Happy Birthday!!

@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 aren’t competing, you’re not. And that makes your product obsolete.

I realize that adding these things to BMS will be no trivial effort. But it’s 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. It’s working now in MSFS, X-Plane, and Prepar3d .

BMS isn’t competing because we don’t need to. We aren’t driven by anyone’s money nor will so we don’t need anyone’s 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 I’m coding for you or for him, I’m coding for myself. I LIKE flying Falcon/BMS, even alone, even SP, even forever (And consider I didn’t actually flew for the last 4-5 years because of my current development journey and it’s incompetence with existing state). At this point in time, I can tell you that I will keep coding and developing Falcon/BMS even if I’m the only one in the world using it. So, let’s 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:

1. We don’t “speak loud” in general. Well, I do, sometimes, but still not really… if we wanted the world to know where we are, then with a few clicks you will have much clearer answers, but that’s not the point and not how we work. Again we don’t need money, so while hype is nice for keeping interest, it’s a momentary thing eventually. We look for the long run.

2. BMS isn’t for everyone. BMS is being developed with the faith that it was meant to be used for “as real as it gets” (i.e dead serious) simulation of a F-16 pilot in a war environment. We don’t mean it to become some “Digital Cinematic Simulator”. For people with that kind of purposes, there are other products, probably much more suitable…

3. 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 that’s why you see all commercial products taking care of that first, but when you look under the hood, that’s 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.

Jp already explained the root cause, if we “remove” the wall you will see basically “nothing” there.

To the more technical explanation:
The gray wall is actually not a wall, it’s the background.
The renderer is currently using a “Fog Box” that covers the entire viewport, then
on top of that then we render sky and terrain.

There are 2 critical problems why this can’t be easily fixed:

1. The SkyBox of BMS isn’t a full dome but a half dome - That is wrong
2. The terrain rendering range won’t cover enough ground in the distance so even if we would create a full dome, it’ll 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 isn’t 10NM but 64KM, that’s not a guess, that’s 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.

@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 (Doesn’t 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 don’t expect it to be a-la M$FS. We aren’t there and even if assuming we can get close, it’ll take time (i.e years, so things will improve but not as fast as you think). We don’t 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.png

Really I need to know, because our 3D modelers are doing awesome work and you should show some respect for getting all that, for free…

I’d be willing to chip in on the dev costs through Patreon.

Ha no - We don’t take money, and for sure we don’t work for anyone. This is a hobby for us and we do it for the fun and challenge.

@AWmk1 Yes competition is always there and by nature I think some of us have very competitive personality (I know that’s true, at least for myself). But what I meant here in my words is more in the sense of: We don’t need to compete, cause we already won

And let me explain before I’m being jumped upon: We won because Falcon was supposed to be dead probably 10-15 years ago. I (personally, and speaking as a “Falconeer” 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: It’s being flown the way we aimed for! So even though everything I said above about “I’ll keep developing even if I’m the last one using Falcon”, of course it’s 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 don’t 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 isn’t a question. So basically all the things you have in mind, be sure we don’t miss anything and we know where current technology is. So while it doesn’t mean we will release or implement everything in a single version, it’ll probably take more than that, we don’t 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 it’s already not a question of “if” but a question of “when”, only.

@hiuuz When the time comes for New terrain release, I will publish development videos and screenshots.

@okayasugf said in [BMS Roadmap 4.37 U3] News from the BMS Team:

@VirPilot Yes, pretty sure autogen for buildings will be coming shortly after after release

Not sure yet how much shortly, but it’ll come…

@Dee-Jay said in [BMS Roadmap 4.37 U3] News from the BMS Team:

@okayasugf said in [BMS Roadmap 4.37 U3] News from the BMS Team:

@VirPilot Yes, pretty sure autogen for buildings will be coming shortly after after release

Will they have hitboxes (?)
If yes, since they will not be part of Objectives will they trigger a dereliction of duty for “collateral damage” (?)
…

Yes they will have. 4.38 has trees collision for the player, and there are 100s of millions of them in KTO…
It’s not really hard to manage sane damage detection if done right. Buildings will be the same but will be broader (Damage from anything, weapons AI etc).

Hi,

These effects are the result of a bug and not intentional. In fact they were there since “Forever” but noticed just now because 4.36 is the first version where terrain is lit by lights dynamically.

A fix is already in place for the next version.

If you want to fix them in the meantime, it can be done by data edit:

1. Open your Data\Terrdata\ParticleSys.ini file with notepad or any other text editor

2. Search for “gp2000-fire” and find these lines:
   light.falloff[.25]=0
   light.falloff[1]=0
   Delete both and instead write:
   light.falloff[1]=0.0001

3. Do the same as step 2 for “gp1000-fire”.

Basically the idea is that a value of 0 is illegal, in next version it’ll be removed and code will be protected against letting such value flow (Sim will crash with a specific message in the log)

Just to clear what is practical for us let me say that:

• Regarding everything but terrain mesh, we aren’t MS and we don’t see FS2020 as something we can compete with (I don’t think anyone can, I mean not really) - We don’t intend to ever get to that level of details, we don’t have the manpower nor the means to hold/stream this amount of data.

• The way ED are doing their terrain is probably the worse I can think of (Hold chunks of “3D models” and render them)

• In order to create detailed terrain you need DEM data, a flat grid and then use HW tessellation to displace the vertices. That’s the only sane way I know of and literally all engines/samples (And I bet all modern sims/games except DCS) I’ve ever seen are using this way to create a detailed terrain mesh. Of course then when you get into details there are other difficulties to tackle - For example a main one is the tessellation factors that DX support are limited to 1-64. The practical meaning of that is you can only create geometry at scales of 1-64 from the most detailed to the least. It sounds a lot but for a flight sim terrain, this will not be enough and so there are more complications.

• When I started working, I thought the main concern will be the terrain mesh - Well after some years I can tell that the mesh is really just the tip of the iceberg and there are many many more complicated challenges

• Adding details “by hand” to the general mesh can be performed but this isn’t a main goal and will remain a “later work” probably. Maybe also some randomness can be created in order to add even more details when very close, but this is for later.

• There is still time until it is ready for release, but we are working hard to make it happen and I have faith in the team and the excellent guys supporting this work to establish the goals and beyond.

Regarding those “20GB of RAM”, well that was just an illustration I made to let people understand the meaning of holding a 10m mesh data. Of course we aren’t going to hold 20GB of RAM, more like a tenth of that However, loading DEM in chunks isn’t a bad idea, but something that I still didn’t tried. It’ll be a challenge due to view distance, and the ability to “jump” between distanced locations by a key press, action camera etc… I’m not sure how much it’ll worth dividing actually, but that is a low priority for now anyway, there are higher priorities to tackle first

Interesting!!

@SyntaxErol said in Weird compression/alliasing on kneeboards.:

@I-Hawk Understood and agreed.
Supersampling setting on amd panel seem to solve the issue by wasting 3/4 of the framerate. lol.
No other setting made a difference in solving this messy kneeboard scribble

Even the default cockpit there are areas affected by this. (Note the countermeasure panel in the background)

Yes, it could be, there are no perfect solutions to all situations etc. This is mostly trial and error kind of thing, and could even be thatsome textures need to be separated and have different resolutions/mipmapping in order to solve that, but this is also a compromise we do because more textures would mean more draw calls, worse performance.

@SyntaxErol said in Weird compression/alliasing on kneeboards.:

@I-Hawk should cockpit textures have mipmaps or dont as @Dee-Jay said, if not it seems like any high res then stock mod will suffer from this.
About kneeboards, maybe a python script of some sorts can be done to auto-mipmap them when theyre changed by wdp/ezboards or so.

Im pretty noob on 3d stuff but maybe can figure out a tool…

Cockpit textures generally shouldn’t have mipmaps because they are viewed from pretty close and we would like to keep the highest resolution even when leaning back. But that said, if someone created textures and they are creating shimmering, maybe better have them with mipmaps. If you understand how mipmaps work then mipmaps are just “subtextures” of the original at one level lower (i.e divided by 2, until you get to 1x1 pixels for the lowest mipmap). The default textures are at 2K IIRC, so they are fine, as far as I’ve seen even 4K are OK, if someone makes 8K then you may start seeing some shimmering, then either make them with mipmaps, or lower res. So while we have an answer with/without for our textures, we cannot ensure it’ll work for other mods. Stuff need to be tested carefully and decided accordingly.

@SyntaxErol said in Weird compression/alliasing on kneeboards.:

I got a weird issue of alliasing/compressed look on some of the textures such as kneeboards (also on @sheref 's high res cockpit mod, but i dont include mods in this problem )
My FOV is set to 80,anti-alliasing setting to max. 1920x1080. tried sharpening settings from amd panel but didnt help. If i zoom in on kneeboards they look ok but when zoomed out its squirely mess.

Here is how it looks.

Aliasing of too hires textures is a problem! Textures size (And I always tell that to people creating content/mods!) MUST match the object size and the distance it’ll be seen mostly.

What is the resolution of those cockpit textures? Do they have mipmaps? Maybe they should if they are very high res. Maybe they were created badly (Maybe even the DDS encoding plugin/SW may make a difference, internally we use Intel’s plugin for Photoshop to create new DDS textures, pretty much reliable and no problems AFAIK).

Let me explain in short the problem you see:
When a texture is being sampled by the GPU during shader execution, the GPU has information on the distance of the object in the world, what size it is etc, so when mipmaps are available for the texture, the GPU knows to pick the correct mipmap slice that will fit the distance perfectly (It’s smarter because it knows to sample 2 mipmaps and interpolate if necessary). But if the texture has no mipmaps and like in your case the texture size is very large compared to the distance, you get this shimmering mess.

Generally that’s not an easy problem to solve and sometimes no perfect solutions, shimmering is part of GFX life and we sometimes just live with it, but trying to minimize as possible. But that’s the reason why the original cockpit textures don’t suffer that kind of shimmering, due to texture size (I bet these textures are way too high res).

If one want to easily see this kind of problem, just resave some terrain DDS texture without mipmaps and look at it in 3D from some distance, you will immediately notice how it’ll be all shimmering compared to the other mipmaped textures.

@Dee-Jay said in Weird compression/alliasing on kneeboards.:

Can a 3rd party generate mipmaps for those textures ?

Easy : Download Paint.net … open your DDS, save in DDS and ensure that generate mipmap is set on (checkbox set).

…

FYI: You may notice that cockpit textures don’t have mipmap. This is normal. Don’t do this for cockpit textures, they must not have mipmap, and result would be not better with mipmap (would be blurry).

Not sure it’s a good idea man, I mean to open a DDS generate mipmaps and then save it, possibly you will get even worse quality (Compression of already compressed content). I know we do that sometimes when no choice, but every time you do that, you loose a bit more quality of the original file, and since we are talking here about quality, I think this isn’t such a good idea. He needs to create from the sources…

@Fresco said in Please choose your main display system when flying BMS:

@I-Hawk said in Please choose your main display system when flying BMS:

@TUAF-Ripper said in Please choose your main display system when flying BMS:

@I-Hawk
I have a Pico 4. Its FOV is amazing. Nearly all screen is “sweet spot”. Moreover, the periphery is clearer than the center because it has denser pixels. However, I cannot say the overall picture is clear. I cannot read MFDs easily. But I must say that I didn’t have a chance to try it with Virtual Desktop. I only used it with its Streaming Assistant. The people who use it with Virtual Desktop claim it is clear though.

I just ordered a Pico4 30 minutes ago

I’m sure they will suit you.

Remember that it is highly recommended to use VIRTUALDESKTOP.

But you have to buy it through the PICO shop, be aware that if you buy it from the Steam website, that version will not work for you.

Fresco

Thanx!

@TUAF-Ripper said in Please choose your main display system when flying BMS:

@I-Hawk
I have a Pico 4. Its FOV is amazing. Nearly all screen is “sweet spot”. Moreover, the periphery is clearer than the center because it has denser pixels. However, I cannot say the overall picture is clear. I cannot read MFDs easily. But I must say that I didn’t have a chance to try it with Virtual Desktop. I only used it with its Streaming Assistant. The people who use it with Virtual Desktop claim it is clear though.

I just ordered a Pico4 30 minutes ago
It was cheap enough IMHO (358$ with free shipment from Japan to Israel) so I took the risk LOL. In last days I got deeper into my VR experience like I never did before, including some heavy MFD work (TGP bombing), and now I feel simply like the G2 sweetspot is annoying, yes very sharp at the center, but very blurry as you go away from there, so I said let’s give Pancake lenses a go. Yes I understand it’ll probably be less sharp than the G2 center area, but I guess I can sacrifice that if the overall “clear area” will be much larger.

If the Pico 4 won’t be good, I may consider selling both headsets and simply go back to screen + MFDs with TIR. But I have a feeling it’ll be fine. Yesterday I kind of had a deeper test on TGP operation and it was pretty much OK, not bad at all eventually. I don’t have a problem really with leaning towards the MFD when necessary for some deep work, but the overall blurry edges of the G2 is annoying for me. For example in a DF, it makes half of the flying to feel pretty blurry…

@Snake122 Thanx for your feedback! Pimax Crystal must be amazing! Pancake lenses and higher res. Will be interesting to see how VR headsets will develop along with the future GPUs that will be able to deliver even more performance.

In general, BMS itself has a LOT to improve WRT VR:

• We probably need to implement OpenXR at some point
• We probably will have to implement something like FSR/DLSS
• We will need to change the way we draw stuff to be smarter (e.g instancing of obejcts to reduce number of draw calls)
• Maybe also making the internal VR targets smarter, e.g like rendering into 1 target with instancing which will cut the number of draw calls by a half. The actual meaning is that instead of drawing everything twice, one time into each eye, we will draw everything once but to 2 sides of a single texture, with instancing (Which is like 1 draw call to the GPU but 2 (and can be more) renders with some different settings like different matrices etc)

These are pretty far goals, but such improvements will blast VR performance in BMS to new heights.

Generally seems like we have an interesting picture up to now:
~75% of the community is using flat screen
~5% on a triple screen surround setup
~20% on VR

Keep voting please

@Korbi said in Please choose your main display system when flying BMS:

@SoBad @I-Hawk Absolutely can confirm, what SoBad said.
I use 100% VR even though I have a complete 1:1 cockpit and was flying it with a 3x projector 220° screen before 4.37. It is unbeatable, except one big point unfortunately.

This point is the read-ability of the MFD, I’m heavily annoyed by the fact I can barely read BE readouts etc. Even though I have a Pimax8K+ and a 4090 and very very good eyesight, there is no way I can read the text in the MFD without glancing forward.
But VR is simply so good that even this is not a blocker for me to use it.
I’m flying mainly A-A BVR in a virtual squadron, where for example BE readouts are very important to have a good tactical effect and most importantly it is required to read them at a fast glance, to react fast and appropriate. Currently this fast glancing reading is nog really possible for me unfortunately.

Interesting what you guys say… I see Pimax 8K is also Fresnel lenses like G2. And @SoBad mentioning crystal clear MFDs with what should be an inferior headset, makes me really think. I’m at a point where I wonder if it would worth getting a Pico4 headset and sell the G2… The Fresnel sweet spot feels like a real problem to me, I mean it’s very blurred and if you will look at this vid:

The guy says something like: The 75% clear FOV of the Pico4 is unmatched compared to the 15% sweet spot FOV of the G2

This point sounds like a huge diff, even if the G2 sweet spot is generally sharper… I don’t know how much critical the difference is, but for sure the clearer picture in a much wider FOV sounds like a LOT better to me. I’m thinking seriously about getting a Pico4 just to try it, and then either give it up or sell the G2.

@SoBad said in Please choose your main display system when flying BMS:

@I-Hawk - Wish they had been checkboxes instead of option buttons. I use both VR & 4k monitor, about 50/50.

Yea I thought about it but actually I really wanted to get an idea about “Main usage” so only one for user, sorry. I guess your case is a bit special

BTW, if already opened that up, what makes the difference for you? Is it flight dependent? like “heavy MFDs” flights on screen with TIR, but lighter flights (e.g AA missions and DFs) in VR? Or is it something else? Really curious about that specifically, how do you choose and when?