Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS
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There is a global consideration though…
Opening the door to API and other avionics means BMS cannot control the quality of 3rd party addons that can be made…
We are very picky when it comes to the F-16, if something else was made, we would have to start supporting aspects of the sim we did not consider before this more work for us…
We are just an handful… I cannot imagine anything like that happening in the near future given our size and ambitions…
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Are there any useful public data for all these assets?
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@MaxWaldorf About the quality of the 3d party ac, you’re right. But I think of that as a first step forward from what we have now, for instance, in the F18 with F16 avionics that people flyes. Having an own avionics would be a boost in realism and very attractive for the F18 lovers who fly in BMS (and a whole world of CV operations that opens up). The quality issue that arises could be tackled with some kind of quality “standard” that ensures some kind of BMS “seal of approval” conceded over the time amd experience with the asset, and then maybe some kind of official support if there are resources for that.
I agree that systems like FLIR would be tricky to “APIce”, as it needs access to the 3D rendering engine… but not much sure about that as I’m only guessing.Anyway, as I said before this is not a thing I demand from anyone: only a few ideas and suggestions to make my mind around the feasability of the feature in terms of time, resources and “policy” (maybe is not the word, not an english speaker here).
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@drtbkj I think that F18 will be a good point of start as it currently has some people actively putting work on it and fying it in BMS. Not sure about the versions, as it needs to be clear before development that all the info is publicly available in order to be able to provide a highly realistic plane. That’s why I think that 5th gen aircrafts are out of reach right now.
Harrier and A10 are pretty good options, too. Would be lovely to fly them in BMS
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Hello,
From my perspective, we already have a great US/NATO fighter with F-16.
It would be far more interesting to have a full avionics suit of a possible opponent, such as Su-30 than just another 10 times rebuilt A-10 or F-18…
Regards,
Radium
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@Radium a MiG 29 would be very, very interesting to have. And for the first versions I think that there are public info out there: did some research about the n019 radar a while ago and I’ve found some interesting sources. They only need to be translated from Russian, though…
About SU 27 or other more modern redfor jets, I think that the Russian policy about the info on their systems will be an obstacle to have a fully realistic simulation of them.
But well, maybe SU-25 as ground attack plane and some older jets like the MiG 23, although that last isn’t a rival against the F16, will be a very interesting addition. -
@moidesko How many Mig29 did we had in simulation… Su-35, Su-30 or Su34 would be more interesting !
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@Radium being able to pilot a SU 34 in BMS could be an authentic blast for me
If there is enough info for a complete simulation of it, I would vote for that without doubt.
As a two seater, maybe some deeper new mechanics need to be implemented in BMS in order to have a realistic experience in it, but well, challenge is what makes coding fun -
@MaxWaldorf said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
There is a global consideration though…
Opening the door to API and other avionics means BMS cannot control the quality of 3rd party addons that can be made…
We are very picky when it comes to the F-16, if something else was made, we would have to start supporting aspects of the sim we did not consider before this more work for us…
We are just an handful… I cannot imagine anything like that happening in the near future given our size and ambitions…
Well, imho that’d be no different than other theaters of operation. Install at your own risk. There are lots of excellent ones, but still there’s a chance you’ll find one completely broken, with models/textures all wrong, eating al the fps and ctd’ing all the time.
Once given aircraft proves itself to be at least decent quality BMS team may promote it to semi-official package.@Raptor WRT other aircraft in BMS wish list, I guess it has to be single-seat, preferably multirole.
For US paltforms it’d be
- F-16A - pretty much crucial for Israel, Desert Storm, Lybia and Panama mabe? Also opens opportunity for fictional campaigns set in '80s
- F/A-18C and A (should be quite similar to C just with less systems)
I’d love to see some non-us platforms, however there’s a problem that till 2000 there were no really multirole fighters outside US.
Later we have JAS-39 and latest models of Mirage 2k, problem is they were not in widespread usage
Russians got multirole capabilities later in late '00 with Mig-35 and Su-3x family. But I think there’s very limited info on their avionics, which btw also applies to two mentioned fighters above.
So i guess it’d be- Mig-29 (sadly with very limited A2G )
- Mirage F1 - useful for middle-east and various conflicts across the Africa .
Mirage III/V or Su-22 - both important and quite widespread, but might be not that fancy to attract enough users.
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Mirage 2000EGM, Mirage 2000-9, Rafale, Typhoon, Gripen, F-2A, FCK-1, are fully multirole fighters. They are neither american, nor russian
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@Radium
Fully agree, all of those fighters are damn cool and I’d really love them being modeled in BMS, but:- How much reliable info about avionics of said fighters is available?
AFAIK not much, so it’d be kinda difficult to get those even semi-right. - For how many theaters are those aircraft relevant ?
Form this list Maybe Mirage 2k would make most sense, as its widespread and some info should be available. However I’m concerned if we know enough about its avionics (esp later models) and amount of variants being an obstacle here.
- How much reliable info about avionics of said fighters is available?
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@Xeno My biggest concern is : it’s so boring to do, and redo, and reredo and rereredo same stuff.
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@Radium said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
Hello,
From my perspective, we already have a great US/NATO fighter with F-16.
It would be far more interesting to have a full avionics suit of a possible opponent, such as Su-30 than just another 10 times rebuilt A-10 or F-18…
Regards,
Radium
Hi, Radium. You raise a point that has occurred to us (OFM) when we discuss the possibilities of this. Given the time it seems it would take to do this, we may not be able to do many jets, if it even possible without code access. So, the question becomes, which jet? I certainly respect your views, but if we ask 9 other people we may get 9 other answers .
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@Xeno said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
Opening the door to API and other avionics means BMS cannot control the quality of 3rd party addons that can be made…
We are very picky when it comes to the F-16, if something else was made, we would have to start supporting aspects of the sim we did not consider before this more work for us…I actually think @MaxWaldorf 's point is true … there is a qualitative difference of supporting “data” mods like theaters, textures, and flight-model configs… vs “code” mods like aircraft avionics, which, for performance reasons, would probably need to be C++ code running in-process with the rest of BMS.
I think BMS team has enough work fighting heap corruption, double-free bugs, race conditions, etc in their own 24 y.o. C++ codebase. If crash logs start coming in due to new third-party code bugs… it would make life very difficult.
They already have this problem, to a small extent, with things like Vorpx which inject DLL hooks into the BMS process…
BMS would probably need a “safe mode” to launch without loading third-party DLLs.
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@drtbkj By my side, I already decided which jet I will do and my comrades are with me ! And it’s certainly not F-18, F16A, F-15 or A-10 !
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@sunrrrise if you want a good Rafale, let’s choose Rafale C or B !!
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@Radium said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
@drtbkj By my side, I already decided which jet I will do and my comrades are with me ! And it’s certainly not F-18, F16A, F-15 or A-10 !
One of the cooler things about BMS is how we can choose our favorite jet. So, you would vote for Su-30?
Let’s assume you are, and use it as an example to the Group . How would we go about setting up a really functional Su-30? First, you have to make the choice, how authentic do you want it to be? Generally, the more “real” you want it to be, the harder it is to do!
1)Let’s go to the cockpit first, and please keep in mind I have not been in a Su30. However, I’m going to assume it has an austere cockpit that you can’t ramp start( no jfs2 and such). You have 2 choices. You can install the needed hotspots. That is a time consuming process. But. if you and your comrades want to put in the time, the Mafia may be able to give you a tool that may help. Or, you can install a fully functional Viper of Hornet 'pit. That’s an easy process. I’m currently testing the 4.36 Harrier, and put a Hornet pit in . The reason for that is the Viper and Hornet are the 2 'pits we have that are fully developed. My personal preference is to put Viper in land based, and Hornet in naval. I took 5 minutes to do it. That, by the way, is why in some of our Theaters, the jets come stock with Viper/Hornet pit.
2a) The next step is flight and ground dynamics. Get ready to learn the acdata/afm files real well. and it’s very time intensive. Basically you take real world flight data and "translate " that to BMS.
2b) Somewhat connected to this is the visual representation of the jet, called the LOD’s. That , too is a complicated process. But I say somewhat connected as you can put new acdata/afm into the existing LOD. So, that would be your choice.
3) After you complete these 2 processes you will a jet that flies and that you can operate in 'pit, but it will have Viper avionics . That is where this thread comes in. If you have the needed real world data, could make Su-30 avionics without BMS code access, and have the necessary time and manpower, then Step 3 becomes step one. -
@moidesko said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
Hi all!
Pretty new in BMS lands here, enjoying taming the F16 and sincerely impressed on the devs work on it.
I write this post in order to share some humble thoughts and ideas about the possible implementation of the avionics of other planes than the F16. I know it’s a recurrent topic here with many older posts demanding it, but that is not my intention: I’m pretty happy with all the content we have for free.
I think that would be very interesting to have other avionics in BMS implementes in a so modular way that make possible for not only the BMS team to introduce new and complete hi fidelity planes, but also from small teams from the community (somewhat like third party planes in DCS but a la BMS).
The idea is to modularize avionics code (as far as I know is the “last but not least” thing missing to make that possible, correct me if I’m wrong) in a way that it’s possible to build an API that, in one hand, implements methods to allow the “plane” to recover info on demand and commit actions on the “core” (if needed) and, in the other hand, registering of callbacks for environment state awareness.I’ve mentioned “other avionics” but maybe is interesting to move it to the full scale “other planes”, as making them fully modular and depending the less possible from obscured systems on the “core” would be the best scenario. Not sure about that, because obviously I don’t have any knowledge about the BMS code, so I’m making maybe some far fetched guesses.
The new plane/avionics would then be send to BMS team for quality approval (or the proccess they want) and, then, included in the source code and compiled along the rest of the system. If the API is implemented in a way that allows it, maybe the third party plane could be implemented in other languages like Rust, in order to make it less C++ typical error prone and making the development easier, faster and clearer for third parties. That could be done with an abstract API, implemented by specific ones using C++ interoperability libs, one for each “approved” development language.
Anyway, I write that post not as a wish list. Although I don’t have experience with C++ outside some personal small projects, I’m a seasoned software developer and I’ve been looking around FreeFalcon code in order to see if that task is possible with that code without dying in the process and put my hands on it to try to make a draft of my ideas there.
I would like to know your opinions about these ideas and/or if FF is a good ground base to build some kind of POC (I know the code has changed a LOT in BMS in comparison with what is left of FF).
(Sorry if that isn’t the category for that post)
Hi, if you have the FF code and want to create a POC with that, that may be a great starting point for such idea.
But honestly, before even talking about externalizing avionics and integrate them with a 3rd party development, I think the first step MUST be internal work that would even allow avionics for different aircraft. Currently the entire avionics code is of the F-16 and bound into other pieces of code, so the first step of such an idea must be an internal architecture that will in the base idea include father class for each type of avionics class and have the existing F-16 classes inherit from that.
To make a practical example, if I’ll take SMS class, then currently we have in code :
SmsClass - Which refer (of course) to the F-16 SMSWhat we need is:
SmsClass (Generic)
F16SmsClass : public SmsClassAnd same should go of course for all other avionics classes: FCC, Fack, ICP, DED, Electrical systems, etc
Only after such step was achieved and we have an acceptable state of father classes, only then we can make the next step to create avionics for some different jet and then maybe at some point implement an external API.
If someone wants to join the team in order to work on such topics from the inside, I believe it’s doable, assuming he has the right set of skills, time to invest and of course motivation.
And of course the existing FF code can be a great ground for POC, for the step I mentioned (Before trying to run for an external API)
Cheers!
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@drtbkj said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
@Radium said in Hypothetical question on Avionics in BMS:
@drtbkj By my side, I already decided which jet I will do and my comrades are with me ! And it’s certainly not F-18, F16A, F-15 or A-10 !
One of the cooler things about BMS is how we can choose our favorite jet. So, you would vote for Su-30?
Let’s assume you are, and use it as an example to the Group . How would we go about setting up a really functional Su-30? First, you have to make the choice, how authentic do you want it to be? Generally, the more “real” you want it to be, the harder it is to do!
1)Let’s go to the cockpit first, and please keep in mind I have not been in a Su30. However, I’m going to assume it has an austere cockpit that you can’t ramp start( no jfs2 and such). You have 2 choices. You can install the needed hotspots. That is a time consuming process. But. if you and your comrades want to put in the time, the Mafia may be able to give you a tool that may help. Or, you can install a fully functional Viper of Hornet 'pit. That’s an easy process. I’m currently testing the 4.36 Harrier, and put a Hornet pit in . The reason for that is the Viper and Hornet are the 2 'pits we have that are fully developed. My personal preference is to put Viper in land based, and Hornet in naval. I took 5 minutes to do it. That, by the way, is why in some of our Theaters, the jets come stock with Viper/Hornet pit.
2a) The next step is flight and ground dynamics. Get ready to learn the acdata/afm files real well. and it’s very time intensive. Basically you take real world flight data and "translate " that to BMS.
2b) Somewhat connected to this is the visual representation of the jet, called the LOD’s. That , too is a complicated process. But I say somewhat connected as you can put new acdata/afm into the existing LOD. So, that would be your choice.
3) After you complete these 2 processes you will a jet that flies and that you can operate in 'pit, but it will have Viper avionics . That is where this thread comes in. If you have the needed real world data, could make Su-30 avionics without BMS code access, and have the necessary time and manpower, then Step 3 becomes step one.I rarely read something here that snooty.