Falcon 4 BMS

[CCIP]

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

[Threadfin]

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.

Originally Posted by Threadfin

Forget the rubbish heap that is DCS.

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.

[Threadfin]

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.

[Red October1984]

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.

[Threadfin]

Red October, here is a good step by step install guide Ice did. If you decide to get in to BMS it makes it a lot easier to get it all set up

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.ph...-3#Post4347779

Get yourself a Warthog or another HOTAS and start flying!

[CCIP]

Originally Posted by Threadfin

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 think this is a great analogy, and thanks for taking a fair perspective on it.

Honestly, I would have to agree with you completely on this, too - I do like what DCS does and I'm happy that it seems to have a live and active community of both players and developers behind it. I think what they definitely nailed was the development and sales model with 3rd party content. Not that it's a new thing, as it's basically a more modest version of what the Flight Simulator payware scene looks like - but it is good that it seems to be doing well in a combat simulator too. As a result, DCS is easily the finest "study sim" there is - if you're willing to pay to get all the various high-detailed aircraft.

Falcon is a study sim too - though even in these latter-day versions, a true study sim of the F-16 only (with other flyable aircraft doing a fine job of being plausible, but still often relying on F-16 systems modeled underneath). DCS aircraft do have a number of finer details modeled in some respects, but overall I'd argue that the BMS F-16 is still the ultimate simulated combat aircraft - though it is helped by the fact that the F-16 comes in more versions and deploys a greater range of weapons than any DCS plane does. At the end of the day, if I had to pick only one aircraft to fly in a combat sim, that'd have to be it.

What's more important, though, is the rest of the simulation - DCS does boast better graphics, physics, and even the (for now mostly theoretical) ability to play as ships and ground units (something Falcon was originally envisioned to do as well, but it was just a pipe dream at the time). But F4's campaign just blows everything out of the water. Ultimately, it's the difference between well-choreographed scenario play in DCS (and all credit due to great scenario designers of course!) vs. a live, unscripted, massively complex air/ground/(somewhat sea) combat theater in F4, essentially a self-playing strategic wargame where things like integrated air defense systems, supply, morale, manufacturing etc. all play an active role.

I say it without the slightest irony or exaggaration, but IMO Falcon 4.0 is not just a great game but one of the most ambitious pieces of software ever written. That ambition made for a pretty much unplayable game on release - but ultimately, it is still the closest we ever got to having a computer game where you can actually be part of a full-scale war, and interact with any of the hundreds of aircraft and thousands of ground vehicles - in 3D - which are meanwhile interacting with each other in all sorts of ways. Now it's nearly been two decades, and Falcon is still as close as you can get to a full-scale virtual war you can participate in first-person - and not because it's better than other sims, but because nobody has even attempted to do something so stupidly daring since. Can't blame them - F4 was not a financial success, and was among the reasons Microprose folded not long after its release. But even next to other great dynamic campaign games like the Enemy Engaged series, what it set out to do is pretty jaw-dropping to this day. And after all these years and a stubborn community, the fact is - that dynamic war in Falcon makes for a game that's infinitely richer than anything else out there, including DCS. And amazingly, it's not just singleplayer, but you can have all the campaign features in multiplayer too (and now it actually works and is stable, too!)

DCS will probably continue to draw the lion's share of multiplayer interest though, because it is better at multi-platform play - and at the end of the day, dynamic campaigns are not as important to most playing online. Most people tend to be more interested in human opponents, not the AI backdrop there. But in singleplayer - or even smaller-scale coop play - Falcon is going to be hard to beat. So I totally agree - I think that compared to anything out there including DCS, Falcon just has more to it as a game. But I don't think that's meant to make others look bad! More sims = better for us all

[Threadfin]

Good post CCIP. One of the things that makes BMS more interesting, more fun and more replayable is the fact that the Viper is a multi-role jet. The DCS F/A-18 will do a lot to bridge that gap, but you're still left with the point you made that I agree with the most -- and that's the campaign.

DCS is great for learning the systems,controls and weapons, mastering the jet. And it looks fantastic all the while. You do some training and get to the point where you are comfortable flying combat. This is where it all starts to fall apart. So you fly some missions. Maybe you didn't get it right. So you fly again. Now you know that the Su-27s are west of steerpoint five. Now you're ready for them. Since you saw no other planes in the first go 'round you aren't even scanning another part of the sky. Nothing there. And you already know it. So now your antenna is right where it needs to be and this time you pick them up early.

You get your missiles off first this time, after all you've already done it once. Two Flankers killed and you fly around and maybe back to base just looking at the clouds because hey, you've already done this and you know what is there or isn't.

My long winded point is that even though DCS makes a fantastic jet, what are you left to do with it? Some mission scripters are amazing, it's true and can almost give the the perception that you're flying something dynamic, changing, evolving.

But deep down you know you're not. The 'soft factors' of flying jet combat are lost on DCS like uncertainty or the unexpected. And there is no feeling of import or weight to what you are doing. The results, good or bad, have no impact on anything. This is where BMS shines as you rightly point out. Of all the great sims we listed earlier that have great campaigns, not one of them comes anywhere close to what F4 does.

[Eichhörnchen]

No matter what beautiful confections are created in the future, Falcon will always stand as a benchmark and an inextinguishable favourite, just as SH3 does.

Originally Posted by Eichhörnchen

No matter what beautiful confections are created in the future, Falcon will always stand as a benchmark and an inextinguishable favourite, just as SH3AoD does.

[Red October1984]

I have got BMS installed now, I just need a flight stick. The one I have is average at best and the rudder control is twitching so that's not a usable function.

I've been having fun throwing switches in the cockpit though. Figuring out how everything works will be a challenge.

[Threadfin]

Which ones are you looking at Red October?

I use a Cougar, but those aren't as easy to get these days. Many of the guys I fly with use the Warthog.

I used a Warthog.
While it appears to be the best you can get for money, it has one severe weakness that made me sell it (that, and the fact that I'm not flying atm).
The throttle's slew function is a joke. It's a tiny "ball" which is very finicky to control and from what I've read not like the original in the A10 at all.

This might not sound like a big deal, but considering how important the slew function (for targeting pods etc) is, it can ruin a lot of fun.
So I'd think twice about a Warthog now.

[Red October1984]

Originally Posted by Threadfin

Which ones are you looking at Red October?

I use a Cougar, but those aren't as easy to get these days. Many of the guys I fly with use the Warthog.

Looking at the Thrustmaster T-Flight HOTAS. It's a budget stick, yeah...but I don't want to spend over 60$ on a flight stick.

Before I buy anything, I'm trying to get a job first.

[Threadfin]

Originally Posted by Nippelspanner

So I'd think twice about a Warthog now.

You're right, but most of these guys seem to either have no trouble, or they've modded it in some way to prevent it. Some, I suppose, are just waiting to happen.

In RO's price range the T Flight HOTAS X is a good choice. It has a throttle and a bunch of buttons so will serve the purpose.

But if one were in the market for a full-blown HOTAS, what aside from the Warthog is there to choose from these days? X-55? CH Fighterstick with Pro throttle?

Pretty barren market it seems.

I've been using the Cougar for 15 years now. It has had a few issues, like all sticks I suppose, though I modded it early on and that took care of some of the most glaring possible issues (pots and gimbals).

I hope it lives forever, as I love flying F4 with this setup.