper: crank estimated target course and speed until the generated pen line tracks the radar dots on a live time-range plotter — only one combination agrees, and wrong rates now physically miss. Then ride your own salvo out on a chase cam (V), call your own spots on the Mk 8 spot scope from the director, and fight her third real war: the siege of Wonsan, 1951, against the batteries that actually hit her. Plus whole-ship teleport, un-blinded sightlines, and furniture in every compartment.
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July 13, 2026
Warbirds lands on itch.io
The game is now playable embedded on its itch.io page. Because Warbirds is a live server, not a bundle of files, the HTML5 build runs from itch's sandboxed CDN and points its fetches and its WebSocket back at the real server — a suffix-matched CORS grant on the JSON APIs for itch's hosts, and a client that honors an absolute server origin. Same-origin play is byte-for-byte unchanged.
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July 13, 2026
Pull back to climb
The mouse climbed when you pushed it forward — backwards from every stick ever built. Now you pull the mouse back and down and the nose comes up, and it ships that way by default. One sign flip, a headless playtest that pulled the nose from an 11° dive up through the horizon, and the reticle bug we didn’t ship.
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July 13, 2026
Your keys, your stick
The flight controls were hardcoded — W to climb, A/D to roll, no way to change them. Now every desktop control is rebindable from Settings > Keybindings, stored on your device, stealing a key from whoever held it, with the on-screen help showing your keys. Plus the playtest bug where a screen that drew perfectly still told a small lie.
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July 11, 2026
The turn that wouldn’t bite
Our touch-stick instructor fixed the death spiral and quietly confiscated the dogfight: 4°/s at three-quarter stick, no loops, and no way onto your back by any input. The stick now commands the turn instead of the pose — deep turns ride the 6 g ceiling, full pull loops, and slamming the rim rolls you all the way around. Split-S is back on the menu.
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July 11, 2026
Four guns talking
Armament now follows the bore: the .50-cal fighters mount quad wing batteries with all four guns firing every volley — double the rounds in the air, each round lighter so the ledger holds — the 20 mm Thunderhead keeps its pair, and the heavies become singles: the Ironclad's 30 mm chin cannon and the Starfang's nose gatling, the old pair's throughput from one muzzle. Two drafts died on the way: the difficulty probe shot down the slow-volley version (bot gunfire kills fell a fifth), and the design review shot down the pair-alternating one — four guns should talk like four guns.
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July 11, 2026
The Gulf plays fair now: a combined-arms playtest pass
No bug report this time — just playing the Brick Gulf until the fun leaked. Found: a desktop tank whose W key did nothing, a town no hull visited for 900 straight seconds, an air objective held 16 seconds a round, and a map quietly dealing Crimson better ground — 16 wins in 20 fixed-side rounds until the terrain noise learned to mirror across the front line. Numbers before and after, and two confessions.
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July 11, 2026
The thumb that couldn’t roll
A tester said mobile felt like flying with only rudder and elevator. The probe said worse: holding the stick sideways wound the wings past vertical and buried the plane in eight seconds. Touch now flies a War-Thunder-style stick instructor — sideways commands a held bank, full stick is the hardest sustained turn the airframe has, and release rolls you level.
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July 10, 2026
Down her stacks: the dive bombers
The naval strike wing learns the classic carrier attack: overfly the ship, chop the throttle, wing over inverted, pull the deck into the sights, release, and firewall out of the dive. Teaching a six-DOF flight model an aerobatic manoeuvre took eleven broken attempts — the log of every one, and the live-fire probe that lost 24 bombers before it dropped a single bomb.
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July 10, 2026
Where the round actually landed
A player said the only failure mode he ever saw was wings falling off. He was right — the death animation scripted it, and the damage dice rolled the same odds from every angle. Now every hit is classified against the plane's real silhouette: a dead-six chase chews the tail off, plunging fire takes wings, a dead engine windmills down instead of screaming — and there's deliberately no gauge for any of it.
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July 10, 2026
Storm fronts on the march
Storm rounds used to be a flat gray fog. Now a front of anvil-topped thunderheads walks across the map — lightning guttering in its belly, bolts cracking down at the leading edge, rain dragging beneath, thunder arriving late at 340 m/s — and every client renders the identical storm from nothing but the world seed and the server clock. Zero bytes of weather on the wire, one sky shared by all three theaters, roughly one round in five. Plus: the theaters that never re-rolled their weather, and how you photograph a 0.65-second lightning flash with a 1.5 fps headless browser.
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July 10, 2026
The Gulf shakedown cruise: eight fixes from the first field reports
The Brick Gulf’s first field reports came back vague, right, and pointing at the wrong causes. The probe said it plainer: 89% of all naval shellfire was blind terrain fire — fleets shelling the island between them, because a spotter plane overhead made everything “spotted” whether the guns could see it or not. Plus: a real anchored flagship under the big guns, a plot table that shows contacts instead of ammunition, Fort Brick visible from farther than 2.4 km, tanks that stopped dancing, rescue clocks that finally run in the Gulf, and a SPECTATE button that works after you die.
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July 10, 2026
The flying billboards
Two bot-only aircraft joined the air war without joining it: a barnstormer biplane towing the sponsor’s banner and an ad zeppelin with the message on each flank. They tour the landmarks, every AI targeting loop ignores them, and anyone can pop one for a token bounty — the sponsors send another. The copy lives in a Postgres table: changing what the sky sells is an UPDATE, not a deploy.
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July 9, 2026
The Brick Gulf: all three wars, one front
Combined arms “got muddy” once and was split into three games. It’s back — as a fourth theater on a map built for it: the tank steppe west of an authored coastline, the naval sea east, one front line through both, and a harbor either arm can capture. Planes spot for the fleet’s guns, a cruiser’s sabot-proof belt meets a Paladin dart at the quay, and the Sky Ring multiplies your side’s zone points. The probe caught an infinite strike-wing spawner and two rounds of doctrine bugs (0–16 after ten minutes of everyone dying in one contested town); the playtest caught a panel that had been invisible in the shipped land theater all along.
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July 9, 2026
Flying with a mouse, the War Thunder way
Players said the mouse was too hard to fly with, and they were right. We already point-and-fly like War Thunder — but our captured mouse had no center to fall back to, so the plane held your last twitch forever and new pilots wandered the sky in a slow permanent turn. The fix is War Thunder’s quiet habit: let the aim reticle spring back toward straight-ahead, so hands settle and wings level (measured 0.61 → 0.36 offset in a second and a half), while a hand that keeps working the mouse still holds a turn. Plus two smaller mercies: the whole text feed steps aside on phones, and Flight School finally has a BACK TO MAIN GAME door.
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July 8, 2026
The sinking the camera never watched
We’d promised the highlight reel hard-cuts to any hull going down. It never did: a ship dropped out of the camera’s candidate list the instant it died, so the reel captioned sinkings the tape never showed — three ships in the probe, filmed from 6.5 km, 4 km, 3 km away — and, ranked by weight, played nothing but them. The fix: a founder cam that rides the wreck under (now 150 m, dead centre), a sink logged only when it’s actually filmed, and a heavier hand on air-to-air that turned twenty-one straight sinkings into about three dogfights per sinking. Then the punchline: instead of guessing which duels will pay off, the director now renders on a five-second delay and covers kills it has already watched happen — shot/reverse on the exact pair, straight from the buffer.
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July 8, 2026
The empty steppe
“I can never find enemies.” A headless playtest put numbers on it: eight AI hulls, ten minutes, 28 rounds fired, one kill — on a twelve-kilometre map where the median sightline was 500 metres. The fix: a smaller steppe with fewer, lower hills and half the forest, contacts that stay lit five seconds instead of strobing, an AI line that marches on the enemy instead of camping the centre town, tanks that circle for the side plate instead of trading sparks nose-to-nose — and a banner for the silent 0 km/h treeline grind.
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July 7, 2026
Big J goes to her real wars
The walkable battleship gets a mission select and her two real shooting wars: naval gunfire support on the Vietnam gunline and the February 1984 Shouf bombardment off Beirut. A shore- bombardment mechanic to carry them — terrain the shells actually hit, a spotter calling fire missions, counter-battery from the beach, altitude-aware fire control — and a gold objective beacon so you can actually find the bridge.
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July 7, 2026
Big J: a battleship you can walk
A second, standalone game ships at /battleship: the USS New Jersey in voxels at 1:1 scale, walkable from the engine room to the Mk 38 director. SG radar in CIC, rangefinder cuts, a Mk 8 rangekeeper grinding out firing solutions, nine 16-inch rifles on real ballistic arcs, a living crew — and honest damage control when the enemy squadron starts answering.
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July 7, 2026
A real build step for a faster load
Warbirds used to ship its browser code raw — two dozen source files and a full copy of the 3D library. Now a build step tree-shakes, minifies, and bundles it, so the client downloads a fraction of what it did: the 3D library alone dropped by roughly two-thirds. It also lays the plumbing to deploy the air, naval, and land servers independently.
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July 7, 2026
A steady hand on the guns
The warship gunsight was a virtual joystick that sailed past every target; it's now position-controlled — the crosshair moves as far as your hand and stops when it stops, and the turrets chase it. The land war gets its sight and muzzle lifted above the terrain's own quantized shelf (no more shelling your own doorstep), parachutes that actually land, capture rings that whisper instead of wall, and markers over the enemies your team has spotted.
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July 7, 2026
The two-ship rule
“The new bots hammer you out of the sky.” Before nerfing the gunnery we put a simulated human in the furball — including one who flies straight lines and never jinks — and measured. The bots aren't too accurate; they gang up: minutes of peace, then a whole vic locks on at once. The fix is doctrine, not charity — no more than two bots commit to one human at a time, with an exception for self-defense.
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July 6, 2026
Teaching the bots to shoot
A bot rides a perfect tail chase and never takes the shot. A headless measurement harness found out why: the AI aimed perfectly and ignored gravity, so past 350 m no round could ever connect. Ballistic hold-over, a fire gate built on what bullets can actually do, wingmen that fall on the leader's target as one vic — and a top cover that finally, actually, flies high enough to write contrails.
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July 6, 2026
The loops that fought themselves
The hands-off autopilot porpoised on a phone, and a hard turn's black-out had gone missing. The first was a control loop fighting its own delay — steady on a desktop, unstable at the latency a phone actually runs at, fixed by softening the gain and leaning on the rate damping. The black-out just needed re-anchoring to the G a modern turn really pulls. Plus: chat and the kill log fold into one stream.
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July 6, 2026
Let go of the stick and it flies itself
The double-tap that was supposed to toggle the mobile autopilot didn't work — it overloaded the steering thumb, and its stillness test read honest taps as steering. So the stick itself became the switch: let go and, once the wings settle, the plane latches straight and level; grab it back and you're flying.
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July 5, 2026
Crashes get the replay, and the mobile HUD goes quiet
Flying into a hill used to jump-cut straight to the spawn screen; now every crash gets the killcam treatment — a CRASH REPLAY chasing your own final seconds into the scenery. Plus a decluttering pass on the phone HUD: the AP and radio buttons are gone, and the only reticle left is the gunsight.
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July 5, 2026
Every callsign gets a page
Every pilot now has a shareable profile at /pilot/<callsign>: a medal case with progress bars, K/D/W and best-round tiles, leaderboard ranks, your favourite mount, and a kill heatmap of where you hunt. Built from the public ledger, resolved by vanity name, token-free — and not a single snapshot byte.
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July 5, 2026
Wear your career
A hangar paint shop of schemes unlocked by the same counters that hand out medals, kill-mark stencils that stack under your cockpit as you rack up kills this round, and a gold spinner, fin pennant and title for career aces — all cosmetic, all off the JSON roster, and the team wing colour never repainted so friend-or-foe still reads.
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July 5, 2026
The island got a life
Fishing boats, a sweeping lighthouse, gull flocks, a whale — and airfields that finally feel lived-in: a graded apron with a marked runway and hangars, scattering ground crew, a real-wind windsock, a dusk-lit control tower, and rows of parked reserve planes worth strafing. All of it driven from the shared clock, so every screen sees the same world with zero extra network traffic.
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July 5, 2026
The round fights back
Two systems make the back half of a round more dangerous than the front: a full-skill comeback ace, gold-ribboned and bounty-headed, sent to drag a losing team back into it — and an OVERTIME finale that drops radar rules for the last minute of a close match, so every plane paints on both minimaps and nobody hides out the clock.
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July 5, 2026
Know your nemesis
Die to the same pilot three times in a round and the game marks him your nemesis: his callsign burns orange on his nameplate and your minimap, for you and you alone, and killing him back pays a doubled vengeance bounty the whole team hears you collect. Grudges don't survive the bell.
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July 4, 2026
Ships that break in half
A torpedoed hull no longer slides under on an even keel — it jackknifes at the hit, the bow rears up dripping, secondaries ripple down the deck, and she goes down in a shroud of steam. Gun-killed ships still settle and list, so the death tells you the weapon — all off one spare field on the sink event.
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July 4, 2026
The map remembers the round
Bomb craters, burning crash sites, and drifting oil slicks now persist for the whole round, so the front line reads like a story of everything that happened on it — all cosmetic decals laid on top of the pristine, never-mutated terrain, so what you fly over is exactly what the server collides against.
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July 4, 2026
No one fights alone: search & rescue
A chute that splashes into the sea becomes a floating survivor with a dye-marker ring both teams can see. Fly a low-and-slow pass — or con a hull through the marker — to fish him out for points and the LIFESAVER ribbon. The enemy can capture him first, so every over-water kill mints a rescue race.
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July 4, 2026
Nobody rides it in: bailouts and parachutes
When a burst is fatal but the cockpit survives, the pilot pops out under a team-silk canopy and drifts downwind. Land him on your own side of the line and he’s returned to the fight; gun a helpless chute and the feed brands you DISHONORABLE. Every kill grows an epilogue — and rescue at sea is next.
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July 4, 2026
The last ride: planes fall out of the sky now
The drama pass fixes the ending. A killed plane no longer blinks out — it sheds a wing, torches its engine, and corkscrews five real seconds to the ground under the same flight model that killed it. It costs zero new bytes on the wire, renders identically on every screen, and the bots do it too.
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July 4, 2026
The juice pass: making the same fights feel bigger
Ten small features from the gameplay audit’s first wave: contrails and a high CAP that writes in the sky, cinematic kill confirms, supersonic near-miss cracks and a CHECK SIX warning, a death screen that coaches, a comms wheel, wingman bonuses, server-detected victory rolls, and an opt-in soundtrack that thickens with the fight.
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July 4, 2026
The stream flips its own switch — and reboots itself at 4am
The 24/7 broadcast now takes itself live with nobody clicking "Go live," and when YouTube quietly ends the stream overnight it notices and puts itself back on the air — so the channel stops going dark while nobody's awake.
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July 3, 2026
The land war: a third theater
Armored combat joins the air and the sea: a rolling steppe with forest walls and towns worth holding, four vehicles from the stabilized Paladin MBT to the shoot-and-scoot Jackal gun truck, and a Gunner-HEAT-style damage model — facet armor, ricochets, behind-armor module damage, ammo-rack cook-offs, and darts that punch through and through. Plus wire-guided missiles, called artillery, and strike planes for the Whirlwind to swat.
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July 3, 2026
The Hall of Fame gets its own page
The all-time rankings used to be a pop-up you cracked open on the hangar and dismissed a few seconds later. Now they live at /leaderboard — a standalone page with a real URL you can bookmark, link and share, all seven boards laid out to breathe on the same editorial chrome as About and Live.
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July 3, 2026
The Starfang: a jet you have to earn
The game's first career-locked aircraft: an early jet in the Starfighter mold with a 30-round-a-second 20 mm Vulcan and pods of unguided rockets, unlocked for good at 25 lifetime kills. Why a jet among warbirds, rockets as a third ordnance class, and a gate the client can't be talked out of.
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July 3, 2026
Bomber crew: the Leviathan gets a tail gunner and a top gunner
The game's first multi-crew aircraft: two defensive stations modeled on a B-17's blister positions — a tail stinger and a full-circle dorsal turret, each a player behind a twin .50 cal while the pilot flies. How the seats work, and how a gun that aims in the airframe's own frame stays honest over the wire.
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July 2, 2026
Two thumbs at sea
A mobile decluttering pass on the naval HUD: the rangefinder, DETECTED banner and fleet orders each get their own lane instead of stacking on the reticle, the conning panel folds into a compact tap block clear of the throttle, the gunnery status moves to a quiet corner, and the gunsight's range dial takes the top-right while the minimap steps aside.
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July 2, 2026
Fight for the broadside
A World-of-Warships-style gunnery pass: turrets are real mounts with real firing arcs (swing broadside to bring all guns to bear), the gunsight projects its dispersion ellipse onto the sea, the guns reach over the horizon both ways — and the AI now obeys the same spotting rules you do. Plus: the whole ship line is unlocked from the first sortie; only the premium Tempest is earned.
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July 2, 2026
The naval playability pass
An audit-driven sweep of the sea war: rally-point spawns that cut the empty-ocean sail, a gunsight that teaches (flight time, calibrated lead ticks, readable splashes), caps the AI actually fights for, night you can see in, and a long tail of HUD fixes.
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July 2, 2026
Two thumbs, the whole war: a mobile playability pass
A player said the plane felt like it was fighting them and the phone UI was cramped. So the mouse-aim assist got a G/AoA instructor — full stick now commands the plane's best turn instead of a snap-stall — and the mobile HUD got a declutter, off-screen bandit markers, a terrain PULL UP warning and a first-flight coach.
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July 2, 2026
Cameras that frame the fight
An audit of the 24/7 stream and the auto-cut highlight reels: the moment log now only records what the camera actually filmed, the reel planner can't cut the labeled moment out of its own clip, and both the stream's follow cam and the killcam learned to frame the fight — hunter, tracers and prey in one shot.
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June 28, 2026
Fire-control ranging, and the turret that swung off the beam
A naval gunnery pass: the forward turret now rides the forecastle instead of swinging off the beam as the ship turns, shells leave the barrel rather than the keel, and a new rangefinder lets you lock a range so the guns auto-elevate — no holdover.
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June 28, 2026
Domination: three zones that split the fleet
The single capture zone becomes three. It's a domination objective you can't hold with one massed line — the destroyers race for the flank caps while the heavies fight for the centre — placed north–south so neither side has a nearer cap.
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June 28, 2026
Warships modeled on the real thing
The naval hulls get a detail pass an order of magnitude denser, each class now modeled on a real WWII ship: a Fubuki destroyer, a County cruiser, a Yamato battleship, and a Des Moines for the premium.
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June 27, 2026
The Tempest: a prize at the top of the ladder
A premium heavy cruiser tops the naval unlock ladder: the Tempest, with autoloading guns — modeled on the USS Des Moines — that throw the fastest sustained fire in the fleet. A reward for forty sinkings, and a hull the AI never sails.
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June 27, 2026
Earn your fleet
The naval theater gets progression: every captain starts in the destroyer and earns the cruiser and battleship by sinking ships — a server-enforced career ladder built on the pilot record you already have.
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June 27, 2026
Balancing the fleet with robot battles
You can't fill a naval lobby on demand, so I balanced it with robots: a headless harness that runs dozens of full AI fleet battles and reports the numbers — and found a battleship that wasn't tanky, a fleet drifting all-battleship, and ships running aground.
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June 27, 2026
The fleet learns to fight together
The naval AI gets the air bots' squadron doctrine: warships now form into a division around a flagship — cruisers in the line, destroyers screening ahead — concentrate fire on one target, and fight to each class's strength.
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June 27, 2026
Reading the cap, taking cover
Two finishing touches for the naval cap: a HUD readout that tells you who holds the zone with a callout when it changes hands, and an AI that slips behind an island to break contact when it's badly hurt.
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June 27, 2026
AI that fights for the cap
The naval AI grows a brain: warships thread the island chains with look-ahead steering and make for the capture zone to contest the centre, instead of milling about at gunnery range.
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June 27, 2026
Capture the zone at sea
A capture zone for the naval theater: a contested ring of open sea you hold for points, so a team can win on map control as well as kills — and the central island gives the cap its own cover.
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June 27, 2026
Repair party & engine boost
Two new naval consumables: a repair party that heals the hull back over time, and an engine boost for a burst of flank speed — each on its own cooldown, so a captain is always deciding when to spend them.
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June 27, 2026
Islands that block your view
Islands are cover now: line of sight is checked against the terrain, so a warship tucked behind an island is hidden from anyone on the far side. The last piece of the naval concealment pillar.
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June 27, 2026
The Dreadnought joins the line
A third warship class for the naval theater: the Dreadnought battleship — slow and armored, shrugging off cruiser shells with her belt, answering with devastating slow-loading main guns. The fleet's rock-paper-scissors is complete.
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June 27, 2026
Now you see me: concealment & smoke
The core World-of-Warships pillar reaches the sea: ships are hidden beyond their spotting range until they fire or close in, star shells strip cover, and destroyers lay smoke screens to vanish.
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June 26, 2026
Star shells and the night sea
A naval gameplay pass: star shells that light the dark sea so you can fight at range, a fleet-action score that finally moves on AI kills, a ship's-bridge HUD, a warship lobby, and grounding you can back off of.
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June 26, 2026
Something for the flak to shoot: carrier strike planes
The naval theater launches air power of its own — AI torpedo bombers that hunt warship hulls, run in at wavetop height, and put fish in the water under the ships' anti-air flak. Built almost entirely from systems the game already had.
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June 26, 2026
The guns that aim themselves: secondaries and flak
Warships now work their own rapid-fire secondary batteries against anyone who closes to a knife-fight, and carry anti-air flak mounts overhead — all auto-worked, all riding the systems already in the engine, all isolated from the air game.
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June 26, 2026
Steel rain: armor, citadels, fire and flooding come to the sea
The naval theater grows teeth: HE and AP shells, penetration against an armored belt, citadel hits, fires and flooding, a damage-control party — and an AI warship patrol to try it all on.
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June 26, 2026
Casting off: a separate naval theater and its ocean map
Combined arms on one map got muddy, so ground and sea are splitting into separate modes. First up: the naval theater — an open ocean map where you take the bridge of a warship and sail it, World-of-Warships style, with an engine telegraph and a lagging rudder.
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June 28, 2026
Stop fighting the stick: auto-trim, without dumbing down the physics
A pilot said flying felt like wrestling the plane to keep it from falling out of the sky. He was right — so we gave it the trim wheel every real aircraft has. Hands off, it holds your altitude; pull, push or roll and it bows out instantly. The flight model never changed.
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June 25, 2026
Keep your distance: the fleets now form up and stand off
Each team now deploys in a diamond — battleship in the van, destroyers on the beams, carrier at the rear — anchored just out of gun range, so reaching the enemy fleet takes a spotter overhead.
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June 25, 2026
The killcam stays for the wreckage
The respawn screen no longer flashes for a frame before the replay, and the killcam holds a couple of seconds past the kill — the fireball and the long fall, not a cut on the trigger pull.
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June 25, 2026
One spawn screen, and it waits for the killcam
The respawn screen is now the same hangar you join from — full unit picker, launch choice and daily missions — and it holds off until the killcam finishes instead of burying the replay.
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June 25, 2026
Who got you: the killcam now plays from the killer's seat
We already had a killcam — it just didn't read like one. Now the death replay runs at full speed from the killer's cockpit, held long enough to watch, with a badge naming the pilot who got you.
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June 23, 2026
Aim like an ace: smarter gunsights for air and sea
The lead pip now tells you exactly where to point for a deflection shot — your speed and bullet drop included — and the battleship lays out its full firing solution so you can read it.
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June 20, 2026
There's always a dogfight on: watch Warbirds live, 24/7
Warbirds now runs its own around-the-clock broadcast of a real match, edited live by a director that chases the action — so there's always a fight to watch before you even click play.
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June 19, 2026
Shoot the wings off: planes that break where you hit them
Damage now lands somewhere specific — smoke the engine, spoil a turn by clipping a wing, starve the fuel — so a shot-up plane flies shot-up. Plus heavy tanks and a hands-off autopilot.
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June 16, 2026
There's always a fight: smarter bots, daily missions, and a flight school
Bots that fly by the same rules you do keep every server lively at any hour, daily challenges give you a reason to log in, and a private flight school lets you practice anything before you go live.
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June 15, 2026
Put Warbirds on your home screen and fly like it's a real app
Warbirds now installs to your phone or desktop with its own icon, full screen, no address bar — and it loads instantly. No app store, no download, same game one tap away.
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June 15, 2026
Your kills finally count: a pilot career, medals, and leaderboards
Warbirds now remembers you — your kills, wins, medals, and leaderboard rank stick around between sessions and build into a real pilot career. Still no account, no password. Just fly.
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June 15, 2026
Building a multiplayer flight sim where the server and browser run the same physics, byte for byte
How Warbirds.io keeps an authoritative Go server and an untrusted JavaScript client in lockstep — bit-identical flight models, terrain you never download, and parity tests that call me a liar when the two drift.
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June 13, 2026
Step off the runway and crew a battleship's big guns
A whole second way to play: take over a battleship's main battery, plot targets on a chart, lob shells over the mountains, and call in a spotter plane to walk fire onto targets you can't even see.
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