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 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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