The future of the sim..?
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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”.
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Go to google setting and disable sharing info and adv
True. We (you and me and many others, at least) got it.
But also ‘they’ did the same, I must be afraid.With best regards,
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Who knows… ? Remember the time (before its release) FalconBMS (also called DarkFalcon by some people) was a qualified as vaporware …
About the future of Falcon4, since BMS team has the source code and now, the support of Tommo … everything is possible. It is just a question of motivation and time.
However, concerning other aircraft than the F-16, do not expect any miracles. There is too much left to fix, do and implement properly on the venerable F-16 : delivery modes, IFF, L16, HTS, various more realistic technical details, systems or ops constrains … etc… (on which we do have valid information and which are not sensible) and I am not even talk about global AI, radar, SAM, EW … behaviors.IMHO, (personal feeling and not the official voice of BMS) the only a/c you (maybe) might hope for improvement and dedicated avionics (maybe one day) is perhaps the F-18 (?). But to bring it near the level of our curent F-16 … you will probably have to wait another decade.
So I won’t expect BMS to become something close to DCS in the area of multi-aircraft simulation. Maybe some 3Dpit slightly improved (hotspot fixes, textures … etc …) maybe … it is not impossible … But certainly not a accurate F-22 nor AN-3 simulation.Is it reasonable to hope for some good and appreciated features in the future : YES … definitively. Do I believe that Falcon will always be a reference in 2027 … ? Yes, I truly believe so.
Live and enjoy the present. We are dealing with “the future”.
You know, Dee-Jay, while I would enjoy a more functional Hornet cockpit, I recently surprised myself when I realized I preferred the Viper avionics. Maybe it’s just my personal tendency to “make lemonade”, but rolling in a a SAM site,just TMS-ing,DMS-ing,cursor enabling, and pinky switching to beat the band, is where the most fun is for me. “Flying Viper” in a Hornet is not a drawback, it’s an opportunity.
Vandal, what you wrote about drones had previously occurred to me. I mean, if RL is “videogame-like”, would it be fun for us? For me, personally, I like what we have here.
What I would like to see in BMS is, wherever possible, to bring in new tech to our flying. AESA(I know this has been discussed, but in 10 years???),ALE-50, IFF, comms,cutting edge weapons, etc. Perhaps we could look at it this way…The USAF will never field a Block 60 Viper…but, WE can.
The other thing I would like to see if increased ease of setup and operation of the sim itself. Take what we have to the point where the bugs are gone. -