Here’s fairly recent pics of my mass chaos system:
Aviation teacher and Flight Instructor
Here’s fairly recent pics of my mass chaos system:
Thanks @Thommo, I’m glad an Aussie is kicking it off right for us!!! I am so thankful to everyone that has helped keep Falcon alive this long, yes the developers, but everyone that continues to fly it too! It’s been an amazing 25 years.
I basically bought BMS as an 19th birthday present to myself, so Falcon 4.0’s many different flavors has been basically a part of all of my adult life! So thanks to everyone and BMS FOREVER! Friday is my personal 25th year of owning Falcon 4.0:
Thanks for keeping the dream alive everyone!
It is also about 22 years since I thought it was dead with 12/07/99 being when original team was laid off. But looking back, it was the best thing that could have happened for Falcon, only not for the designers. Thanks to whomever was disgruntled enough with Hasbro to leak the source code!
This years survey is up! Stick through it, it is front loaded with civilian MSFS/XPlane questions but starts to have more combat specific and even BMS as a primary sim choice. Good way to represent the community of both combat flight simmers and BMS:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/flightsimsurvey2022?partner=MSFSAddons
Very cool and fitting at almost 25 years to see the Microprose logo in 4.37u3!
@Micro_440th as a former Aviation Technical Writer (mostly turbine engine manuals) and a RL civilian pilot, I appreciate the realism that BMS has gone with having the -1 and -34. The problem is that a lot of people, especially those transitioning from DCS are used to things like the excellent Chuck’s Guides series, they see these manuals and go there and not understand how these were written is truly as reference material, not how tos, like RL.
Making the disclaimer better that the BMS Training manual and secondarily the Comms+Nav is truly where everyone should start to learn to fly and employ systems would help. It’s less graphical than Chuck’s Guides, but honestly has better info on how to actually use the systems. Truly the -34 and -1 are reference material these days to understand the things going on behind the scenes or why what you did with the Training manual/Comms+Nav manual worked the way it did.
With native VR support coming, I thought it was time to start this thread.
First, let me start with what PointCtrl is. It is a very clever finger tracking unit. Think of TrackIR thats camera mounts on the VR headset and you wear two active dots with buttons on your index fingers. These small active dots’ buttons quite intuitively allow you to click on things in the virtual cockpit. As a long time home cockpit builder, I can tell you this melds VR and virtual cockpits into an amazing symphony. You look around the cockpit and you put your finger on the switch where it looks to be in the headset and hit the clicky buttons to move the switches. Plus it works with any aircraft’s cockpit. I had planned to rebuild a more thorough home cockpit, but PointCtrl stopped me. I determined with it in VR all I needed was a basic button box for the switches/levers I needed to reach often without looking at them (like gear, Master Arm, etc.). It feels so natural to use the switches, knobs, and buttons in every VR cockpit you sit in (in DCS VR).
On the hardware integration side, the very clever thing about PointCtrl is that is works on mouse emulation. No software integration is required, unlike other hand tracking solutions. This 3d world into 2d mouse movement works shockingly well.
I’ve played with the current lots of issues BMS in VR work around of the Vorpx VR wrapper/virtual desktop. There are some big issues there with PointCtrl’s movement being very amplified almost like it is at a much higher tracking resolution/DPI than what is shown on screen, but I really hope that the native BMS VR support may fix these issues.
Another interesting feature Aux button panels that attach to the side of your VR headset and add 6 functions. Originally these were the QWERTY but now with a firmware update with the V2 hardware, these can be DX buttons and do show up in the Alternative Launcher.
Edit to add:
A couple of videos of how it works. The support boards aren’t needed but does give you a physical stop so you don’t feel like you are just hanging out your hand in space if you like and a way to steady your hand if you want:
On the practical side, OpenXR for some people increases performance and avoids some SteamVR annoyances. It will definitely increase performance for those of us that have Dynamic Foevated Rendering (DFR) headsets like the Pimax Crystal. It may also allow for those of us that have PointCTRL to be able to use @fredemmott’s MSFS workaround. So to whichever BMS team member implementing it, hats off to you and looking forward to it greatly!!!
That time of year again to represent BMS in particular and combat flight sims in general!
@qawa please don’t stop! I think it’s a bit of a hurry up and wait. For me, I’m waiting for the full implementation of F-15 before I take a dive into it. I love that it’s a model that DCS doesn’t really do (it’s a FC3 plane so it doesn’t really count). I personally Iwould love to have a F-5E in BMS too. We all I think have aircraft we would like to see and of course there is the OFM group, but again I haven’t taken a deep dive into them yet partly because I know it’s F-16 avionics still. So the whole other full fidelity airplanes in BMS will reach a critical mass and we appreciate you being part of the foundation!!! I think it will be the next major leap in BMS, much like we have seen many new/returning users with VR, I think the other aircraft will have a similar wave of bringing more people to BMS.
I’ve used it a lot with my facial interface mods to make more look under so I could see my physical MFDs and other home cockpit stuff. Works just like normal. Can’t speak to the AR passthrough issues though.
@Atlas yes, and you’re right in that we need DCS, IL-2, VTOL VR, even War Thunder for the community to stay viable as an industry, especially peripherals. I just don’t like the DCs business model, but I truly hope that if it is Nick Grey personally keeping it afloat, he is able to without burning the 3rd Party developers. I hope they learned VEAO Hawk debacle and have some kind of support to allow unsupported modules to work through later updates, but I don’t know how they can do that legally/financially.
But I really want to remind everyone here, DCS doesn’t really “freaking” matter to us. BMS is its own thing. Yes, comparisons are always going to be made. We will get some flow through of users that maybe do the War Thunder->DCS->BMS transition(s) that I’m seeing with my students that are young flight sim enthusiasts, which is always nice to have fresh blood, but BMS will continue to walk its own path regardless of ED.
Alright, I’ll wade in, I can’t resist. @I-Hawk I agree! ED and the recent kerfuffle with Razbam had me eating the popcorn, despite owning M-2000 and AV-8B (my excuse: 2020 for me was actually a good year for flight sim spending and time to fly). It always feels like their early access programs are a pyramid scheme, and it all almost came tumbling down last week. VEAO’s Hawk has been a harbinger for their 3rd Party Program and with as many of them they are letting in, there is going to be a fragmentation of modules that people spent a decent amount of money and not being able to fly them anymore if ED doesn’t collapse under its own weight first. I know Nick Grey comes from money and maybe that’s how, but still…
@Atlas I think help is coming to this in multiple ways. I’m not sure how much your down time during the wait versus put in the time to it now for a solution that will be superseded, but one way is here in a video of baked in BMS AR support being tested:
@Mike-0 Ummm, checkout this thread…
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not showing the level of 3d object details that the villages and cities have in DCS, but that 4.38 terrain seems on par and those villages and cities come at a performance hit. There are sometimes I prefer BMS clouds, especially in VR.
@dawgboy definitely @drtbkj as says for the AIM-120D with OFM mods, which are great but somewhat too speculative for BMS on the performance of the D. As for AESA, BMS doesn’t due speculative like some of the other sims. You can be sure if things like IFF can’t be modeled fully, they won’t pursue it. I’m now a believer in this philosophy. When I want more the speculative I can fly the other modern combat sim option, but that is very rare these days for me because I like all of the hard RL things that BMS makes you do to get those toys, not just use them as an easy button with none of the drawbacks.
There was a point when I was younger I wanted all the latest and greatest toys modeled even if speculative, but that’s not what makes Falcon in general and BMS specifically special. Yes, that makes a lot of the features and modeling in BMS 10+ years old, but this all of this is done properly with the associated pilot workloads, not just a magic wand to have a feature function with none of the effort to make the feature work as a pilot. For me now, there are plenty of recent history about that far back what ifs to keep me entertained than to try to be on the bleeding edge of now that would mostly be guess work due to classified information. Give me the real deal 10+ years ago instead of however long ago the information allows of complete guess of today for BMS please that is often nerfed in implementation by other sims that attempt to model that stuff.
@Scotters check that the HMCS axis isn’t assigned to an analog axis. It will disable mouse clicking the 3d cockpit knob. It probably got mapped to one of the TQS knobs or increase/decrease analog base lever.
@airtex2019 FWIW no, there were a lot of us that tried shutter glasses (eDimensional) or even red/blue in the early 2000s and then on but the HUD was never collimated to “infinity” so it had big problems with dumb bombing and guns. It took the DX11 and VR support in 4.35+ support to fully fix this.
@rubba and @Mav-jp this maybe a bug that might be a feature. There is something about VR that makes me think that in needs at least more adjustment that pancake and just telling us it’s a know issue might be okay.
The CATMs in BMS I believe were first made for the Korean training theater that hasn’t came out for 4.37 or maybe the CATMs included somewhat took over that project. They were for Virtual Fighter Squadrons that wanted to do more realistic/higher volume training. CATMs allowed for shot validation and feedback, something that takes ACMI ranges and lots of debriefing in RL. So the beeps of getting hit allowed for feedback and BMS ACMI recordings of hits. This also allowed these groups to do realistic regenerations of flights so that you could still have a valuable training evolution, practice BFM/ACM/BVR and know you hit/got hit and still get an AAR and landing in instead of being shot down. I believe @AviationPlus did a few videos with that theater and may still use CATMs
@williang83 I VR 100% right now with a Pimax Crystal. I have physical MFDs and ICP, button box, Saitek Switch Panel, potatoed Saitek AV8R (use the toggle switches and axis pots for cockpit stuff, former stick head as external view control), an X56 throttle for buttons and switches, and Logitech G13. Of course, the X65F HOTAS. With all this I can get pretty much almost everything in the cockpit that is needed for ramp start and general combat. I still don’t have the Aux Comm panel and a few other little things.
For the mouse usage, I have my standard gaming mouse and then a trackball placed on my left hand non-stick side so I can use it as a stationary mouse control.
Honestly with the Crystal and even having special switch covers and different shaped drawer bumpers, it’s hard to navigate everything by feel and sometimes it better to use the mouse, sometimes better for all the device buttons, switches, and knobs.
Then there is PointCTRL, like finger units that has a mini “TrackIR” sits on top of your VR headset and tracks your finger and makes it into mouse movement and clicks. Simple but very effective hand tracking. Works amazing in DCS to where I need literally none of the extra things I’ve listed besides my X65F and my “critical no looking required” switches that are on my button box. But unfortunately, not supported in BMS and most likely won’t be anytime soon