Dear BMS team
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Albeit i don’t know if i am writing to the correct part of forum,
i feel the need to post the following letter adressed to the Benchmark Sims team
and all those who develop the theaters, campaigns, models and mods,
who collect data and contribute their knowledge and experience to this ongoing project.Thank you.
If ever you feel tired and fed up with the development process,
if you think at moments (rarely, i hope) that it is somehow futile,
please don’t forget the following.Back in the days the Microprose team has released an absolutely insane for its time project,
a product of reckless ambition and careful consideration, iterated over and over for more than a decade.
I don’t know if the game development industry has already been back then as vicious and toxic towards it’s own
workers as it is today, but what they did accomplish was incredible not only in 1999 but also in 2018.
It would be difficult to trace the ancestry through each hand that contributed in the years after the original release,
but if it wasn’t for you today guys (and girls?) this “thing” would cease to exist and disappear.
I know that the player base isn’t as large as it is for any other genre, but let’s estimate it at 10-15 thousand active
users. A number comparable with the number of active fighter jet pilots in the world which in the case of Falcon BMS is
surely a compliment. It’s rather mindblowing that so many of us choose to digest gigantic manuals, scour youtube and forums,
meet up online and roleplay (but more out of practical reasons) fighter pilots while buying books (manuals, memoirs, analytical 1000+ page treatises)
that would make any intelligence service suspicious; most without having chosen this profession in real life. And if you read this post,
if you are registered on this forum, you know exactly why.
The simulation (not just flight sim) community can be extremely salty and is often a friendship
of arguing voices (arguing over numbers, dates, etc as all wargamers do), sometimes (often where men are young) into
toxicity and at moments into some pretty miserable masculine crisis folded into angry forum messages. And often we blame
you (developers) for all sorts of things. Sorry for that. But here is a thing :
Falcon 4 + BMS is perhaps the biggest, most badass convincing simulation project ever.
From spending hours reading forums and books on tactics (of killing patriot with iron bombs in the desert for instance),
carefully considering fragging a package (and being drenched in period macho music that no matter the era, makes me want to grow a regulation mustache),
to strapping into the cockpit (arranging the chair among the wires, hotas, tracker, mouse, keyboard, finding the right position with pedals)
and flipping all the virtual switches, to dancing with the sams, to fumbling with tacan and ils while hoping that the engine isn’t burning -
all of millions of micro and macro tasks that made me understand what it feels like to be a multicore processor -
all of that stuff that preoccupies the user so much that the whole world disappears and i find myself sweaty (in rl) after the mission -
this is so much. There isn’t a thing in the whole world, not even the best books read under bedcover with a flashlight in childhood,
so absorbing. Falcon BMS, while demanding a significant (but not insurmountable) dedication at least in the beginning of the players journey,
is the most convincing, almost living, simulation of reality that exists today. In other words, there has not been
a thing made by man that could work just like imagination does. The combination of simulation, reference and game is simply without match
in any medium or industry. For many reasons i don’t think that games are or were Art (in qualitative sense) as the industry is palpably
moving away in a different direction, that’s not to say that any contemporary art could not be interactive.
Falcon BMS however, comes very close to being truly a work of art - and the pinnacle of (and i hope not to insult all those who don’t consider simulation a game)
games up to today - a medium of interactive imagination.Now now, i know what you think - perhaps this newbie is throwing all these epithets around for some mercantile reason,
perhaps he wants something or maybe you mumble that Falcon BMS is nowhere near any art and in fact you won’t install it again
unless it solves problem a) and adds the feature b) and furthers the ai (and a little more in parenthesis : i wish it would be easier to work with ai wingmen in for instance
sead and dead missions, but let’s not forget that among the sim genre BMS ai is still on the first place, with Wings Over Flanders Fields being second close (albeit theirs has an advantage of existing within the ww1 context, where chaos was chief among all engagements)) or until something with distribution or rights will change… the list can go on,
and you all know where the wishlist topic is and you know, of course i have my own wishlist; but hey,
i’ve been playing games since mid 90s and was constantly, maybe not always consciously, searching for the one thing which i could fire up and there,
behind the screen find a living, moving world in which i can dip here and there, perhaps make some ripples but also be able
to wander in awe at all things happenning - and none of the projects which attempted this have succeeded. BMS did though.
It’s still there, it’s breathing, kicking, reporting and fighting.
But not on it’s own, of course. It’s the community and most importantly - you people, you who sit through nights with red eyes and choose to do this on the weekend,
or maybe in many more other moments. Life constantly gets in the way of our innermost desires and games (imho) are drugs (for my generation, definitely) and oh god
how many times i wished i could instead of attending a) or doing b) strap in and fly.
For many reasons the majority of us are not real life pilots. I could say that for health reasons i wouldn’t even enjoy flying. But of course,
it is mostly the financial restrictions or limits or the roads we (chose to ?) took in our lives. There are still those who do fly or used to.
I know that this sensation of sitting in front of a screen, wrapped in usb wires, is maybe 1 or 2 percent from what it is like in real life.
But it is 100 percent of imaginary flying, fighting, planning, almost living a virtual life. And sometimes this virtual life can deeply affect the real, meaty, physical one.
Just like books do, conversations, maybe movies? Art seen in museums or artifacts under the glass, maybe a traffic accident or a conversation with a person in the street.
But games ? Not really. Best games have a loop of pleasure, they put one in the zone. And here’s where simulations differ - all these interaction, focusing and concentration,
it all feels so real. And let’s say this experience can change some of us, pull some of us out of certain loops in life. It changes thinking is what i want to say.
For the better ? Who can know such a thing. I’m sure we all come from different roads and have different stories, our views on life (politics?) may differ drastically, so on.
And yeah, i do have and dip and play the other things too - i’d even buy all modules of one those things, if there was a game bundled with the models. Sometimes the
new and old career modes in Il2BoX and Woff and SH3-5 and Command Ops and others fool me into thinking that there are cogs spinning there, things that happen outside of being a script made and polished by human hand, but often it is obvious exactly how it is made. And then there’s life and exciting and depressing things that go on there, the beloved or hated job, perhaps family, perhaps other people - these are all rich experiences.But this, this “thing” that you developers, modders, etc have made and are making is unique.
There simply isn’t anything in the world or history like this.
Thanks. -
We have no girls (at the present) in BMS… this is a man-thing…
Futile? We are past that stage…
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Well, it’s a mystery to me how a group of people no matter how big or small can go on with a passion project this complicate this long.
But i sure am glad it exists.
I just hope that the story of this development won’t get lost as this project is really unique.
And oh, enjoyable -
Newb.
Never ever heard that Falcon is immortal?
Falcon Never Dies.
FND
Worst than cats.
Better than vampires.
Deity.Στάλθηκε από το MI 5 μου χρησιμοποιώντας Tapatalk
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I take my hat out for this fantastic compliment to the BMS team
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Behind any man there is a woman (in most cases), this must certainly also be the case for the BMS Dev team. So even if there is no girls in the Dev team, there still is. They give us or the Dev team the freedom to enjoy our passion.
Well writen depapier.
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I checked in my pile of falcon goodies for history, but there is a better one out already. I can’t copy link for some reason, but if you Google “falcon4 history chart” , there is a detailed history of all falcon iterations from start to bms 4.33 u4.
It gives you a pdf file with timeline type graph, very interesting.
Cheers