The modular FPS/flight/racing sim pit.

I haven't been doing a whole lot of DCS lately. I am hoping that we get edge and great rift support will have me back soon.

A while ago when I downsized everything for the rift it gave me a lot of room spare in that area. I couldn't move my racing rig down there because of the triple screen taking up a bit to much room to have them side by side. Well, my rift turned up a while back and I tried racing with it. I have not raced triple screens since then. While flying is good, racing at this stage is awesome. Many of the issues of the rifts resolution in a combat sim are not issues for racing where most of the important stuff is reasonably close where resolution is good because the object sizes are large.

So I managed to make the wife happy and move my racing rig downstairs in to my little room. I just had to tidy up the room. Not there completely, got to put up something for the curtains. Silver/grey blinds I think and do the res of the walls. Got some flooring from the engineering supply shop and put it all in.

What I have been working on in the last few weeks is a FFB steering wheel for the racing sim. It is based off an industrial servo and finally lets me race in game with the same forces at the wheel that the real cars have. On some of those cars those forces are large. First day driving I felt OK, next day when I drove I could feel the muscles I was using the day before. This is nothing like the wheels from fanatec, thrust master, logitec. This is so fast and has so much force.

It's not like you just put the force up to 100 on the others, this will replicate from the smallest to the largest force as it would be in the car, it's not just artificially inflating all forces to feel heavy.

The enclosure I am building for the electronics.

Monitor setup

May I ask how you manage to only render on half of the second and third monitor? I don't think I can do that with Nvidia Surround. My 3x24" monitor setup is a bit to wide for my liking.

Looks like I am pulling my thread back from the dead.

Hard to believe that it as nine years ago I started the thread. It's interesting looking back on it how I started with something that let me do racing and flying, to pretty much just flying and for a while, just racing. Now I am going full circle back to racing and flying.

For some time I had moved away from the idea of one rig does both and I had both rigs. It was really the only way to do it. With one rig if it was set up for racing it could stay that way for a long time because of the hassle to change to flying and vice versa.

Now I just have one and for a while it's been mostly racing as flying was a bit of a compromise. I used the racing pedals for rudder pedals (no toe brakes). Works ok but not ideal.

A while ago I made the SFX motion platform and figured if I wanted to do racing and flying it would have to be on a single rig using motion for both. Back to figuring out how to make the change quickly. I have got it down to under a minute. Even I am not that lazy to let that be an impediment to swapping when I want to fly instead of race! :)

So now my rig is very different to anything it has been in the past and a very happy VR user. Things I use for racing I can use for flying and vice versa.

The warthog throttle is a great VR button box when racing, I have a number of things mapped to it and being hotas, no need to look for the button in VR. Also when flying I can keep the formula wheel rim attached. The joystick _nearly_, but doesnt touch the wheel when in use so I can still use the rim. As well as having a lot of buttons it has 6 rotaries on it so a lot can be mapped in aircraft like dimming lights, freq tuning etc. I don't keep the stick attached when racing.

I bought four buttkicker LFE mini's some time ago for racing and I am finding them really good in DCS as well. Thanks to sim aviator software I get to use them and they complement the motion very well giving me effects I cant get through motion but add to the experience. Motion is very good in DCS, you dont need a lot in VR to give you cues that you are moving. As well as your standard feeeling coming from pitch, yaw and roll the other effects that come through the motion are great, gun fire, stalls, feeling when you are getting outside the flight envelope. Landing on the carrier and feeling the motion dip and the active seatbelt pull you hard in to the seat are all very cool. The active seatbelt I added after doing the motion. It tightens or loosens the seatbelt depending on acceleration or deceleration for racing but for flying could be for other things, i.e. if upside down and g's are letting you fall out of your seat.

The fans I use for racing and flying, mostly just set at a level to keep cool in VR. often the fans will be running faster by the time i am finished than when I start, it can get warm in VR.

My stick has had a quick method to attach for a while but not my pedals, so my rudder pedals have not been attached for years. It was only in the last couple days I decided to do something about it. On my 8020 rig everything is bolted down so a number of bolts are required to be undone, re-positioned with rudders and done up again. So it never happened. Have now come up with using the quick release handle levers and making plates for the rudder and racing pedals. Now it only takes a short time to swap them out. Undo 4 levers , slide two out of the way and lift pedals then replace with others.

You don't seem to see too many 8020 rigs for flight but they are very easy to attach things and move things. Right now I am pretty content with how it is. Only new thing on the horizon is a reverb G2. Looking forward to seeing what DCS might look like in that resolution.

Here are a couple pics as it is now and a video with really bad lighting on how I swap from racing to flying in no time.

This is AWESOME!!!

I'm trying to do something a bit like this myself, not nearly as fancy, but just enough to have basic functionality. Racing now has it's own rig, wasn't the original idea but when I saw a used unit at a very fair price I jumped. Have the fighter setup going, intending to get a Foxx mount today. And aiming to set up something that will do helicopters too, collective and a non-spring cyclic.

Been trying to find 80/20 locally, seems a bust right now. I know wood is a good option... but it's very heavy for next time I have to move residences. And somewhat prone to breakage. Welded steel tubing, powdercoated local shop, seems a good choice.

I think it's important for people to buy or design units that can be easily disassembled for residential moving... because if it doesn't easily go through doors, it may be left behind. Sure, all kits can easily fit through a doorway, after all it's almost always flat-packed in a box from Asia... but I'm talking "8 bolts out and now I can carry each piece fairly easy", up and down flights of stairs, with tight 90 degree turns.

Another reason why I'm sorta making a "half-pit" is that... finding a chair... got very sucky very fast. Stores I went to for ordinary desk and gaming chairs... NOT ONE felt like it would be comfortable after 45 minutes. I suspected that all of them would be punishingly bad after 3 hours. At least, they didn't seem nearly as good as they ought to have been. Thinking of making my own chair setup. I think a major key will be the foam... how thick, how stiff or soft it is. Sure, the shape will also matter, but the foam will make or break it, so that will be where I experiment, I think.