Hello fellow falconners, it’s me again. First of all, apologies for the delays on 4.37.3. This turned out to be more complex than we expected. And some of the reasons are beyond our control. The rest we are trying to do our best.
If you have not read it yet, please check Max post: https://forum.falcon-bms.com/topic/25327/bms-roadmap-4-37-u3-news-from-the-bms-team?_=1689049470827, a lot of cool information there. Here I’ll try to give more technical details. I will give some names this time, because a lot of people are assuming this is all my work and this cannot be farther from truth.
From my side, the biggest problem was the new BML format, which introduced some serious graphical bugs. I spent basically a month debugging and figuring out the details, almost in a reverse engineering approach. There were 3 bugs related to this new format: wrong polygon winding, inverted normals and wrong shading. The hard part was that only some polygon types were affected. So, I had to figure out the bugged ones (with the help of our data folks (Cougar, Max, Arty and others) who pointed which primitives were bugged) and then I had to do a lot of renderdoc debugging to understand which pieces was different in old and new format. Luckly for me, I-hawk implemented a very handy switch that allowed me to change back and forth old and new format, making the iteration faster. The good news is that all these 3 bugs are solved, and I have not heard other reports from the new format, so I think this very important milestone was reached.
I know other coders spent a lot of time in other areas as well. For example, MavJP spent quite a lot of time debugging new fragmentation damage code. I don’t know the details, but I remember MavJP saying something like the bug was already there for ages, but the path was not triggered. Until the new logic entered the game. I know our team spent quite some nights one this (MavJP and at least 3 testers), I’d say weeks or even a month on it.
On the cool side o new things, Chihi opened the door for several new avionics by doing refactors of the classes we had: avionics, hud, sms etc. He also started implementing a avionics for different aircrafts, plus support for Xinput, new round NVG and more. Tumbler also spent quite some time on avionics, specially F15 and has done a ton of code health changes. I mean, really, tons of them. Users will never see the effect of these, but devs will: it means quicker iteration, safer migrations and opens more doors in the future. Tbuc also worked on avionics, campaign ALR, tests, debugging etc. He also spent a few days with one of our devs fixing a some SMS imprecisions.
It is impossible to tell the contribution from everyone, I’d have to go through the logs and spend a lot of time, but these are the ones are work most closely with and I am telling by heart. But there is also a lot of deving happening on the NT front in parallel but unrelated to this release, where BP, Biker, I-hawk and others are working with terrain devs (like Ranger, Max, Polak) to bring NT to life.
I cannot forget to mention people working on the F15C data side: Qawa for his insane F15C cockpit, Topolo for the FM and Manos, for the new F15 3d model. Amazing team work there.
Last, we have our testers, playing the new version everyday and reporting bugs. Unfortunately, more than we can handle, but we keep going And let’s not forget all the reviews that coders do for each other, which also takes considerable time and the people keeping (and paying) the infrastructure and DB sane (BB, Max and others as well).
Now, what went wrong which is not under our control (in terms of SW):
- The flood in Italy was not only a disaster, but also burned Qawa’s PC. New one is coming, but we have to wait to finish more F15 functionalities.
- I also burned two mobos due to a defective GPU. This was very tricky, because the GPU worked, but PC was freezing randomly. I changed memory, PSU, processor, mobo, disk until I found the culprit was the GPU… sigh. At least I returned it and got a new one, but lost 2 mobos.
- VS2022 stopped working for custom builds. We opened a bug with Microsoft. Sounds like a joke, but only brazilians are being affected by it and MS has no clue what is wrong. The biggest issue here is that we had removed support of VS2019 in our code a while, so we had to revert this and you have no idea how HUGE this task was. I mean, HUGE. But this is done.
I believe only the F15 avionics are missing now for the release: most of the bugs are fixed and BML format is stable. We will not deliver in this first version a full fidelity F15 as the F16 is, but it will be fun to fly. Definitely a different feeling. I know you are all eager about NT, but sorry, this is a 4.37 thread. In any case, I’ll leave a screenshot of the F15C:
When will the U3 be released? Given the shortcomings we had, hardly on July (also summer vacations on the north). We will see if we can make it to August though. Let’s see how much progress we can make on the F15C when Qawa’s PC arrives.
Until then, enjoy U2 and keep the spirits up!