Hey everyone, as discussed on Falcon Lounge discord:

To fix the missing <M> on RWR you need to alter the 3 lines in FALCON4_RCD.XML file.

line 87 <BeamWidth>30.0</BeamWidth> instead of 9
line 733 <BeamWidth>45.0</BeamWidth> instead of 9
line 1208 <BeamWidth>30.0</BeamWidth> instead of 9.

The fix needs to be done on every machine and every theater.

For the default, Korea theater the file can be found at Falcon BMS 4.35\Data\TerrData\Objects . However the change needs to be made for each theater, so use your windows search function to find it. I’ve done this change for Balkans, Baltic, Iberia, Georgia, Israel, Israel 1980s, Mideast128, Somalia, Kuweit theaters and haven’t found any significant differences in xml files, but your mileage may vary, so it’s best to add lines manually rather than just swap the file. The changes touch the AIM-120, AIM-54A, AA-12 (R-77).

UPDATE:

Rather than forcing every user to manually edit this file for each campaign they have installed, a member of the community has graciously created a utility which will make the appropriate changes to any instance of this file found in the BMS install directory.

All you need to do is download the file and run it. It doesn’t matter where you download it to or run it from, it will still work as long as you give it permissions to run.
Note: Windows 10 users may see a blue warning dialog box when attempting to run the utility. Click “More Info”, and then “Run Anyway” to run the program.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cZEq_NWloEdKAWWYP2X7JmJIs9koTDZU/view?usp=sharing

Hey @I-Hawk you may find this presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw and paper https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SIGGRAPH_Advances_2021_final.pdf an interesting read regarding current and future LODless rendering! Pretty sure you’ll find this interesting.

Guys you all should just take vacations after this intense year, we can all wait! Thanks for your work and updates!

Just ran 4.35 on a machine that is 3600X and 5700XT - the performance is shockingly good.
Previously I didn’t even think about running in 4k, but now it…runs better than 1080p before?
Stellar job! Thanks guys!

This is indeed amazingly done. To my mind, only one other game tried doing this - Silent Hunter 5, where the original idea was to allow for proper marine navigation through stars, but like much else in it was abandoned. Current mods restore it somewhat, but its a very confusing process much of which relies on scripts. However, one thing that is always astonishing - as with BMS - is when in order to understand how something in the game works you need to read real life books and manuals. Then, when you try it out in the game - it works. This is especially amazing when you discover this yourself and it seems that the system is just there, not designed for the player, but for proper simulation and can be used as in reality.

What you’re posting is mostly to do with PBR - physics based rendering. This means configuring materials for 3d models in such a way that different layers respond in a way that imitates physical materials. That would be a simple way of put it. Global illumination is simply a way to calculate lighting within the scene - it means using physically realistic sources of lighting (to an extent) instead of setting everything up manually (which is what lighting designers do in games and this is pretty complex). But global illumination does not solve every problem, so you’d still have to adjust lighting in closed volumes etc. There are different ways to calculate such a model and ray tracing is the most expensive (in terms of computation) and most precise one. Essentially ray traced global illumination can be noticed only through small details. So, in case modelling such a reflection on metallic body of aircraft as on this frame from a video you posted, there needs to be both a lighting model and metallic materials, and of course the actual graphic assets which are made appropriately. Then there are ray traced reflections, which are a different story altogether but essentially their point is to provide more precise calculation than screen space reflections. Again, this is noticeable mostly in details or in very large reflections.

But honestly, this is all just general statements about rendering tech. BMS devs above already responded in this topic where necessary regarding what is going on and where it is going and what is needed.

@i-hawk I think that viper shot is from a recent usaf reddit where people were making fun of navy growler slamming the jet down on landing while viper pilot did a good gentle landing.

Very grateful for this new update to you all! I’ve not had the time to fly proper since it happened (mostly because setting up the campaign and initial planning phase and refragging or editing all suicidal ai flight packages takes long in the beginning) but a short test with TE’s looked great! Its peculiar how a small lighting change shows the incredible potential that lay in the future. In this light, it’s great that you’ve moved to a new forum and webpage, since you might as well be prepared for a surge that is likely to come with next versions.

Anyway, thanks for your work on U3 and looking forwards to flying it this weekend finally!

@xeno Its totally fine if you don’t understand complex rendering techniques and tricks that go into creating engines that work with terrain and a huge number of assets, you can just say so. After all this is really obscure knowledge and highly specialized stuff! No shame in it.

Photogrammetry and its imitation solve a massive problem of having very detailed mesh that looks good. I-Hawk already mentioned hw tesselation - well this is a key aspect of it. You are adding details to a mesh that are not there in topology of an object, but they are added during one of the rendering passes. This is a job for gpu. Physics are a complete different matter and usually this is done with a different LOD of the mesh you see - a much simpler one. Especially when ray casting is used for solving stuff ie radar and radio signal propagation. So, the question of having a massive terrain with a lot of detail is not about dumping a huge detailed model (with detail and resolution that is completely redundant for a flight simulation), but rather in dividing the tasks within simulation and offloading them to respective hardware. And MSFS is great not because “it looks good” (though it does), but because how cheap in terms of computation its looks are, hence I mentioned it, rather than to compare directly to BMS. Anyway, 4.35 dx11 engine already made a big leap forwards in this direction of separating tasks and I’m very happy to see it. It’s a massive change to an engine and we’re lucky to have this being done by BMS devs. Can’t imagine how such a task would be accomplished in other, commercial simulations.

ctrl+enter turns the borderless window into one with the border. Move it where you wish, press ctrl+enter again.

It’s not impossible but the first thing that needs doing is actually rewriting the code in a way that makes the avionics modular. Iiirc the dev who mentioned this in the past, is currently busy with other stuff. Probably same goes for a potential SDK for such modules.

OMG!

I’m not sure I understand what the suggestion is:

1. Remove unavailable options from the menu?
2. Leave all options and sorting as is but don’t “grey out” the options even if the call is unavailiable?

If its 1, then I would vote against since it will make voice comms software useless. If its 2, then sounds good! Although this will increase the amount of questions “why does this not work?” among players.

Guys you all should just take vacations after this intense year, we can all wait! Thanks for your work and updates!

@spotdott select target with tms on wpn screen while in ag mode, then tell flight to attack my target. Or are you firing in POS mode? Either way, best to use suitable sensor/screen for giving attack orders.

@icer I’ve only seen the falcon4_rcd.xml file mentioned, so that’s the only one i’d modify.

Hey everyone, as discussed on Falcon Lounge discord:

To fix the missing <M> on RWR you need to alter the 3 lines in FALCON4_RCD.XML file.

line 87 <BeamWidth>30.0</BeamWidth> instead of 9
line 733 <BeamWidth>45.0</BeamWidth> instead of 9
line 1208 <BeamWidth>30.0</BeamWidth> instead of 9.

The fix needs to be done on every machine and every theater.

For the default, Korea theater the file can be found at Falcon BMS 4.35\Data\TerrData\Objects . However the change needs to be made for each theater, so use your windows search function to find it. I’ve done this change for Balkans, Baltic, Iberia, Georgia, Israel, Israel 1980s, Mideast128, Somalia, Kuweit theaters and haven’t found any significant differences in xml files, but your mileage may vary, so it’s best to add lines manually rather than just swap the file. The changes touch the AIM-120, AIM-54A, AA-12 (R-77).

UPDATE:

Rather than forcing every user to manually edit this file for each campaign they have installed, a member of the community has graciously created a utility which will make the appropriate changes to any instance of this file found in the BMS install directory.

All you need to do is download the file and run it. It doesn’t matter where you download it to or run it from, it will still work as long as you give it permissions to run.
Note: Windows 10 users may see a blue warning dialog box when attempting to run the utility. Click “More Info”, and then “Run Anyway” to run the program.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cZEq_NWloEdKAWWYP2X7JmJIs9koTDZU/view?usp=sharing

Hey @I-Hawk you may find this presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw and paper https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SIGGRAPH_Advances_2021_final.pdf an interesting read regarding current and future LODless rendering! Pretty sure you’ll find this interesting.

@xeno Its totally fine if you don’t understand complex rendering techniques and tricks that go into creating engines that work with terrain and a huge number of assets, you can just say so. After all this is really obscure knowledge and highly specialized stuff! No shame in it.

Photogrammetry and its imitation solve a massive problem of having very detailed mesh that looks good. I-Hawk already mentioned hw tesselation - well this is a key aspect of it. You are adding details to a mesh that are not there in topology of an object, but they are added during one of the rendering passes. This is a job for gpu. Physics are a complete different matter and usually this is done with a different LOD of the mesh you see - a much simpler one. Especially when ray casting is used for solving stuff ie radar and radio signal propagation. So, the question of having a massive terrain with a lot of detail is not about dumping a huge detailed model (with detail and resolution that is completely redundant for a flight simulation), but rather in dividing the tasks within simulation and offloading them to respective hardware. And MSFS is great not because “it looks good” (though it does), but because how cheap in terms of computation its looks are, hence I mentioned it, rather than to compare directly to BMS. Anyway, 4.35 dx11 engine already made a big leap forwards in this direction of separating tasks and I’m very happy to see it. It’s a massive change to an engine and we’re lucky to have this being done by BMS devs. Can’t imagine how such a task would be accomplished in other, commercial simulations.