Weltensegler

UPDATE: Right panel still missing a lot elements but I wanna test the touch mounted sooner :)

psychologically its helps though :) "Mooom, are we there yet?"

yeah who knows...maybe it comes free for DCS F18C beta testers...or later with dx15 support. :) just kidding ED! Take your time, do it right.

Yes..with dx11 support :thumbup:

Yeah 2 pages German are already 1 page in English...probably a line in Chinese :)

Are you implying I wont stop before I have all walls and ceilings projected? :D you might be right. But I will stick to the screens for some time until Nvidia releases Kepler 3rd generation or something bc I want each wall at least in HD ...better 4K because then I don't have the zoom problem...I just use real binoculars :lol:

Thanks guys! The paint is actually primer :) I fell in love with that color and matte look so I didn't dare to mess it up with the actual paint and just kept using primer only.

Start now! :) Its more fun when you have time and it is not about getting done really...but wait with hardware so you get max performance for your money once your pit is ready, hehe

This is pretty much the unfinished (yet) story of my improvised fun-pit project and I will keep you posted about the further progress of course! ATM I am building "the fuselage" to integrate my 23"touch better and maybe have some generic toggle switches (real metal) like in my test project. Unfortunately I used 1/16 plywood for the hull instead of 1/8 mdf. The plywood starts to splinter easily and is very flexible so it creates kind of a shower curtain effect between the screws. more pics: I keep you posted how this will turn out. I hope so far this was all easy for the eye and inspiring for people who want to build something similar for themselves. You don't need to know a lot! Just get some good 5 to 6 times distilled vodka (for less hangover)and be a bit inventive. Walk through all the tool stores and home depots and look at everything and how you could use it. Like cables and pipe clamps for parachute rip-cords etc. Hope you had fun reading, see you soon with updates. Feel free to ask questions. regards, Weltensegler (WELD)

To have a good slide for my feed for using my simped pedals I cut some metal sheets and screwed them into the platform in front of them. And here is how the front panel is mounted with MFDs. The MFDs JUST fit in the front panel overlay with a tiny bit force so I didn't need any screws or glue and they could just lay on the screen. more pics: The first stage was done! The cockpit was for the first time flyable. I did consider buying projectors (I wish I had so I could have made a 180 or 360 surround projection) but for reasons I don't remember I went for a 55" LED LCD for now. Now I downloaded a bunch of Helios profiles and puzzled and arranged an A10C profile for this front panel layout. But I did hope for the F18 at that time already and most planes there might come would have something like an ICP displaced off the front panel. I also planed at that point to get into Falcon but that was before I had a look at the "environment" in that sim. Great sim technically but when I build a pit I don't wanna fly IFR only. In that case I could have saved money on screens. But there was still hope for some eye-candy sims so I started building an ICP box that I could detach and attach within seconds to stay flexible for switching aircrafts. The ICP got a 7"mimo touch that as the MFDs got placed tight into the box so nothing would move when you push buttons on it. I also left half of the box open on top and bottom since I hadn't tested yet how hot the little touchscreen gets and also I didn't wanna cover more of the 24" touch screen for same reasons. Turned out temperatures are totally decent though. more pics: Next I optimized my Helios profiles for DCS and added a 23" touch screen to the right that I could switch to the left panel by touching a vent in the Helios profile. Now I had a huge pit in front of one main screen...that had to change so I added two more 55" screens standing on IKEA stands. I bought a brand new just released gtx 680 4GB ftw to have enough video memory on my primary card to feed the 4x1080p for the main screens and the front panel. I kept my gtx580sc for the side panel. Here is the thread I tried to figure out all the softTH part. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=90300 PeterP helped me a lot getting into this tool and providing his collection of links and tutorials about these works. I soon noticed I went to far and 3x55" was way to big. Angled towards me as in the pic the setup was still more than 9 feet wide and almost covered 180deg of view. Using three viewports would cost more performance and wouldn't be fun with zooming or trackIR. Using one planar mapping produces ugly distortion on the appropriate FOV and trackIR started to lose my clip LEDs when looking to the side without adjusting curves and dead zones. At the beginning I considered to have all screens in portrait mode but wanted to go for the wide view instead of wasting screen behind my front panel. (that was before I noticed all the disadvantages of the horizontal alignment and wide image aspects in DCS) So I built new stands to turn only the outta screens vertical as PeterP suggested. (pictures follow)

Hello Gentlemen, this thread is about the story of a sim setup and due to its improvised character in many ways hopefully inspiration for everybody who always wanted to build something for his passion but hesitated because of lacking technically knowledge and or skill. I always wanted to get a bit closer to the real feeling and during the work on "Red Tails" I felt the time had come to try some things in that direction. I wanted to provide as realistic and constant avionics and maneuver animation throughout the air battles in the movie as possible and of course as script and director allow to. "Cliffs of Dover" was about to get released (and postponed again)for the 100th time and DCS P51 was unfortunately not even mentioned yet. So I decided to build a little Desk-pit for DCS A10C beta as test project which should include MFDs with displays, toggle switches and LEDs. I grabbed some wood rests and screws and put together some rough platform that with some paint didn't even look that bad. I learned how to wire switches and LEDs to usb-interfaces and map them to keyboard commands. That's how that little thing looked like BTW: With the TM Warthog this setup was actually really fun but guess what... ...soon that wasn't enough and I reminded myself why this was supposed to be a test project. It was fall 2011 when me and my girlfriend moved into a new place and I specifically had looked for an extra room that would serve as man-cave. Some days off were approaching at work and I had ordered one of FLIM's ejection seats to save some time and get as far as possible with something bigger than last time. All rooms still empty and no furniture anywhere I started spreading the pre-cut parts of the ejection seat on the floor figuring I actually need not only tools but a ton of screws too. Well what I was about to start surely would need a ton of tools anyways so I bought one by one as needed. How I had all the money though I just moved? Well who needs furniture when you can have a sim to fly and spend 15h a day and often weekends at work anyways :) Ok I admit I also like empty rooms, not a fan of furniture. Next problem I was facing was measurement tools... I couldn't find any metric ones in the tool store and as a German I don't really have a good estimation to build something in inches, elbows, feet, spoons and cups so I set new rules for my project. Vodka, eyeballs and items that lay around should be my measurement tools. The seat since it was pre-cut was no challenge but the seat alone didn't make a pit. more pics: Due to my liquid measurement tools I thought only about one step at a time and usually didn't have a plan how to finish something when I started it which made it extremely fun and exiting! :) The seat and anything I might build needed a platform and so I made one. Pretty simple, rigid and stable so it won't make noise later when more weight gets added and shifted. To get a good height and orientation for the seat I made a little socket on the platform. MetalNwood was so nice to make me an awesome extension for my Stick! This requires a picture to not sound inappropriate :) To avoid damage to the hardwood floor I glued some felt patches under it. So there I was ...sitting with a big smile in my seat with a mounted stick. But something was missing. I needed some front panel and to not bind myself to one aircraft I decided to go for a touch screen Helios setup for now. The biggest affordable touchscreen I could find on ebay was an ELO touch 24" and it was pretty thick and heavy. First I had no idea how to mount that thing stable and rigid in position when I suddenly saw the "U" shaped IKEA table legs on my desk. They had almost the right height so I just mounted them from below to sink them a bit in the platform. Then I used a cheap monitor mount to connect the ELO to the table leg. This was pretty stable but since the ELO was really heavy there was still some play that didn't quite satisfied me but I decided to solve that with a wooden construct around it. I supported it with 4 plates of plywood (two inner 3/4" and two outta 1/2 inch) which also should be the case of my front panel. So far so good everything was stable and rigid and nothing was moving or wobbling. Now I made a front panel layout from cardboard in A10C style and place the MFDs perfectly into the upper corners of the touch screen leaving the lower half open for gauges and switches and leaving the sides open for 7" usb screens I had from my test project. I planed to use those for fuel and hardware monitoring but towards the end they turned out to be too much performance loss for the many screens I was going to attach.

:lol: awesome pic

:) this was one of my first "simulators" I flew. Its almost easier on the eye than falcon bc it doesn't try on the ENV :D Well ok the green is brutal. Still funny how much better this one looked in my memory, hehe

just aim higher than target and pull down moments before impact! :)

:D He either wrote you the path and it requires only 3 signs or its short for "use windows-explorer search function and look for manual" ...which is still pretty long for 3 signs, hehe. But hey its his first post :) EDIT: Google translate says it means "Take a look at" but I assume it means rather "look for it". BTW the search brings up only all manuals for installed modules. Do you look for anything that might not be module specific?

Sure! That's actually exactly what I need after 3h of lua scripting! :) Also my pit has Flim's seat so I'm glad to do some performance tests for him. Ok Flim here we go. Since I don't have a TH2GO, two of my six monitors would be non-local so I did the test with four BUT I think I compensated for it :) I did 4x1920x1080 (7680x1080) with MFDs on top and I left out the top since that one would be the least intense concerning rendering. Also I used High settings on everything (except water=medium) and 4xAA, cockpit shadows, 4km trees with still 26-27fps in the first A10 instant mission (the other few to get over a stable fixed 30 you probably get by using something not on high that I did) (might not be thrilling over a city I guess :) ) I reached only 2182MB video memory (but I didn't use my scripted viewing distance/detail ranges which you probably will manipulate too) VAC,Helios etc. on top will lift that also by a few hundred. If you stick to your front panel I guess not more than 200MB all together. On my pit settings with all my high settings and modded files and 2 more indicators and Helios etc on 5 screens (3xsim; 1x exports and Helios; 1x Helios only)I come to ~3430MB. My rough setup is in my signature. Note that the GPU I used for those 4 screens is not even overclocked which you could do with some hydro chopper or similar cooling. My CPU(2600K) is stock 3.3GHz I think and reaches only 65C @4,9GHz at full load with a corsair H100 cpu cooling also not maxed out. DCS is not considered full load though and I had it on 4,6GHz for this test. I hope that helps a bit! I think you can get a system that runs your setup sufficient especially if you were ok with PeterP's resolution. Good luck! can't wait to see pics!

Eye-cancer and a disease called "Minecraft-syndrom" :D ...just kidding he said no such thing. I just can't stand the BMS environment though the sim itself has a lot potential. Kinda sad.

I almost bought projectors for my pit but then finaly all those 55" screens...big mistake :) This looks all very promising. Curious how this works out for you, Flim!

Its the C!

yes u missed something :) If you didn't get the news letter some month ago then google for it or search the forum. The mustang was the first "flying legends"...there is still a jet in works! Could be beta released tomorrow...or xmas with Nevada. But yes There are tons of thread about this discussion and what the next is, lets not start over again.

And I would buy it only if they include the Minecraft environment textures from BMS ...just kidding, my FAA doctor strictly forbid me to fly BMS because of the consequences to my eye-sight.

wanna bet not? :)

yeah they can be moody :) And extremely lazy too! Sometimes when some little debris are on the runway they just keep everybody from landing or taking off and just bitch around...but nobody walks out and picks it up. :D So ask yourself if you maybe took off without permission the day before or something when they don't answer you.

In my case for ground crew you need to be on intercom OR have the canopy open (a bit is enough) otherwise they wont answer. For ATC issues...just don't use easy coms. There is nothing harder without easy. Use the according radio/mic switch/button to your radio and frq. and it should work. (its probably mic button/switch "down" for your wingman in SP)

:D thats because they have Xray on their TGP and see through buildings! See this thread with tests I made: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=91212