The future of the sim..?

[CaptCanada]

Hi all

Firstly, I know that there is a thread regarding what people are looking forward to in the next release. My intention of this post is, if possible, find out what will happen after BMS reaches the point where they can no longer extend Falcon 4.

I am just wondering what will happen when the team reaches this point where they can no longer take the game any further or in order to extend it the time involved would be too prohibitive and thus a completely new sim would probably be the best course of action.

I know that the other flyable aircraft in the game could really use updates and could in theory be upgraded with their own individual avionics suites and flight models. As great as that would be, I feel that such a course would be best suited to each plane being a standalone or addon sim, as MPS did with the F18 and Mig29 addons.

I hope that the team really does continue work on this great sim and I am sure that they have great plans ahead. I am not taking away from all the great work they have done and continue to do.

I assume? that the team has discussed this issues at least more than once. I am sure that each release makes it more difficult to decide if there will be another release or if it would be better to focus their efforts into a completely new F16 sim?

Thanks to the BMS team for all the great work!

[Dee-Jay]

[h=2]The future of the sim…?[/h]

[leblonk]

Falcon A/T - Falcon 4.0 - Falcon4 BMS. I’m sure that as falcon has grown from its baby steps to the point where it is now it will with PC technology and peoples love for the sim change and morph in different directions from the F-16 - F-18 - F-22 - V/R innovation
Hotas tech - its not that the sim wont grow because for every person wanting something new there’s someone in one way or another working on it. Lets just enjoy the here and now

[CobaltUK]

As I understand it the team do what they do for their own love of Falcon and generously share it with us. Its been said before. So its really us that will either be happy with what the final result is or move on. Always been the choice.
For me its just fine as is though naturally I will appreciate any advances that continue to come.

[Vyper37]

I think a brand new sim is the way to go, we could call it “Fighter Ops” ! :shock:

[Ripper]

Falcon 5.0 will blow your minds.

[LorikEolmin]

I started to use F4BMS a bit more than a year ago, I don’t know what THE future is but I know what MY future is.

[CaptCanada]

@Vyper37:

I think a brand new sim is the way to go, we could call it “Fighter Ops” ! :shock:

Very good point! Wonder what ever became of that sim? Probably in perpetual development just like Jet Thunder and the Seven G F18 sim

[CaptCanada]

@CobaltUK:

As I understand it the team do what they do for their own love of Falcon and generously share it with us. Its been said before. So its really us that will either be happy with what the final result is or move on. Always been the choice.
For me its just fine as is though naturally I will appreciate any advances that continue to come.

I know the guys do it for the love of the sim and certainly hope that the love continues and the updates as well. I guess my question should have been not what the future of the sim will be but what the future of the combat flight sim is in general? Personally, I’d love to see another F16 study sim. I’d also like to see a F117 sim, even though the plane itself is no longer in service.

[Arty]

Well i dont think that this sim will ever reach that point.
In this category real evolution is fast and clasified… so when it comes unclasified then BMS kicks in…
Even if F16 reach that point there are hundrets of other aircraft.

sent from my mi5 using Tapatalk

[Cik]

they have the source code you know, the only limit is the man hours you can put into rewriting it

“the limit of falcon 4” doesn’t really exist

[-Vandal-]

Yeah it’s an interesting topic. The thing that I found fascinating about Falcon and those other flight sims is that it was based on current technology. So it was a way to get some rudimentary knowledge about the present military capabilities around the world.

It seems to me we’re getting pretty close the most dangerous missions being flown by drones or weapons with such stand off capabilities that realistic military aviation in the not so distant future will be reporting to a cubicle to coordinate with politicians to see if it’s okay to go ahead and drop a bomb or not. If so then you swivel around in your office chair and remote the weapon system to the target. That might be fun as a sim, but I am thinking its not going to be as fun as pretending to be combat pilots putting our virtual lives in the threat zones. So in that respect, I hope there will be enough fans to keep jet aged combat flight sims as an available hobby. Certainly there has been a market for WWII era aircraft and I don’t think that will ever go away, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of jet engine simming development going on.

I thought the Devs said that they had done some things to make Falcon BMS more modular, so that some point in the future it would be less of a hassle for them to plug in a new plane with its avionics into the system. I thought they said that was a long-term goal. I could be wrong about that, I might be mixing it up with DMS. But yeah, that would be the way to go in my book because like Arty says there are hundreds of planes with various avionics and capabilities over the jet age and being able to do the Korea 1989 campaign, or a Vietnam 1970 campaign, or a fictional Nato vs East Block 2017 campaign is really cool, and would be even cooler with the other planes and avionics brought in. However, I am just happy that we got what we got now working with Windows 10 because Microsoft like’s to blow up games like we like to blow up SA-2 sites.

Seriously, I would like to see the future of military aviation simming go totally open source and be cross platform, so I could play Falcon 5 on Linux with someone playing it on Windows 11 and another on a Mac. Open source would be so cool because if one team loses it’s key people another team can just pick up the pieces and keep this thing alive. Long LIVE Falcon! LOL.

[Mav-jp]

@CaptCanada:

find out what will happen after BMS reaches the point where they can no longer extend Falcon 4.

why should that happen ?

the only limit to extend falcon4 is our brains and imagination.

[Dee-Jay]

@CaptCanada:

Very good point! Wonder what ever became of that sim? Probably in perpetual development just like Jet Thunder and the Seven G F18 sim

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”.

[koskar12]

The limit is the sky…

[MorteSil]

@Mav-jp:

why should that happen ?

the only limit to extend falcon4 is our brains and imagination.

Ability/Will/Desire to continue? I think he is more referring to the point that the things that need to be changed from a technical aspect (Not gameplay aspect) start to become too prohibitive on the teams’s real lives, or the projects out there that nobody on the team wants to put the time into tackling…such as a much needed DirectX update, or reworking all the models and texture and terrain and UI screens to be a true native HD and not scaled, designing new code to handle newer technology and avionics that the engine can’t currently handle like JTIDS, IFF, “stealth”, AESA, etc… They are very large and labor intensive projects that are hard for someone to take on willingly without a paycheck to keep them coming back for more every day, so please don’t take that like I’m complaining, I certainly understand why nobody really wants to jump into attempting some of them, or have attempted them and become discouraged and moved on. From a game play perspective, you are correct there really is no limit. But sooner or later the graphics engine will need to be updated to use an API that was at least released in the last decade and not built for 5 generations ago Windows, if for no other reason than graphics card vendors are going to stop supporting it.

[Dee-Jay]

@MorteSil:

Ability/Will/Desire to continue? I think he is more referring to the point that the things that need to be changed from a technical aspect (Not gameplay aspect) start to become too prohibitive on the teams’s real lives, or the projects out there that nobody on the team wants to put the time into tackling…such as a much needed DirectX update, or reworking all the models and texture and terrain and UI screens to be a true native HD and not scaled, designing new code to handle newer technology and avionics that the engine can’t currently handle like JTIDS, IFF, “stealth”, AESA, etc… They are very large and labor intensive projects that are hard for someone to take on willingly without a paycheck to keep them coming back for more every day, so please don’t take that like I’m complaining, I certainly understand why nobody really wants to jump into attempting some of them, or have attempted them and become discouraged and moved on. From a game play perspective, you are correct there really is no limit. But sooner or later the graphics engine will need to be updated to use an API that was at least released in the last decade and not built for 5 generations ago Windows, if for no other reason than graphics card vendors are going to stop supporting it.

You are right. Maybe Falcon4 will slowly die in the next few years … or not. Rendez-vous in 2027 and see.

[MorteSil]

@Dee-Jay:

You are right. Maybe Falcon4 will slowly die in the next few years … or not. Rendez-vous in 2027 and see.

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…

[Stevie]

Eventually, the people that started all of this will pass on…which begs the question, how is the legacy of the sim passed on? That’s the real question - how much gets remembered, and how much gets forgotten?

[sub101]

I think it will only die if something else comes along and betters it. At the moment the concept that F4BMS has is brilliant, it’s just outdated. I Don’t think any developer will invest the money to build a sim like that ever again. DCS is trying, but to me still doesn’t quite sit up there with falcon. we have to bear in mind peoples rigs that struggle with bms. would a complete new sim provide better graphics for less fps drop. I would like most pilots see an improvement in the mp scenario. I do take my hat off to all the BMS team for there hard work in what they have done so far. All in there own FREE time.