Dear Forum,
since this has come up in a few threads and I am too lazy to answer all: yes there will be a Blender Exporter coming with U4. I would love to release it earlier, but since U4 has changes on some parts of the model format, you wouldn’t be able to use it with U3.
So if you are currently working on a model (or you want to start a new one), you can do that in Blender as well. Don’t put too much work into the Blender Materials though, since U4 will have a bit of a different workflow for that.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here.

@SN00PY
I would like to give you a reply with the hope of deeper insight so that you can understand it from a devs perspective:
imagine that BMS is like an 30 year old car. We have been swapping out many components and replaced those with modern ones. Many components relied on old tooling that itself is not developed anymore because it is outdated.

In order to keep the car maintainable, we sometimes have to choose between replacing components (and maybe breaking old tooling) but on the other hand we will decrease maintenance cost because we can introduce a uniform standard.

The move towards the txtpb format helps us a lot internally: we can use uniform parsing logic, have additional tools like checksums in place, etc.
Now in your case, it broke an existing tool that you relied on - that is not a good situation for you. But as the format is open and parseable, the community can step up and create new tools or fix the existing ones. You are just currently in the gap “between tools”.

To your initial statement If only we could get the basic software to work properly instead of endlessly adding new options I would again reply with the car analogy: the car has to be worked on, otherwise it will get rusty and unmaintainable. We don’t change formats because its fun, but because we need to stay future-proof.

If you have any further questions, I will be happy to try to answer them, have a happy new year!

Hi folks,

in case you are looking for the Blender plugin and the Substance Painter plugin, you will find them both on the official BMS Github. Please use the Github issues in the respective projects to report any problems you might have.
If you have general questions on the plugins, feel free to ask them in this forum

BMS Plugin
Substance Painter Plugin

@AWACS334
A Blender exporter is in the works and will be released probably with 4.37.4. Releasing it for earlier versions will not work due to technical reasons. If you want to start modelling, you can already do that - just model the polys in Blender and use the Blender Materials for texturing. The exporter should be able to pick it up from there.
I suggest you start with simple stuff, like static objects (houses), ships, …

@Leandro it seems that the current implementation of the HMCS was a bit inaccurate - I have fixed the bug you reported and the HMCS will correctly display slant and horizontal range in AG.

@Tomcattwo
I just built it in, just wanted to get feedback. I will check if I can make the skins switchable.

• We have seen some people crash with OpenXR when the opening movie plays. If you experience that issue, please tick the “NOMOVIE” box in the Alternative Launcher or run BMS with -nomovie.
  If you see any other crashes regarding OpenXR, please report them here.

• Regarding OpenXR Toolkit: as stated, it should be uninstalled. If you want to change the world scaling, please look at g_fVRIPDMultiplier (set to 1.0 per default) in your User config.

• Confirmed bug: in-game menus are not clickable in OpenXR anymore - perhaps somebody could test that in SteamVR

Dear Community,

as some of you may be aware, the DEV team has decided to revoke my access to the source code and part ways with me. While I won’t go into discussion publicly, I want to inform you what that means for further development of the Blender Plugin:

• As I don’t have access to the github repository anymore, I can not do any bugfixes or updates, nor update the documentation
• Since I also don’t have access to the BMS source code anymore, I will not be able to further work on the plugin. While the code of the plugin itself is open source, it is very often necessary to attach a debugger to BMS itself to see how it interprets the models and nodes. Without BMS source code access, this is not possible anymore.

Therefore, with a heavy heart I have to cease all further work on the Blender Plugin. I hope that one day somebody can pick up the source and continue my work, the code itself is free for anyone to use.
I am sure the plugin itself will continue to work for some time and I will be very happy to see all the amazing models the community will create

All the best & Thanks for the fish
Richard

Thanks for your words of support, to be clear: I have no personal grievances with the team or any persons - I am always happy to continue my work if they decide to change their decision

I dug in the code a bit because I wanted to implement the model rotation - turns out its already there but not quite documented.
The hotkeys are R/F T/G Z/H for roll/pitch/yaw. Set the time to ~19:00 to see the effect better.

Some QOL improvements I have lined up:

• F5 to refresh the model without reopening the editor (planned for the next hotfix)
• Display the current roll/pitch/yaw as text (completed, release not scheduled)
• When I get to it: more user-friendly feedback if the model is somewhat invalid (malformed JSON, etc.)
• Editing material names

@chihirobelmo
I don’t want to derail this thread too much but perhaps you want to take a look at the main-clean-split-cockpits branch (if its still there).
Basically the whole OTWDriverClass::VCock_Exec is over 3k lines of code setting the internal status for all aircraft types to the respective switches (e.g.: "Is the autopilot on? Then set switch #foo to state bar, etc.).
So that is something that could be cleaned/split up.
The next thing are the switch and DOF ids, maybe think of making them human readable and unique per aircraft type in order to help modellers…

But I am getting too much into it, I am not part of the team anymore and don’t have the proper insight - I wish y’all good luck with it.

Very beautiful work, congratulations!

However as others pointed out I very much doubt that the current dev team is willing or able to help you out code-wise - let me offer some insight there:

• The cockpit (instrument) drawing code is currently a mangled mess of thousand of lines in a single method, garnished with a lot of structures like if(aircraft == F_15). There are no standardized APIs or methods to split that up properly
• The DOF and switch IDs are currently global, which means that they are (re)used for all aircraft - that means you would have to find free IDs for your purposes and/or reuse existing ones while making sure that they do not conflict with existing ones

The sad truth is, that while there are some distinctions in avionics - those are at least somehow split-up - BMS is far from offering multiple high-fidelity aircraft cockpit experiences which are more than eye candy.

Of course this is from a (now) outsiders perspective, perhaps the team has decided to make a clean aircraft separation on its list of priorities.

@Radium
It’s a shame that 3d artists have their work influenced by the current issues but I am sure you will find a way - godspeed!

@MaxWaldorf
Thanks Toni, but without BMS source code access I will be restricted to docu updates. And: while I did the work, it was always for the community and a way of giving back
So I would not call it “my work”

Thanks for your words of support, to be clear: I have no personal grievances with the team or any persons - I am always happy to continue my work if they decide to change their decision

Dear Community,

as some of you may be aware, the DEV team has decided to revoke my access to the source code and part ways with me. While I won’t go into discussion publicly, I want to inform you what that means for further development of the Blender Plugin:

• As I don’t have access to the github repository anymore, I can not do any bugfixes or updates, nor update the documentation
• Since I also don’t have access to the BMS source code anymore, I will not be able to further work on the plugin. While the code of the plugin itself is open source, it is very often necessary to attach a debugger to BMS itself to see how it interprets the models and nodes. Without BMS source code access, this is not possible anymore.

Therefore, with a heavy heart I have to cease all further work on the Blender Plugin. I hope that one day somebody can pick up the source and continue my work, the code itself is free for anyone to use.
I am sure the plugin itself will continue to work for some time and I will be very happy to see all the amazing models the community will create

All the best & Thanks for the fish
Richard

@dumba
Thanks for your trust in BMS but this is just an ugly bug so it will be fixed - like “3”, “2” should always switch back to YOUR cockpit

I repro’d this bug, this is a funny one: when you switch to another object and then to the 2d view, BMS will load the cockpit view of THAT object you last looked at.
Thanks for reporting!

Do you use per chance an NVIDA card and did you update your driver recently?

@SN00PY
I would like to give you a reply with the hope of deeper insight so that you can understand it from a devs perspective:
imagine that BMS is like an 30 year old car. We have been swapping out many components and replaced those with modern ones. Many components relied on old tooling that itself is not developed anymore because it is outdated.

In order to keep the car maintainable, we sometimes have to choose between replacing components (and maybe breaking old tooling) but on the other hand we will decrease maintenance cost because we can introduce a uniform standard.

The move towards the txtpb format helps us a lot internally: we can use uniform parsing logic, have additional tools like checksums in place, etc.
Now in your case, it broke an existing tool that you relied on - that is not a good situation for you. But as the format is open and parseable, the community can step up and create new tools or fix the existing ones. You are just currently in the gap “between tools”.

To your initial statement If only we could get the basic software to work properly instead of endlessly adding new options I would again reply with the car analogy: the car has to be worked on, otherwise it will get rusty and unmaintainable. We don’t change formats because its fun, but because we need to stay future-proof.

If you have any further questions, I will be happy to try to answer them, have a happy new year!