I'm all for the in-memoriam stuff, can't fault that. RIP mate.
But the rest is boggling me. Like, I find it difficult to believe that someone would ditch BMS for DCS because of VR. I can see flying both, but considering BMS is dead because of it seems odd. I suppose people have their own motivations for what they fly, but specifically in regards to BMS I reckon most (but clearly not all) players do so because of the high fidelity jet and the campaign. VR's cool, but can it really be enough to cause a BMS player to ditch it?
I don't know in what state the DCS Viper will be released, or what state it will eventually reach, but I certainly have my suspicions. If EDs entire track record is applied to the F-16 module I think you're going to see a beautiful, awesome sounding F-16 with many missing, incomplete or broken systems. Systems that BMS nails. Could a simmer really decide that they prefer the incomplete jet just because it looks nicer? Consciously decide that graphics trump detailed systems, avionics and a persistent dynamic battlefield in which to fly it? I know the answer to that is yes, but it still gives me trouble
No, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
#4477064 - 06/07/1902:54 PMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: DBond]
I will admit - i don't flight sim anymore because of VR. It was like getting trackir - once you had it you can't go back. DCS Viper ALMOST has me deciding to fly again, but without the dynamic campaign and being unable to play it smoothly turns me off doing it.
The main VR related issue for DCS is that the system requirements to run with VR, AND upscale the resolution to make visual fidelity approach what is available on a monitor are astronomical.
With VR games requiring high visual fidelity (like flight sims) the main issue isn't about the resolution of the headsets, but the resolution of what is being passed to the headset coupled with high enough framerates. If you look at many of the Steam Labs game they look excellent because the graphics are simple enough that supersampling can upscale without a huge impact on framerate.
Similarly, games like Falcon4 or IL2Sturmovik are at what I consider to be the sweet spot for conversion to VR - allowing similar upscaling as the Steam labs stuff.
Last edited by Bard; 06/07/1902:57 PM.
What WW2 Fighter pilots say about Angels and Airspeed:
"Nice job of getting down to the basics - love your choice of a cover!" Col. Clarence 'Bud' Anderson
"I have enjoyed reading angels and airspeed, it should prove good reading for all interested in combat tactics and their application related to the fluid air environment and state of technology in WWII years. All the best as you make it available." - Col. Charles McGee - Tuskegee Airman
NEVER ENGAGE STUPID.
#4479672 - 06/24/1912:00 AMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: Sleepdoc]
If you are not using rudder pedals you can enable roll linked steering in the UI/Setup/Advanced/View Control page. Otherwise, use the arrow keys to steer.
Clear skies!
#4479696 - 06/24/1908:06 AMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: WolverineFW]
If you are not using rudder pedals you can enable roll linked steering in the UI/Setup/Advanced/View Control page. Otherwise, use the arrow keys to steer.
I think he was having some fun
And anyway, the answer is clearly Ctrl-E (Hold)
No, now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
#4479762 - 06/24/1906:10 PMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: DBond]
Joined: Apr 2013 Posts: 361schnidrman
Jason Schneider
[quote=WolverineFW] All we need now is Aragorns HARM incident for the complete Time-Warp
I used to LIVE for letting that thread disappear from the front page on Frugal's board only to bring it up again, or using "frubles" to make it sticky for a bit!! Thanks for that memory!
I may have to give BMS another crack...it's been a while!
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.” -Robert Heinlein
#4480077 - 06/26/1904:34 PMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: Sleepdoc]
I'll admit it's been a while since I last strapped into the F-16. Had a lot of fun flying in the Freebirds, as well as with the iBeta team right after Microprose went belly up.
I've dabbled in DCS lately, but nothing was ever quite the same as the campaign in Falcon. I went and downloaded the newest BMS, and grabbed the first Falcon disk I could find to install it. Unfortunately, I grabbed Allied Force, and that didn't seem to be one of the approved installs. So rather than go through the trouble of hunting down the old CD (I still have my binder!!) I just picked it up on Steam since the sale is going on.
So it's installed, but that's about it. I don't know if I'll actually do anything with it, but I think I'd like to (even if it isn't in VR!)
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.” -Robert Heinlein
#4480841 - 07/01/1910:41 AMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: DBond]
Joined: Dec 2001 Posts: 4,840ricnunes
Senior Member
If you are not using rudder pedals you can enable roll linked steering in the UI/Setup/Advanced/View Control page. Otherwise, use the arrow keys to steer.
I think he was having some fun
And anyway, the answer is clearly Ctrl-E (Hold)
Alternatively, ALT+F4 also worked as well (at least in the past)
#4480877 - 07/01/1901:07 PMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: ricnunes]
I will admit - i don't flight sim anymore because of VR. It was like getting trackir - once you had it you can't go back. DCS Viper ALMOST has me deciding to fly again, but without the dynamic campaign and being unable to play it smoothly turns me off doing it.
And here is where the allure of DCS ends. Their static battlefield with "trigger points" to accomplish the canned missions reminds me of Wolfenstein with planes. You miss a point, start over and fly for an hour again, only to find out you failed again. Save the game so you can skip the 45 minute ingress? Not a chance, NO SAVES. Is it pretty, absolutely, right up until your i7/32GB/RTX 2080 machine starts stuttering and it looks like someone is fanning cards with terrain pics on them. Try and create a big TE mission with multiple moving entities? Forget it, they will move but watch your frame rates disintegrate to an unplayable level. So all good TE builders use static enemies that just sit in the same spot until you kill them. Cool maps like Normandy? Would be great if it wasn't so horribly flawed and unplayable, but I hear the people that created/sold it are going to fix it "as soon as they are done with their next (broken) map"... I really tried to like it, even upgraded my machine in hopes of making it run well, then made the mistake of picking up BMS 4.34 and hopping back in (after many years away). Enormous learning curve? Yep. But the 1st campaign mission I turned on far labels (forgive me) and just thought "Holy crap, the sky is ALIVE!" There is no comparison, and I have 0 confidence in DCS getting a functional dynamic world going when they can't even get a static one right!
Oh, and for F4 history buffs, take a look here - http://www.combatsim.com/review.php?id=451 done by Sleepdoc. I remember well all the names, including the outspoken Papadoc (was a BIG Flanker fan IIRC?) from the forums. Hope all is well with them now..
Just to throw in some of my experience. I play both titles - BMS is more robust, has more unpredictability with it's dynamic campaign but someone might argue you can craft unique experiences inside DCS single missions which you wouldn't be able in BMS. Like this one:
Seeing that laser marker while using NVGs is really cool feature I haven't seen in BMS. (yet)
Also after flying so many missions in BMS they start to feel repetitive. Obviously you fly somewhere else and have diffrent encounters each time, but the core is the same. In DCS you may have limited single missions but they can be filled with scripted story making each one unique and unforgetabble.
Both sims have their flaws and advanteges. I fly both mainly in single player and enjoy them evenly for different reasons. Especially lately I started to enjoy DCS more (to the same level as BMS) after getting fast SSD (M.2 NVMe) drive - it basically reduced the problem with stuttering entirely for me. And I dont have super fast PC, i5 6600K, GTX970 and 16GB of RAM, my previous hard drive was the bottleneck for DCS, BMS run fine before the upgrade.
#4485905 - 08/12/1911:15 AMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: damson]
No taking away from the breathtaking beauty of DCS! Imagine if BMS had the cockpit and plane graphics (I could care less about terrain in a jet).. that would be heaven. I have a good SSD now (surely not as good as an M.2, next system will have two M.2s!). This helps with the terrain loading but the engine can't handle a lot of activity without killing FPS, that's the big issue, and I have a fairly robust system even now.
Sadly if you wanted to put as many units in DCS map as there are in BMS campaign you would need prabably NASA super-computer that's for sure. BMS Falcon 4.0 was smartly coded from the start with the bubble concept, unfortunatelly with the advent of large scale multiplayer and many units "mannable" (even ground ones ithanks to DCS Combined Arms) that approach would not fit into DCS well. But even so, with smart scripting and units placements / spawning / de-spawning you can still achieve a good feeling of being a part of a bigger battle. There are some MP servers that feature persistant "dynamic" campaigns, but I haven't tried them yet so can't comment on those.
I'm also finding carrier ops more fun in DCS than in BMS (in which I fly the Viper pretty much exclusively anyway) . Tomcat and Hornet in DCS are a dream to fly. And with the upcoming Carrier module the experience will be even better.
Last edited by damson; 08/12/1911:56 AM.
#4486816 - 08/20/1905:09 PMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: damson]
Seeing that laser marker while using NVGs is really cool feature I haven't seen in BMS. (yet)
Also after flying so many missions in BMS they start to feel repetitive. Obviously you fly somewhere else and have diffrent encounters each time, but the core is the same. In DCS you may have limited single missions but they can be filled with scripted story making each one unique and unforgetabble.
Both sims have their flaws and advanteges. I fly both mainly in single player and enjoy them evenly for different reasons. Especially lately I started to enjoy DCS more (to the same level as BMS) after getting fast SSD (M.2 NVMe) drive - it basically reduced the problem with stuttering entirely for me. And I dont have super fast PC, i5 6600K, GTX970 and 16GB of RAM, my previous hard drive was the bottleneck for DCS, BMS run fine before the upgrade.
There is actually a spot on the ground in NVGs for the laser marker currently in BMS.
The equivalent in Falcon is the Tactical Engagement mission builder - where you can build bespoke single missions or whatever you want with the in game TE builder or the 3rd Party Mission Commander. Similar in other games - if I wanted to recreate an actual mission from history in Strike Fighters then I would create a single mission either scripting in Notepad (SF1) or using the mission Editor (SF2). I would be bringing in new objects and flying to locations you would never see otherwise (also see Yankee Air Pirate)
The DCS scripting allows quite a lot of detail and flexibility - probably a lot more in some areas than previous games. However one slight problem is having to spend time creating them yourself and people creating good ones for free has generally been the exception. The time that needs to be invested in creating these things is probably one reason why only what seems a small minority ever attempt it. Creating basic missions for yourself is fairly easy in most cases but that is not the same thing.
The DCS paid campaigns have clearly provided incentive for people to create some exceptionally good single missions - I would say I would be 90% satisfied overall ignoring trigger overuse. Use of triggers has to be balanced otherwise you can spend part of a mission trying to satisfy gaming elements only.
'Crashing and Burning since 1987'
#4601086 - 06/05/2202:36 PMRe: R.I.P. Steve Blankenship - Long Live BMS and VR
[Re: Sleepdoc]