Hi folks,
I didn’t want to say anything before next release, but for some reason I am seeing a lot of nonsense being posted here and there. So, let me explain how BMS team works, hopefully that will clarify things.
First of all, there is no hierarchy. All BMS devs have their own will, lives, work, family etc… And we all work on our free time out of passion for what we do and love. No one ever told Qawa to build an F-15C cockpit. No one ever told Biker, Tbuc to change the campaign. No one ever told me to write mirrors. Or Chihi with AL. Or Mav to write a new FM system. Or I-hawk and NT. The list goes on, I can spend 20 years here on this.
Having said that, some internal organization is needed. And that is the part where I work mostly on. On a personal note, I also do that on my professional job, so excuse me, but I do have a lot of experience on this.
How was the line for U3 defined? We saw an amazing cockpit done by Qawa and we saw progress from Chihi on refactoring stuff for different aircraft. Tumbler also joined this effort and later on Tbuc. Notice none of those did this because I, or anyone else, wanted. They did because that is what they wanted. And when I saw that, I thought: hey, we can make an intermediate release out of this. Which will also be a nice testbed for future stuff we will need for 4.38.
I spent the last 2 years fixing all sorts of bugs you can imagine. If you don’t understand what that means, you should ask other devs. Once we got into a stable state (from 4.35 to 4.36 U2 IIRC), I finally decided to do something personal, and it was the mirror implementation. I know, some people internally complained the same as some here: I don’t care about other aircraft etc etc. And fine, I don’t care about a lot of stuff either, but I don’t tell them: hey what you are doing is shit. Because that is what those people like. And THIS is what I like.
The main point here is: this is my free time. This is Qawa’s time, I-hawk time, MavJP’s time, Tumbler’s time, Chihi’s time, Micro’s time, Max’s time, Tbuc’s time and every other dev’s time. No one here, or anywhere else, has the RIGHT to demand anything about what we do with our free time. And time is our most valuable asset.
We, as devs, must deliver a high quality product, and treat with respect those who treat us with respect. That is our missions: deliver a good product to the community and by doing a good job, we are fueled by the enthusiasm. Now, we are being bashed by people who never joined the dev team, don’t know how internals work and worse, have no idea what they are talking about (both the next version we are working on and the internals of the team). If we were degrading the F-16, I would understand. If we were badly affecting the existing experience of our users, I would understand. If U2 was in bad shape, in bad need of fixing, I’d understand. But we are expanding the options for new players to enjoy, and people, out of no reason are getting pissed without even knowing what they are talking about (interestingly enough, we got similar comments before VR release, people bashed saying they had no interest in it due to having a cockpit, or cheap hw etc. Later on, some of them converted to VR).
I hope the above have clarified how the team works internally. If you don’t like the direction things are going, please, join our team and help us. But be sure to have a lot of free time. Because I spent my entire Friday night fixing an ILS bug that was there for months, and guess what? It was not related to the F-15 development. And I spent my entire Saturday rewriting the lighting system to allow better performance and cockpit instrument lights, that guess what, we will be able to use in the F-16 in the future (and Tbuc already opened a thread about it).
For those who think F-15 is delaying U3, let me say what MavJp already said: U3 without F-15 is almost non sensical. Most of the changes we did are internal changes in the direction of 4.38. We are using this as an intermediate step towards a bigger goal. I will not list the amount of nights and bugs I fixed during this period, you’d need to be INSIDE the team to understand that. And here I am telling for myself only. There is a whole bunch of work done by others that you have absolutely no idea until you are part of the team and live this 24/7 like we do.
Of course, I believe this is a minority that is complaining, otherwise I would have dropped already. In fact, I’ve seen some feedback which is basically what drives me forward and I believe it is the same for the rest of the team (and thank you for that, you know who you are!). And yes, we (BMS team) also take constructive feedback very serious, as the ones who are in the external test document probably witnessed. The few who answered the call provided us unvaluable feedback. And that was not F-15 only (in fact, it was one of them that found the ILS bug).
To finalize: I don’t expect any apologies. But think twice when you say how devs should work and what we should do. Things are much more complicated than you can imagine, and you will only understand it when/if you are inside the team. No dev will act like: hey this person said I should work on this and so I will. In the worst case, you will make a dev lose heart (why am I going to do this if all I get is bashing?).
So, wanna make the F16 more realistic? In the minimum, provide concrete feedback (hey, here is some non classified material, anyone willing to take it? I will provide testing and so on). Or join the team and dev it yourself. Simply stating how devs should work is no feedback. It is almost offensive, as you have no idea how much time/effort we spend on this.
Want to change things? Join the ranks. But expect to spend your free weekday and weekend time on it. Then you will understand what we go through.
