metalnwood

Also had the problem. I deleted the saved games and then renamed the directory to 'dcs world12-' and changed the shortcut. That worked but seeing there are registries etc I will reinstall again and just change the install directory to a different name.

Looking at the youtube vid and lets say the guy is 1.8M then I would say the sphere has a diameter of 2.2M roughly. So the area of that sphere is 18 square meters. If you were to move your head freely I guess you might see half the sphere which is around 9 square meters which is about 12 50" panels. I dont know the future costs or OLED but if it took a few years to reach the costs of LCD then there is some indication. Honestly, you would be lucky to get the electronics and drives for under $20k, then there is the rest of it :) Anyway, back to your original questions, the only other comment I have is that it only looks to be 3 DOF, i.e. yaw, pitch and roll. In a flight simulator I would want at least one more, heave which is Z on your traditional axis. For landings, takeoffs, turbulence etc heave is the only real way to get that feeling.

Entirely possible to do, the mechanics can be worked out and there is nothing technologically limiting that part of the project - except of course time, space and money. When the screen technology will be there is anyones guess as I am not sure if you are proposing the whole sphere to be wrapped or not? I dont know where oled is going but even so it would require some sort of customised panel to do it and that looks fairly large, something like a 4Mx4M screen or 12x12 feet at least. I am not confident oled will help you out at those sizes. I have thought many times about a good motion platform but my biggest hurdle is space, in your case that looks like a room with at least a 6M (18ft) ceiling which is fine when you have your own space for it. Next would be the money compromises followed by time. I have thought about making my own linear actuators to save money as my own projects tend to think farther than a couple of cheap actuators for a rocking seat, at least 3dof would be required byt ultimately 6. Then the actuators are in the thousands and doing it yourself is something to really think about. The chinese help out here as well. I dont know how much that would cost but if I was to throw a minimum figure about I think you would be scrounging to do it for 50k and that would involve making most things yourself, I hope you have a good workshop thats up to it :) Seriously, unless you are an engineer and know for certain you have the machinery to make it and the $$ and desire to do it then I would think about something a little less ambitious so you have something to use. , just IMHO :)

If you want to spring the $$$ for the full BS2 then do that rather than an upgrade, check other threads for why this is beneficial.

The moral of the story in the future is just eat the extra few $$ and don't buy an upgrade. If I could get a refund and pay the difference for the full version I would do it instantly, the hassle is too great.

In the 1.2.0 files the upgrade and the bs2 dload are within one meg of each other. Does that mean that they both work in DCS world now?

They say 1.2.0 but all torrents are the same or have not been updated yet.. another edit. I guess they are different.

i just have the issue that I normally have with the store. Randomly logged in, some pages it says I am logged in but when I want to check out it thinks I am not.. Edit. A safari issue, chrome is ok

Hah, you should see my workshop between projects. It looks like I have been working on the titanic and then I trot out some small thing at the end :)

You mean an alumiminzed plate rahter than an aliminium plate? Something acrylic with the mirrored finish should be cheap and has the morror on the first surface.

I know a guy, he designed the corrector lens for one of my scopes and could probably help out a bit. I have shied away from thinking about this kind of thing because of the quality and potential problems with lining it up. If you guys think you pretty much have it nailed and the optical glass is the only issue then I dont mind playing around with it either. Although that will take me up to 6 screens! I need my 7970 to be replaced with a 9990.

Another option is to use a professional printer to print your panels on self adhesive vinyl. The blacks will be black, a better quality black Than our printers will do. I have done this for large areas where. I don't want to paint I put on artwork and get it professionally printed. I think you would be happy and the price where I live is good, you are in a larger economy so pricing may be even better.

You will certainly need more dedication than this! If you are sure unsure from one minute to the next and query your ability to do it you might want to think hard. Of course people are around to help but make sure you are dedicated before you plonk down the many thousands on a frame. Also think about it this way too. For what it would cost to buy and the large amount of space it would take up and the huge amount of time it would take before it is ready, would you rather have the enjoyment of a three screen projection setup with nice controls and some other DIY or bought cockpit? You are talking about the same money and space. Which really floats your boat?

Press the eject button, you are pressing the defection button.

Just had a play with a rocker switch as well, came out ok but the V at the bottom is not sharp . Even though the top layer is pressed in to a sharp corner of the bottom piece it still maintains a bit of a curve at the surface. Probably as good as I will get though. Now to wait for the grey material so I can cut them all out! Bah, it doesnt look right in the photo, I think where I captured an above light throws it out. Now it looks like its all a curve which it is not.

So far I have not had any success with getting buttons done to the quality I would like. I probably mentioned before that I am worried about painting buttons as I am not sure how long it will take for the paint to wear off. If someone buys one of these from me I don't want to have problems of that nature in the future. Also when painting the laser does not engrave as well as I would like. I could rotary engrave with the CNC router but the laser is a better tool for engraving. My success with engraving on off the shelf keys has not worked, it's too messy engraving and filling with white paint. Same issue anyway, how long before it wears off? So, two options left to me.. I have decided that I either make the buttons from scratch or by using off the shelf buttons and glueing a front on to it. I have tried making them from scratch with acrylic. The results are good even though I did it quickly just to get an idea. I would be very happy with these keys. What I am doing it glueing the laserable material on top of the acrylic. Then I mill out the buttons in an array and transfer to the laser to engrave and finally cut them out individually. They are made with a slight lip at the bottom to keep them from falling out of the panel. These buttons would have the tactile switches mounted directly behind them so they dont fall backwards either. They would stick out maybe 2mm. I dont know how far above the panel the reals ones are on the cdu. Then I need to mask the top of the button and paint the sides to match the colour. I am not worried about the paint coming off here as nothing is touching it. As you can see, my test buttons are black as I wont have the grey material for another week and a half. The other option is to glue each top to off the shelf buttons and paint. Not sure about this as I need to individually do them all. Machines wont help here. The E key is done like this. The nice thing is that you can press on this material all day with cheezel fingers and nothing will rub off. The buttons milled from acrylic are cleaner at the joins as you cant tell, the are milled after they are glued so there is no join line like there is with the off the shelf buttons.

Agreed that a project like that is because you want to do the project, less so the motivation to fly in it at the end. Cockpit builders often dont fly sims :)

It sounds like you are still a little while away from needing that PC. It takes a little while to build the pit, do the panels, get them interfaced etc. If your current machine is serving you well for your current setup I would hang off until you need the machine. Chances are what you buy today will be dated before you get to put it to the use you wanted. When you are on the leading edge and trying to keep up with the newest things there is not really any specific upgrade path. You usually just replace the whole thing except the power supply and case. Thats what I do but then I usually think I have a whole machine that I cant run because of no case or PS. So I end up buying those two and having another spare machine lol At the rate of about one a 12-18 months. You would struggle to get performance that you want with 10 monitors and probably you could not get support from a sim to run that other than fsx, prepar3d or xplane. The best advise if you want to buy now is buy the lastest, that will last the longest and the socket for the cpu will be around for the longest. It is CPU intensive but dont underestimate the GPU, I see my frames going up with everycard upgrade.

I will chime in Fred, it really depends what you want to do? Like every sim, the more you throw at it the better it will perform. If you are looking at a pit like gadrocs that you want to run off a single machine then you may want to look at the ATI cards. I am up to five monitors on mine. The 7970 will let me add one more. When you talk about ideal but you havent said what you would do with it then I would say an i5 ivy bridge overclocked with a 7970, 16 GB ram, turn off the page file running win 7 64bit. If you dont like load times then add a ssd. Very easy to say the ideal machine but if you dont want to pay top $$ you will have to state your goals :)

Just out of curiosity, how much does a touchscreen cost and then how many hours will it take you to write the software. From a business point of view paying yourself less than $50c an hour to work weeks rather than spending $30 doesn't sound very efficient.

apparently it feels like someone else is doing it when you use your other hand.

I got two for testing here. No problems with them except at 4" they dont come with a vga adaptor. It's composite so I needed to spend another $15 on a vga to composite adaptor. http://www.good-display.com/products_detail/&productId=d2feb6a1-5a62-4888-9b7b-37676145726c&comp_stats=comp-FrontProducts_list01-004.html

Thanks linden, it's a 4", very close to the actual one in the a10. The same width and a few mm off in the vertical height. A 5" wouldnt fit in the a10 cdu without button rearrangements.

School holidays so I have kids with me, a bit less time but I have been trying to get the buttons how I want them. I think I will give up as I am not sure that I will get them done to the quality I want them. That means I will have to do them from scratch myself and mill out each button then paint and engrave. I didn't want to paint them, I am worried about the paint coming off after being used for some time. I cut out the front of the CDU so I could have something to mount the buttons in and start testing. I really like that LCD, it fits in well. Also, the caution light panel in the picture is not the one from above. I thought putting 48 individual panels in place and gluing would be tedious so I did it again but instead of cutting them I engraved the slots until the material was almost cut. The final result is a panel that looks like it is 48 individual small panels but it is only one so it doesn't take very long to alighn and glue. I shouldnt take photos in bad light on a phone. I have a knack of showing something in the worst light. It looks good though so photos dont matter :)

We have been pretty stable for some time, who would have thought greece and spain would cause a one week bit of pain right when I was buying :)