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 aren’t 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 “urgent” 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 it’s “just” the F-15C. It’s 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 don’t understand how things work. It’s TOTALLY not related. People who work on the F-15, they wouldn’t necessarily work on the F-16 avionics if the F-15 didn’t exist. It doesn’t 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 I’m 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 it’s 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 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:
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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.
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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…
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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 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.
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RE: Fixing the Gray Wall
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:
- The SkyBox of BMS isn’t a full dome but a half dome - That is wrong
- 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.
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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 (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.pngReally 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.
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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 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.
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RE: BMS 4.37 Dev Series ?
@hiuuz When the time comes for New terrain release, I will publish development videos and screenshots.
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RE: [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
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). -
RE: 4.36 U3 weapon impact effects
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:
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Open your Data\Terrdata\ParticleSys.ini file with notepad or any other text editor
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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 -
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)
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RE: Some suggestions for improvements for the next versions -4.5 ?
Just to clear what is practical for us let me say that:
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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.
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The way ED are doing their terrain is probably the worse I can think of (Hold chunks of “3D models” and render them)
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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RE: BMS 4.37 Dev Series ?
@Aragorn said in BMS 4.37 Dev Series ?:
@I-Hawk said:
When the time comes for New terrain release, I will publish development videos and screenshots.
I DEEM IT TIME.
Videos and screenshots below, please.
You have until midnight.Cheers.
I have no choice so…
[img]https://i.imgur.com/OOdfO3d.png[/img] -
RE: to the 'dev's
@Bowser said in to the 'dev’s:
4.33 completely messed up the AG ordnance delivery
You lost it here… Let’s see - 4.33 implemented/Fixed/Improved for A-G:
SPI - The very base of the F-16 A-G system
Sniper
Mavericks
IAMs (JDAMs, JSOWs etc)
Harpoon
LGMs
MITLsEverything became better, more realistic than it was, or totally new.
How exactly is that worse?
4.34 improved so much at gameplay
4.35 came with DX11 and a new rendering engine (Better performance and open door for a lot of new stuff)
4.36 is probably the most stable Falcon version ever!So I got to ask… WTF ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???
I really don’t know if this is some joke or something coming from some DCS fanboy or some DCS crew maybe? Someone that got so much offended by something I said somewhere?? Please reveal yourself and don’t be a chicken, because this post can’t be serious…
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Please choose your main display system when flying BMS
Hi everyone,
Just for gathering statistics, nothing more, I’m curious to know what kind of display and display resolution you are using for your main display device while flying full missions in BMS. Please choose one of the options.
Important: please choose only for you main display and one that you are using for flying full missions in BMS. So for example if you have a VR headset but you aren’t using it for BMS missions flying (Maybe you use it for Dogfights only?), then please don’t choose VR.
Cheers!
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RE: VDXR With bms
Hi,
BMS doesn’t support OpenXR yet, but it’ll come with the upcoming (Hopefully not too long now) 4.37 U4.
I confirm that VDXR does work great with BMS, so it’s just a wait until U4 is released to the public.Cheers!