Informatika és tudomány

  • militavia
    #52990
    It has been a while since we did a last update from the dev team and I thought it would make sense to write a couple words on the current team status…

    I. Giving 4.37 a proper retirement
    As some of you have seen, a public testing of an Update 7 for BMS 4.37 hes been launched a couple days ago by @Seifer .

    The goal here is to turn the page on 4.37 and make sure people can still enjoy this version until 4.38 comes and a variety of theaters make slowly their way to the new platform…

    There are still a lot of theaters done out there that can be enjoyed and given the amount of work that 4.38 requires on the data side, I’m not expecting community driven theaters before several years (while we have proper tooling and material to share with the community)…

    We also have to accept that people that won’t be able to upgrade their PC and are currently barely making 4.37 run… They might struggle a lot with 4.38.

    Let me be clear though… 4.37 won’t be updated further. This update 7 is to give a last farewell to it and make sure the community can run it smoothly while we are focused elsewhere.

    II. 4.38 development progress
    You probably have seen far less involment from the team on the public side for a couple weeks / months. This is actually a good sign!

    We are busy testing and ironing out the bugs in 4.38…

    Major improvements
    Code wise
    I’m not going to enter into the specifics of features but here are the strong areas of focus we have seen:

    Major improvements on graphics engine and memory handling (huge fps gains have benn seen). Personally, I went on a modern high-end PC from 70+ fps on the ground to 100+ fps
    Major improvements on VR. On top of FFR that already increased performance, a new technique has been created exclusive to BMS to reduce the load on GPU and ensure a solid FPS experience
    New lights rendering and optimization (will be shipped with 4.37.7) which improves the light source rendering by night.
    Some systems have been improved as well on F-16 and F-15 but I won’t enter into details (no spoilers)
    AI is even more realistic now in the air but also on the ground… So don’t expect to do NOE mission without serious planing nor will you get out easily from a furball!
    …
    Data wise
    We have spent a lot of time on:

    Integrating new 3D models for multiple aircrafts
    New PBR weapons and racks models for F-16
    Fixed 100% of airbases
    Fixed most obvious scenery issues
    Added new method to show grass and shrubs on airbases at the proper spots
    Major UI fixes and stability improvement
    …
    Next Steps
    While gaining every bit we can from BMS in terms of FPS is now quite advanced (next optimizations might continue to benefit older generations of PCs), the next steps will mostly be mostly focused on the following areas:

    Campaigns (Revamped campaigns and associated code support)
    Systems (improvements on F-16 and F-15)
    Tweak rendering engine and effects
    Adding some custom objectives for eye candy (don’t expect a flight simulator like experience with cities - most of this work is done by hand)
    …
    Limitations and expectation management
    So… Let’s talk about the elephant in the room…
    4.38 is a massive undertaking in terms of data, requirements and experience!

    Given the size of the team, we have to make some sacrifices and decisions that will affect the community:

    Forget about new community theaters for a “very” long time…
    The tooling won’t be ready to be distributed most probably
    A need for custom assets is essential and requires 3D skills for creators
    Objective placement will be long…
    While we improved performance greatly lately, if you’re running 4.37 on a potato computer, 4.38 won’t be for you… Your GPU will require at least 8G of VRAM to run the 4K ground textures and PBR objects
    We will still have some people complaining about the fact that some objectives are not realistic ect… Well… Get Flight Simulator and not a combat sim…
    Forget everything you think you knew about until 4.37 for 4.38… There are so many changes that most existing tools won’t work anymore!
    Timeline
    Famous subject within the BMS community… When?
    Well… I have no real answers for you…

    I would count it more in months than years at this stage but… It will depend how comfortable we are with what we would consider a minimum viable product and this is still pending a proper landing on the topic internally…

    III. Conclusion and consideration for the future
    Thanks to our dedicated core team and extended beta testing team (that have an NDA on 4.38 material shared with them ? ), we made a very important progress toward stabilization of the sim.
    I’m personally quite confident on our coding / development practices and the level of quality we achieved over the last years!

    But… There are some considerations to be made:

    Some people on the team can’t follow the pace (for good or personal reasons) and we tend to be short on hands on some key topics like tooling…
    Recruitment is hard because it requires trust, dedication, good knowledge of the sim and ability to fit with the team…
    On a more personal level:

    I have a personal challenge on supporting the infrastructure for the 4.38 release and still trying to strenghten as much as possible with a small budget…
    The influx of DCS refugees is also quite a mixed bag of signals:
    While I appreciate the positive notes, I’m not sure all will fit properly with the spirit of our sim and might feel bitter about it (because they came for the wrong reasons).
    Our strength was always on documentation and manuals. We have way too many people relying on videos and medias that are incomplete and we always see the same questions that are already covered by our documentation…
    We can’t get rid of the constant bashing of fanboys who will always find reasons to criticize 4.38
    But not everything is black in that picture, 4.38 will be the greatest achievement since 4.32 and I’m personally very involved to continue making it a great launch!

    Thank you for your time reading this long sitrep and continue to enjoy BMS!

    MaxWaldorf Out!

    Note: This sitrep isn’t an invitation to ask us more details… We will give some if we wan