The future of the sim..?
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OpenGL is not an option.
Hello, I-Hawk.
I was following this interesting discussion, when I’ve read your last statement.
For me, not an expert or a skilled developer like you are instead, would you kindly explain your point of view?Thanks in advance, with best regards,
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That’s not what I meant. It just seems that people are responding with things like “what happens when we run out of ideas? We’ll never run out of ideas”, and I don’t think that’s what he meant when he posed the initial question. I think he meant sooner or later the project is going to get to a point where the continued development will no longer provide the satisfaction to those of you keeping it going, or there will be aspects that need attention that are beyond the limits of the current teams technical expertise (That’s not a dig or a slam, I’m a coder too and we all have our limits and specialty areas, and lets face it DX is just a pain in the A no matter how much experience you have with it), or when the imposition it causes in your personal lives gets to the point that you have to/want to do something else. Maybe I misunderstood what he meant, but that comment was not meant to be a dig at BMS or say it won’t keep evolving. I just think he meant that the game has come a long way, and sooner or later you reach a limit to how much you can change things from the original without having to do other major overhauls, which cause problems with other modifications, etc, etc, big circle and so on…
That’s pretty much what I was talking about. I love the game and know that the team has lots of features that they can and want to implement. I guess I didn’t understand that it is a labour of love and that their work is not prohibiting another dev team from making another F16 sim. I just thought that they would eventually get to a point where they would much rather devote their time to creating another sim . Such a sim would allow them to make use of the latest DX/OpenGL/Vulkan API from the start to to implement all the features and systems that they are, technically, unable to add to Falcon BMS.
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IMHO (or, in this case, not so Humble opininion), win10 is dead as a valid and legit gaming platform (too many issues to mention here, and also I don’t want to derail the thread). so ithis would be a major step forward towards making BMS a cross-platform sim.
All the best, Uwe
err You can play Xbox games on Win 10 now - mayb just me but this doesnt look like MS are moving away from gaming on Windows 10.
Still once bms/dcs/sf2 and all the hardware drivers have been rewritten for one of the X variants of Linux there might be a case for it being more than a VM on my desktop - not looking likely is it
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I believe that. I know that we will be graced with 4.34 one day, the BMS team thus far in 6 years has not failed to deliver and the surprise of finding what’s in the latest update is part of the fun. I do miss very much the “3 to 4 weeks” jokes in regards to 4.33, it was almost a community identity for a loooong time. Can we get that going again, I-Hawk?
Please sir, tell me when 4.34 will be released tounge in cheek
Oh, 3-4 weeks you say?
4.3-4 weeks. “3-4 weeks” has been around a lot longer than that
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That’s pretty much what I was talking about. I love the game and know that the team has lots of features that they can and want to implement. I guess I didn’t understand that it is a labour of love and that their work is not prohibiting another dev team from making another F16 sim. I just thought that they would eventually get to a point where they would much rather devote their time to creating another sim . Such a sim would allow them to make use of the latest DX/OpenGL/Vulkan API from the start to to implement all the features and systems that they are, technically, unable to add to Falcon BMS.
You are wrong
Technically we can do EVERYTHING we want in BMS
do you think people believed implementing a 100% new physics model was possible in 2004 ?
Our possibilities are UNLIMITED , only our competence could limit BMS. Not the other way around
Only one thing is sure : achieving the level of current BMS from a white page is probably not feasible within a reasonable time frame
You need to remember that Falcon4 code has been developed since 1992/1993 with uninterrupted coding
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I am curious on that topic. There is a lot of reference to technical debt in discussions with the developers about Falcon BMS, but opinions seem to vary on how much of an issue it really is.
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I am curious on that topic. There is a lot of reference to technical debt in discussions with the developers about Falcon BMS, but opinions seem to vary on how much of an issue it really is.
What do you mean about technical debt ?
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Hello, I-Hawk.
I was following this interesting discussion, when I’ve read your last statement.
For me, not an expert or a skilled developer like you are instead, would you kindly explain your point of view?Thanks in advance, with best regards,
I’m sure he will respond in his own time, but if I had to venture a guess it’s not as simple as just graphics. DX gets used for a lot more than just putting pretty pictures on the screen. Controller interfaces, text rendering, debug information, audio processing, and some of the Math functions are likely being used in other areas of the game as well. All of which is available in other Graphics APIs, but now you’re talking about rewriting the entire game engine, and not just the GFX engine. It may also be a matter technical knowledge, I-Hawk stated he is familiar with DX, specifically DX11, there may not be anyone on the team who has experience with OpenGL, and BMS is not the scale of project you want to try to learn an entirely unfamiliar graphics API on, at least not from scratch. If the game were already coded in OpenGL, you could use it to learn, but trying to learn it while actively developing a 5-10k line GFX engine would likely be a disaster, it would be like asking someone to learn C by developing a fully operational Linux distribution–not impossible but not really feasible for the most part either. I have little doubt this has been discussed in the past internal to the team, and his adamant response indicates there are probably other reasons why it wouldn’t work as well. Not trying to answer for him, just offering some insight based on my own personal experience.
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IMHO (or, in this case, not so Humble opininion), win10 is dead as a valid and legit gaming platform (too many issues to mention here, and also I don’t want to derail the thread). so ithis would be a major step forward towards making BMS a cross-platform sim.All the best, Uwe
I’m curious why you think this? Win10 has ALL the functionality of Win7 (It literally contains a copy of the Win7 core), with performance increases, DX12, Xbox connectivity, and vendor support for the next 10 years. And even though a lot of gamers still prefer Win7 just because it’s comfortable and they have a bad taste in their mind from Win8, 10 is still lightyears ahead of where Win7 was at Launch+18 months. Almost all of the things people were concerned with have been corrected or avoided all-together, such as driver availability, program compatibility, and performance due to a mem hungry OS. I have heard this argument from several people, but nobody can ever give me a legitimate concern or reason as to why they feel that way, other than to say it’s not Linux and it’s not free.
EDIT: I don’t think it’s a complete derail of the thread, it has kind of morphed into a DX discussion as well, and since DX12 is only available on Win10, it’s not entirely off-topic.
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Win10 has ALL the functionality of Win7 (It literally contains a copy of the Win7 core), with performance increases, DX12, Xbox connectivity, and vendor support for the next 10 years. And even though a lot of gamers still prefer Win7 just because it’s comfortable and they have a bad taste in their mind from Win8, 10 is still lightyears ahead of where Win7 was at Launch+18 months.
Agree with MorteSil.
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As MorteSil nicely explained, porting BMS to OpenGL would be a huge task. Let me also add something from my own view, from my (Relatively short) experience, dealing with Graphics problems isn’t easy, many times you do everything “right” (or more exact, you think you do) but things not working and you need to start debugging and spend a good amount of time just to find what gone mad. Let’s say that is happening while dealing with DX and trying some new/different techniques. So… I can’t even imagine the issues that may arise if we will go and try to pair BMS with OpenGL, if you ask me it’s simply not practical to achieve with the time constraints that we work with.
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Well, looks like I got my answer and then some!
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Dear MorteSil and I-Hawk,
thanks a lot for your quick answers. I appreciated them because they are well detailed and helped me to begin understanding a little the hard developers’ job.
With best regards,
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Mav, Technical debt is a phrase describing the concept of where existing code prevents you from easily doing something. Generally it means that instead of planning your code in advance to have a useful structure, you went with whatever came to mind quickest so as to get results fast. Any time you say something would require significant rewriting even to make small incremental changes, you are talking about technical debt.
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…I’m going to have to carry this one to work and put it on the shelf next to “spaghetti code”.
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Spaghetti code is a leading cause of technical debt, and the opposite is ravioli code, which can happen when you try to avoid technical debt without a clear understanding of what the final picture should look like.
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While win10 may or may not have its technical merits, for me personally the problem lies at a much deeper level. I’m not willing to accept an ever-more intrusive Microsoft that decides for me how (and more importantly, what) my computer should run.
I’m not going to repeat the countless arguments-turned-into-flamewars from the net (and I hope we can avoid this here in our cozy little subgroup of sim enthusiasts), but if you’re interested I can drop you a PM which elaborates on and lists numerous reasons why one should stay away from win10 for the time being until Microsoft fundamentally changes its attitude toward their customers (not very likely to happen I’ll sadly agree unless we, as consumers, fundamentally change as well).
Thanks for the insights on the DX11 / DX12 topic!
All the best, Uwe
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While win10 may or may not have its technical merits, for me personally the problem lies at a much deeper level. I’m not willing to accept an ever-more intrusive Microsoft that decides for me how (and more importantly, what) my computer should run.
I’m not going to repeat the countless arguments-turned-into-flamewars from the net (and I hope we can avoid this here in our cozy little subgroup of sim enthusiasts), but if you’re interested I can drop you a PM which elaborates on and lists numerous reasons why one should stay away from win10 for the time being until Microsoft fundamentally changes its attitude toward their customers (not very likely to happen I’ll sadly agree unless we, as consumers, fundamentally change as well).
Thanks for the insights on the DX11 / DX12 topic!
All the best, Uwe
Not only Microsoft, but Google, and tons of others have decided that they are just going to sell your information if you use their service. For example, I looked at a Warthog in Amazon. My wife get’s Warthog advertisements in her Facebook now. So I shop for a Valentine’s gift for her, she knew what it was going to be before it arrived. IMO this sort of behavior is wrong. All of this ought to be opt-in, not opt-out. Then you opt-out, and they go behind the scenes and make you opt out again in a new way. I hope Linux and GNU and those that truly respect privacy and freedom – not just give it lip service – keep growing and are able to put an end to the madness. Not likely to happen with corrupt governments around the world and here in the U.S. but yeah I’d love to see more games and sims for Linux. There’s a lot out there and tons of titles that have been ported, but it would be nice for developers to include Linux at first release. But you know what Microsoft will do? My guess is it will make life miserable behind the scenes for any company that tries it. Lot’s of corrupt, rotten eggs in the world.
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Go to google setting and disable sharing info and adv
sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk
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Spaghetti code is a leading cause of technical debt, and the opposite is ravioli code, which can happen when you try to avoid technical debt without a clear understanding of what the final picture should look like.
I’m going to have to take that one to work too…and all the rest of the pastas…
Once overheard - “if we don’t know what we’re going to do,and we don’t know how we’re going to do it…I’d like to do that today”.