I-Hawk
@I-Hawk
Best posts made by I-Hawk
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RE: [BMS Roadmap 4.37 U3] News from the BMS Team
Guys, as I wrote some avionics in the past (Well, most of it was very long ago but still), let me tell you a couple of things, more from a Falconeer POV but using my Dev knowledge.
The F-16 is still and probably always will be the #1 platform for us. All small fixes/changes/upgrades we are giving it through the years, those arenāt obvious and I think we are already at a point where we have some saturation with the avionics potential. I mean, how far we can still go to make it better.
The most āurgentā areas we need to upgrade at some point are probably:
- Link-16 - That will happen at some point, not sure when or how exactly though
- GBU-24 and CCRP upgrades
Other than that there are many MANY other tiny fixes and changes and updates and what not that can be done. F-16 is an endless story and always will be. And we will keep upgrading it probably for as long as BMS exist.
The focus on other platforms is a bless for BMS, so many people are excited for the potential, so many are excited about the option to fly a different platform with serious avionics, even if for now itās ājustā the F-15C. Itās a huge thing and the potential is even more of a big story here.
If you think that development of the F-15C takes dev time from the F-16 then you simply donāt understand how things work. Itās TOTALLY not related. People who work on the F-15, they wouldnāt necessarily work on the F-16 avionics if the F-15 didnāt exist. It doesnāt work that way.
And last, my personal POV, During 4.33 I spent 100% of my dev time upgrading F-16 systems, mainly A-G related (SPI, Sniper, IAMs, Mavericks, MITL, Harpoon, Mark points and probably some others I already forgot), since 4.33 Iām mostly focused on Graphics, the new Terrain engine, and other related stuff, but no more F-16 avioncs (almost none, I did some tiny stuff here and there). Do you think I should drop Graphics and focus on F-16 systems? BMS as a flight sim is a whole package, and if devs decided to focus at one area over the other right now, then it means they have passion for that now and they think itās more important.
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RE: Another F16 entry coming "someday"?
@buzzbomb said in Another F16 entry coming "someday"?:
Yes, it IS a competition. Every time I decide I want to fire up a flight sim, I have to choose: BMS or DCS, or X-plane or MSFS, or Prepar3d, or various legacy sims. Which will give me the experience I want at the moment?
Every person who has more than one sim installed makes this choice, too.
The moment you think you arenāt competing, youāre not. And that makes your product obsolete.
I realize that adding these things to BMS will be no trivial effort. But itās going to decide how relevant and competitive BMS remains in the foreseeable future.
The flyable world will surely be the biggest effort, particularly when you start adding in 3D constructs. (Buildings, vehicles, etc) Hand crafted areas of interest which will be focus points for future battle campaigns will certainly require extra effort. But even that is getting easier to implement all the time. It was beyond consideration a few years ago. Itās working now in MSFS, X-Plane, and Prepar3d .
BMS isnāt competing because we donāt need to. We arenāt driven by anyoneās money nor will so we donāt need anyoneās support in order to keep do what we do
And speaking for myself (i.e off-record as BMS dev) - You need to understand - Before Iām coding for you or for him, Iām coding for myself. I LIKE flying Falcon/BMS, even alone, even SP, even forever (And consider I didnāt actually flew for the last 4-5 years because of my current development journey and itās incompetence with existing state). At this point in time, I can tell you that I will keep coding and developing Falcon/BMS even if Iām the only one in the world using it. So, letās get over that specific point.
Now that we are clear about that let me add a few things about BMS compared to the rest of the world:
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We donāt āspeak loudā in general. Well, I do, sometimes, but still not reallyā¦ if we wanted the world to know where we are, then with a few clicks you will have much clearer answers, but thatās not the point and not how we work. Again we donāt need money, so while hype is nice for keeping interest, itās a momentary thing eventually. We look for the long run.
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BMS isnāt for everyone. BMS is being developed with the faith that it was meant to be used for āas real as it getsā (i.e dead serious) simulation of a F-16 pilot in a war environment. We donāt mean it to become some āDigital Cinematic Simulatorā. For people with that kind of purposes, there are other products, probably much more suitableā¦
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Considering all the above said, and while we lack in the GFX department (for now, but being practical, probably always will, at some amounts), we compensate on that with other stuff. Graphics sell, and thatās why you see all commercial products taking care of that first, but when you look under the hood, thatās where the things that matter will be, and I believe there we still have a strong word.
If you or anyone else will decide to not use BMS anymore because he think we are too slow, not advanced enough with chasing technology (We are doing this at our free time yes?), then we will be very sorry to hear that but not much we can do more than we are already doing.
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RE: Fixing the Gray Wall
Jp already explained the root cause, if we āremoveā the wall you will see basically ānothingā there.
To the more technical explanation:
The gray wall is actually not a wall, itās the background.
The renderer is currently using a āFog Boxā that covers the entire viewport, then
on top of that then we render sky and terrain.There are 2 critical problems why this canāt be easily fixed:
- The SkyBox of BMS isnāt a full dome but a half dome - That is wrong
- The terrain rendering range wonāt cover enough ground in the distance so even if we would create a full dome, itāll look somewhat wrong, squared-shaped probably at the edges
So for now it is what it is, ugly yes sure we know.
And BTW the terrain rendering range isnāt 10NM but 64KM, thatās not a guess, thatās a number we know. Of course it feels less because by nature the fog is eating some of it towards the viewing camera.
Anyway, we intend to fix ALL of those issues for 4.37.
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RE: Santa's wishlist for BMS
@b0bl00i said in On what grounds would you wish 4.37 to be developped?:
-New renderer that actually looks like something from this century while support VR. Good and realistic lighting, proper height maps (sharp mountain peaks and ridges) crisp and sharp textures, ground decals, volumetric clouds, plenty of forests and buildings, huge draw distance, scalable spotting, updated plane models (Doesnāt have to be UE5 good looking but a heck lot better) ** highest prio
You are probably confusing us with M$ or that other sim which keep delivering unfinished alpha versions while the game itself stays unfinished and actually sandbox, forever (Yes forever, you read correctly).
BMS will do the graphical jump but donāt expect it to be a-la M$FS. We arenāt there and even if assuming we can get close, itāll take time (i.e years, so things will improve but not as fast as you think). We donāt have teams of Devs to develop every small graphical feature. What we can offer though is a graphical improvement that will come on top of an already working sim.
Regarding the 3D models: On what models are you talking really?
Our ugly F-16s? https://i.imgur.com/T56B7jd.png
Ugly B-52? https://i.imgur.com/DbAPGtl.jpeg
Ugly Rafal?: https://i.imgur.com/9AWm4C3.png
Ugly Flanker maybe? https://i.imgur.com/3CPZcOQ.png
Ugly EF? https://i.imgur.com/lB0Rj0e.png
Ugly F-4s maybe? https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/263474413909835776/968185715353608192/2022-04-25_192347.pngReally I need to know, because our 3D modelers are doing awesome work and you should show some respect for getting all that, for freeā¦
Iād be willing to chip in on the dev costs through Patreon.
Ha no - We donāt take money, and for sure we donāt work for anyone. This is a hobby for us and we do it for the fun and challenge.
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RE: Another F16 entry coming "someday"?
@AWmk1 Yes competition is always there and by nature I think some of us have very competitive personality (I know thatās true, at least for myself). But what I meant here in my words is more in the sense of: We donāt need to compete, cause we already won
And let me explain before Iām being jumped upon: We won because Falcon was supposed to be dead probably 10-15 years ago. I (personally, and speaking as a āFalconeerā here) find myself lucky that Falcon is still alive and kicking, many folks are using and enjoying it, flights are running daily, PVP sessions are executed on different theaters every now and then, and: Itās being flown the way we aimed for! So even though everything I said above about āIāll keep developing even if Iām the last one using Falconā, of course itās warming our hearts to see a big and strong community!
Also yes sure, I agree that cinematics do sell (As I stated above, GFX sell). But we are out of this game, for various reasons. I can talk here for hours but instead I could post a single vid or screenshot which would explain much better where we are currently and where we are headed, but we donāt do that. Things will come when they will.
@Buzzbomb Yes, trust me I totally agree with you that GFX (and sounds) are part of realism and immersion, that isnāt a question. So basically all the things you have in mind, be sure we donāt miss anything and we know where current technology is. So while it doesnāt mean we will release or implement everything in a single version, itāll probably take more than that, we donāt intend to miss anything that the DX11 API can be used for and which all the great sim engines out there already have.
Regarding VR it was stated more than once by myself and possibly by others as well - We know that VR is the future, and itās already not a question of āifā but a question of āwhenā, only.
Latest posts made by I-Hawk
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RE: VDXR With bms
Hi,
BMS doesnāt support OpenXR yet, but itāll come with the upcoming (Hopefully not too long now) 4.37 U4.
I confirm that VDXR does work great with BMS, so itās just a wait until U4 is released to the public.Cheers!
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RE: what's everyone's FPS on Campaigns for those who are on a RTX 40 series card?
@john1974 - In order to measure FPS for a purpose that means anything, when we want to do that internally, we either use the Benchmark TE or we create a different ācustomā TE for the specific purpose of the test. So generally I suggest to use one of the 2 options mentioned above and ask users how many FPS they get at different angles/looks. That would be a benchmark test that makes sense.
Cheers!
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RE: McDD F-15C/D/E New model for BMS
@Manos1981 my friend, congrats on the huge work done here and on other models! We couldnāt ask for better!
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RE: 3DPIT WISHLIST
@qawa said in 3DPIT WISHLIST:
BMS still working on itā¦
Dear Stefano! Your work is amazing and used by 1000s of people! Like the F-15 cockpit Iām sure this will one day be used in a fully functional simulation of the Tornado!
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RE: Ram ?
I recommend 32GB for the future as well. If you have 64GB then great but BMS wonāt use most of it.
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RE: Physical MFD and ICP vs handtracking vs mouse only with VR
@williang83 Yes. I donāt really āflyā in last years, as even my fun flights are more of a āLetās see where we standā kind of, but the last time I tried campaign flights it was ~2 months ago and I ran ~4 missions all in VR yes. The ICP itself wasnāt part of those flights because I didnāt received it at that time, but when I tried it, it was working good enough for me āblindlyā. For sure WAY better than using the mouse
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RE: Physical MFD and ICP vs handtracking vs mouse only with VR
I tried once with ICP and it was working fine. Of course not as comfortable as seeing everything but it wasnāt bad. Besides that, the Pico4 headset passthrough is good enough for seeing what I do with the ICP so I can also use that by shortly getting out and then back in.
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RE: Tu-95 3D Model
@hiuuz said in Tu-95 3D Model:
@Radium
Well. If I consider BMS is a free product. What about making the developement process also free?
But I know it is not what I decide. Programming resources a very valuable one and I guess we need them elsewhere. Otherwise we would have a Blender exporter already.Blender exporter is comingā¦
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RE: Rypley's Hangar
@Xeno said in Rypley's Hangar:
@I-Hawk is tri-count stated below within a limits for 4.37.u and 4.38?
@Rypley said in Rypley's Hangar:
[ā¦]Tri count for both Consoles (the only thing Iāve gotten done since the start of the remodelling process, og cockpit with 80% done was around 120k) is roughly 15k, Iāll have to get back to you on exact numbers a little later today.
ā¦And no, I havenāt touched any normals as of now, but figuring blender allows me to bake normals from meshes, Iāll start creating iterations of switches and what not in very high detail, uv unwrap bake the normals, take em and drop them on a final much lower poly version and then instance those object to avoid unnecessary repetitions in textures. (This is a very very WIP idea since Iām waiting for the BML exporter and the supported 3ds max version to test this theory, if not possible, then Iāll just export the base model and instance inside 3ds max instead)
Taking on normals and uv unwrapping id going to definitely be a helluva challenge since Iām not used to PBR, but thereās always a first time aye?
PD: idk the max tri count for bml but hopefully it can handle 200k which is what I expect the whole cockpit to be.
For a cockpit 200K is fine. 300-400K is also fineā¦ as long as the cockpit is highly optimized regarding tris count, and also (not less important, even more) draw calls, itāll be fine.