Falcon 4 BMS
 

I don't see much mention of flight sims 'round here. But there has to be some cross-over. And for us Silent Hunter fans spoiled by great dynamic campaigns, there is another sim that has a great one, and in my opinion, the greatest sim campaign of all, Falcon 4.

F4 was released back in 1998. It's come a long way since then. There are a few version choices for a virtual Viper driver, but for me the best choice is the BMS mod.

https://www.bmsforum.org/forum/content.php

The F-16 is modeled in painstaking detail, and it's true that it is a steep learning curve. Not everyone will take to a sim like this. But if you like combat jets and an amazing virtual war to fly them in, F4 BMS is the best thing going. Forget the rubbish heap that is DCS. Pick up a copy of Falcon 4.0 at GOG.com and download BMS. Cost: $10

The campaign is fantastic. It's a virtual war that rolls on with or without you. I'm sure most of you know about this already. It's complex. For anyone interested, I've done a campaign guide over at SimHQ. Read it here

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.ph...ns#Post4336426

A few shots showing F4 BMS

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._30_221510.png

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._10_215403.png

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._26_181855.png

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._26_200549.png

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._02_221741.png

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._26_200250.png

http://simhq.com/forum/files/usergal..._26_201047.png


For best results a full HOTAS and Track IR are recommended. I use a Cougar. This sim is fantastic, in my opinion the very best there is. It's not easy, and takes effort to become proficient. But if you put the time in, you'll be rewarded with the best jet combat simulator out there.

I don't know why my screenshots are so huge. Sorry 'bout that.

Most are posted in the flight sim section :O:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/forumdisplay.php?f=216

Hmm, you may be on to something... :)

Falcon 4 and Enemy Engaged are the only two flight sims I know that have both nice physics and a nice dynamic campgin. I remember a very early game about F-22 Raptor had a nice campaign. But sadly the graphics and physics didn't catch up.

Nice thing about F4 is that you're flying a multirole. So you have so many different ways to play the campaign.

DCS is very good at physics and graphics. Too bad it doesn't have a campaign or a good story.

P.S.: Falcon 4 is on sale now on steam for $3.50. It's really a steal for those who don't have it yet!

F3 Gold was one of my favorites growing up. I used to fly in an AOL (yes AOL) dial up ladder league.

That steam price is soooooo tempting.

Eh, Just remembered I have no joystick. I'll have to put that on my birthday list, but I can get F4 now for that price.

I still have fond memories of that game. Received that MOH once, for downing 17 enemy fighters before having to punch out myself. We were on a CAP over the Korean border, and our RWR started screaming and AWACS did too, a huge alpha strike was inbound. All 4 AMRAAMS hit, then all my sidewinders hit, and then I lost my wingman, and then I somehow got 9 more lucky gun kills, screaming for backup the whole time. Went Bingo weps and fuel, but could never escape the rest of them. Don't remember how I got shot down, but I did, punching out, and that Pilot went MIA. Ahh the memories of a wasted youth.

And looking at the Falcon Gold on Steam, holy crap I don't remember the graphics being that bad LOL.

And they are asking for a 1.8ghz processor minimum. I ran mine on a 66 mhz 386 back then.

You're thinking of DiD's F22: Total Air War, and it's a great game. While it certainly hasn't matured as well as Falcon BMS, there was actually also community work done on it for well over a decade after its original 1997 release. I can't link it here unfortunately because it falls into the same legal "grey area" as BMS (and even a little more so), but you can find it fairly easily if you search. It was one of my favourite sims back in the day and I recently got it running on my PC again :)

What fascinates me about that is just how much BMS (and other modders before them) managed to do with it - try running Falcon 4 without mods, and it's practically unrecognizable. Heck, even the Allied Force release from 2004 looks completely obsolete by comparison. It's amazing that it's still running on the same engine.

Then again, if you look at something like ARMA 3 - it's also still retains a fair bit of the original 2001 "Operation Flashpoint", while DCS is built on top of 2003's Lock On (which, in turn, is based heavily on the 1997 Flanker 2.5 and its predecessors), while today's versions of FSX/Prepar3D retain most of FS2002's code base and some from even older version. But today's Falcon definitely gets extra cookie points for basically being community-maintained for what's now been 18 years since the last official Microprose patch!

Another honourable mention should go to Jane's F-18, also. Although not nearly as active as the Falcon community, and lacking F4's dynamic campaign, it also received lots of mod updates over the years and is worth taking a second look at!

Well, I think Falcon Gold has Falcon 4.0 included right? So that may be why there are higher CPU specs?

Yes, I think it's that - I don't remember how it's packaged on Steam, but on GoG it's packaged in an odd way (probably for licensing reasons) - it's sold as a pack of Falcon (1.5) Gold, Falcon 2.0, and Falcon 3.0 all together, with Falcon 4.0 being a "bonus item" rather than a core part of the package. F4's license status has been a bit of a mess for a while, so I think everyone (not the least the BMS) team prefer to stay as low-key about dealing with it as possible - although I'm sure that the success of BMS is part of the reason it has gone back on sale now.

But I think you're also right that the specs are higher than you remember for Falcon 4.0 - I'll have to look at my original manual when I get home, but I think when it shipped, it listed a 233 MHz Pentium II as minimum. Considering how horridly unoptimized on release it was though, 1.8 GHz would've been much more realistic :O: I played the thing for at least 5 years on systems waaay below that 1.8 GHz spec though! First on a 400 MHz Celeron, then an 800 MHz Pentium III. I even managed to be part of an online squadron for years - on laggy 56k dialup!

Man, those were the days :D

IIRC, Gold was the last expansion of the 3.0 series. I believe that the gold on steam doesn't include 4, might be wrong though.

I got to laughing today in the car, realizing I had posted a recount of a single mission I flew about 25 years ago in a game.

I then realized I remember other games, like in the dial up head to head dog fight tourny I was in. I had my wings holed by his cannon, and was losing fuel quickly. I ran out of gas, and had to dive to gain speed, he followed me down to the deck, but I was able to pull up better than he was, and he crashed before I did, giving me the win.

Well, you have to admit - if you can still remember missions you played 25 years ago, chances are it was a pretty good game after all :yep:

I never actually got to play Falcon 3 - it was just a little bit before my time. Perhaps I should actually install it now that I have the pack of them from GoG.

We are flying BMS a lot these days. We have a dedicated campaign server and have a good old time. Of course you have to install 4.0 to use BMS now. I had snapped a couple of shots to compare the old and the new. Quite frankly, original Falcon 4 still holds up well. When I attach pics here they explode to massive size, so I will just link the post from SimHQ comparing the old and new 'pits.

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.ph...ey#Post4336731

Good post CCIP. With a handle like that you have to be a jetsimmer! Yeah, what Team Super Hornet did with F/A-18 was amazing. I haven't flown that in a long time, but it's one of the greats.

Yeah, BMS is worth playing and it's great that there's an active multiplayer community as well. It's been eons since I've done Falcon multiplayer - but I'm sure I'll come around to it again! F4 has been installed on my hard drive in some form non-stop since its release in 1998, and I don't think that's ever going to change :)

Oh, and as to the question about sims with dynamic campaigns - honourable mentions should also go to Rowan's titles, namely MiG Alley and Battle of Britain. I'm not sure whether the former runs on modern systems (I guess I'll have to install it and find out!), but BoB lives on - as A2A Simulations' BoB II. It's a bit dated, but has a very active community that continues developing officially-approved patches. Both had true dynamic campaigns.

It's unfortunate that most simulators don't do true dynamic cam paigns, even if they claim to - in many cases, what's passed for a dynamic campaign is actually just a semi-random mission generator. IL-2 is noteworthy for that.
CFS 3 (which also has been well-maintained by the community!) is somewhere in between - it's closer to a dynamic campaign than a mission generator, but it still vastly simplifies the actual conduct of war; I'd think of it more as a sandbox. Worth mentioning too is the CFS3-based World War I title Wings over Flanders Fields - which while not "truly" dynamic does have an outstanding campaign mode. It's made all the better by a very clever AI, which (at higher realism settings) not only fights well, but also makes healthy choices for its own survival (like disengaging it finds itself at a disadvantage).

And for those who want dynamic campaigns played on a strategic level (i.e. not in a simulator game per se, but a game where you control the air war) - there are the Gary Grigsby titles "Eagle Day to Bombing the Reich", and the recent "War in the West" has some air-only campaign scenarios as well.

Not modern combat like F4 but all worth bringing up nonetheless :)

Agreed. I was big in to MiG Alley and BoB. As a matter of fact, posts I made at Combatsim back in the '90s about the campaign landed me a gig on the staff of Frugalsworld, if you might have been familiar with that site. Once there, I got in to F4, and for a time, Frug's was the go-to place on the web for Falcon 4.

Jane's sims may be the only ones without dynamic campaigns I've bought that I played the sh!t out of. US Navy Fighters, ATF, Marine Fighters, the whole works. Of course back then, in the mid-90s I didn't have anything better to compare them to and I loved each of those titles.

But a couple years later, 1999 to be precise, I picked up MiG Alley and F4 and the rest is history. Any sim I've bought since then that does not have such a campaign was short-lived. Like Strike Fighters for example. EF2000 sort of bridged the gap. A better campaign experience, but not on par with F4 or the Rowan titles.

The exception is Il-2, and that only because we had so much fun flying multiplayer. If the single player campaign was the only way I could fly, even the classic Il-2 would have been gathering dust long before it did.

To that list I would also add LB2 and EECH, rotors sure, but good campaigns that kept my attention for a long time. And of course what dynamic campaign list would be complete without Silent Hunter series?

I think it says a lot about both Falcon 4 and the F4 community that out of all of these classic titles, F4 is the only one I still fly.

Yeah right, DCS is 'rubbish'.
What nonsense, really.

It's like saying Italian food sucks because you like Indian food better.
There's no need for elitist nonsense between falcon and DCS at all.

OK, fair enough nippelspanner. I disagree with your analogy and it's far more than a matter of taste. And I accept that calling DCS 'rubbish' isn't fair. The sim is good looking, the aircraft, systems and weapons are well modeled for the most part and the 'pits are gorgeous. Beyond that though I have little good to say.

For me, DCS is a fantastic flight sim while BMS is too, while also being a fantastic combat flight simulation. Beyond the actual software though, DCS, to me, is a mess. Haphazard development map, fractured community, substandard releases, ridiculous forum and so on. There's much dissatisfaction and downright hostility in the DCS community. So even if someone might think I am full of sh!t, it's out there for all to see.

If you like DCS that's great. Have fun if it scratches that itch. Having more sims is good. I was wrong using the word rubbish to describe a sim that does indeed have good qualities, even if I personally feel it misses the mark in many facets I believe are essential to a sim that models combat aircraft. Good hunting.

I bought F4 during a steam sale a while back meaning to do BMS but I need to get a new flight stick. My old one crapped out and I haven't touched a flight sim yet. :doh: