The moderator over at FF told me there had been some issues reported about FF5 and BMS sharing the same drive.
He didnt elaborate, but pointed me to some further readings.
Bleh...
To my eyes, FF5 won the beauty contest w/its weather details, flare dispersions and aircraft explosions.
I'm almost tempted to go get FF6.
Almost.....



Neh-I got enough on my plate here w/Bob, WoP, IL-1946 & Allied-
I need to exercise some discipline here =(

I have all three in my drive since the BMS release. There were always issues between Open Falcon and Free Falcon, but I had never had install issues with the BMS/FF/AF simultaneous installs.

It's good we can make our choice. No need to look down to any incarnation...

FF6.0, Aegean Theater, HAF F-16D armed for an A-G mission:

FF6 required me to uninstall the original F4 install, which I thought I needed for BMS... guess not. FF6 will not actually start, though. Just freezes at the blue install screen. Can't even get into the menu. Oddly, the config launcher shows nothing checked. By default, FF6 is set to run as administrator. I thought maybe I needed to select that option, but it was already done. Not sure what's going on. Install is 16GB, by the way. I went through all the steps methodically. Windows 7 64bit.

FF6 ran fine for me, first time out. It asked to uninstall FF5.5 first. No sign of any interaction requested or needed concerning my BMS install. Only glitch is that for some reason I can't determine, when launching the saved TE "Just Having Fun" or whatever the non naval strike, non SR-71 TE is called, I can't join any flight but the first one, the AWACS. Regardless of how many times I click on another flight, or reload the TE, the selection remains in the top, first flight - AWACS. Weird.

It'd be nice if they say explicitly on both the install page and the download readme that it absolutely will not work with Intel Integrated graphics chips. Not even the menu screen will load. That's BS, dude. 3-4hrs I spent downloading, installing, and struggling to get the thing to work. And now it's hogged up over 20GB on my hard drive between the installers and the actual installation. Another defrag session tonight, I guess, after I remove it.

By the way, zero problems with F4AF or a tuned-down BMS. And love the HMCS in BMS, though the TWS mode and TMS hat function is confusing.

Edit: the TWS and TMS hat was confusing because the hat wasn't working properly with the profiler. direct mapping of the TMS and DMS hats fixed it.

or until a 3rd party does a DCS : F-16 module.

Ahahaha, God d.... true, including defected developers.
and guess what, if there weren't on site "shrink", Aragorn, they would be all "mentalists" by now.

I really think the teams should merge. There is a lot of talent on both sides, and the community would be better off if they were working together. But I am sure a lot of people would disagree with me.

Not least the developers themselves. FreeFalcon and BMS are so far apart now that the source code simply cannot be merged. Also, the vision of the two teams is VERY different. FreeFalcon's focus is on the ability to fly every aircraft in the sim with its own cockpit (not avionics as the program only supports F-16 avionics) making it a survey sim while the BMS focus is on as realistic a simulation of the F-16 as possible making it more of study sim. There is no right or wrong direction, but to merge the two visions would be impracticable and would likely piss off a bunch of die hard fans on both sides.

However having said that, a lot of really great work finds itself crossing over. The Israeli Theatre is a great example of that, and only one of many.