Help wanted building a 14 screen Professional Flight Simulator

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

We are constructing a professional flight simulator with the use of 14 screens and a decommissioned Huey.

This is going to be a very big mission so all suggestions on this set up are very welcome and are very must requested!!!

 

here is what we have to date.

1 x Bell 205 helicopter (yes a real helicopter) Decommissioned

4 x 48 inch LED TV's

6 x 32 inch LED TV's

2 x small computer monitors (two more to come)

Asrock server motherboard

Dual Xeon 2 gig(2.5 on turbo) CPU's total 12 core 24 thread

64 gig ram

250 gig SSD Hard Drive

3 x Radeon R9 270x graphics cards (yes having issues with DVI to HDMI adapters)

1 x Radeon R9 270 graphic card

5 x 500 watt power supplies for computer system.

 

We also have the following

hanger space at police

helicopter technicians both mechanical and electrical

Tools (lots!!)

Computer geeks

Budget, we do have one of these but it is not big!!

 

So come on guys please post so feed back on putting DCS on this system.

how can we do it and what would you expect?

 

Really looking forward to the input from all and everyone

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

We have built a micro sim in the past we had the computer/helicopter integration to the point where flight controls were working along with most of the engine start using the helicopters original electrical system, but had to stop the build as the hanger floor was being resurfaced, now it has finished we have a lot more computing power and a lot more screens, time to go big!!!

The helicopter will be hard wired to USB this will allow for flight control sensing and original helicopter switches to be used

you can check out the build in progress on our FB page

http://www.facebook.com/flightreplicator

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

The Micro Sim was a proof of concept that the PC Flight Sim Games can have real world value in the professional world, in the past we have been working with FSX now with other clients interested we need to look at a more combat styled program.

 

I have never played with DCS so have only the basic idea of the platform.

 

Please remember that a commercial flight sim cost in the range of $3 million USD, if you dont have that budget then you have to send your poilots to the simulator incuring another massive cost.

This means that good training is cost prohibitive, so we have a plan to take the simulator to the pilots with a digital based system that is a fraction of the cost of a commercial flight sim.

 

The experience that so many of you have I would like it to be used in building this training platform so that cost effective training can be available for people that cant afford to purchase a commercial simulator.

No FAA or CAA needed as this is military, we dont play by civilian rules!

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

here is a vid of the micro sim it was a proof of concept that you can connect a game to a helicopter!

putting youtube on here was a failure

 

here is the link

 

Edited October 29, 2014 by Thai Police Flight Sim

[Flagrum]

For specific details I am sure, the DCS community will help gladly. But I would contact Eagle Dynamics (DCS) and/or Belsimtek (Huey module) directly for this. Maybe they are interested in supporting your project in one or the other way - perhaps in ways even the community can not really provide.

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

many thanks for the reply.

I sent the email before registering on this forum, started with a ticket got an answer very prompt with an email address, so wrote an email over the morning coffee.

 

The next stage was to post on the forum, although I do wonder have I posted this in the wrong area?? I scrolled down and noticed general discussion and now think it may be wrong.

 

Admin could you please slot this onto the correct area if incorrect.

[One1way]

Looks like you guys have a nice project to work on!

This might be something you might consider?

 

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=122853

 

Sell the TVs and computer screens, and get little money back.

Would guess that it's easier and better then 14 screens and tvs?

Good luck and look forward to to seeing more of your build!

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

Hi Wilcox

the screens we are using now are for testing whilst we wait for the price of curved TV's to come down, I dont like the projector style as this is very restrictive.

I have just come back from Singapore after having an engineering tour of Eurocopters flight simulators, both the static and dynamic sims, both of these units run projectors, both have pour graphics.

The goal is to have monitors at all visual points, with a projector system you can put a screen at your feet and you cant put one above your head.

The screen at your feet is important and most commercial sims do not have this, the result is that auto rotation cannot be done well, as you flair the aircraft you can no longer see the landing point with projectors.

no way can a projector beat the definition from a LED.

I note that the cost of the wrap around screen was $1,700 add to that projectors and it is very expensive, 4 x 48 inch LED and 6 x 32 inch LED the purchase of those ten units was about $900 usd new, a lot cheaper than projectors! Welcome to Asia, electronics are cheap here!

Projectors are old school in my books and are very limiting, best to use today's technology so that the sim can deal with tomorrows programs.

But thanks for that suggestion please keep them coming!

[Flagrum]

... I do wonder have I posted this in the wrong area?? I scrolled down and noticed general discussion and now think it may be wrong.

 

The sub-forum where you initially posted was the "General Discussion" for the old Lock-On 1 and 2 sims. Now you thread was moved to the "Home Cockpit" sub-forum where it fits now perfectly. Many people here try to build a replica of the cockpit of their favourite DCS aircraft. Some with rather limited ressources - time- and money-wise, some with more. If you look around here, I am sure you will find many projects, tips and tricks that might help you with your own project - or at least give you some pointers to where to dig into deeper.

 

Good luck! :o)

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

yes I have been looking about the place and see some fantastic things.

over the next two weeks we will be making some leaps and bounds on a physical level, so I will be able to post pictures of the build.

As of this moment in time I have not started the frame for the TV's, that will be next week, the goal is to have a frame that wraps a huey in full HD, this frame will be on wheels, allowing it to be unplugged and moved over to another airframe and plugged back in, meaning changing from a 205 to 412 then over to a 206 can all be done in just a couple of minutes.

This is designed to be the universal sim, the frame will evolve over time to be a unit that flat packs for ease of transport, the computer will have its own refrigeration system to allow it to run on a hanger floor as opposed to a air conditioned room, reducing cost further.

 

you can see the micro sim we played with as a proof of concept on our fB page.

www.facebook.com/FlightReplicator

 

So what happens when you take an old Huey on the hanger floor and plug in DCS with a total of 14 monitors and 2 - 3 tablets for pilot graphics, switches hard wired (Dashboard done with monitors) and two screens for the Flight Sim Manager all of that connected up to a server running as a PC??????

we think the effect might be a little breath taking!

So we went out and purchased everything last week, TVs, computer, the lot!

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

This is a team sport, not a one man show!!!

 

I have a fantastic team!

We have a Helicopter Maintenance Department assisting us, we have FAA cert teams of electrical and mechanical helicopter mechanics. I cant steal them full time but then can assist when needed.

We have a computer specialist that is full time on the project.

We have one hydraulic/mechanical/electrical/refrigeration engineer full time. (myself)

We have one very stable investor.

 

We have a simple agreement with the police, we will build and test our simulator at their hanger (where I work on huey hydraulics) using a decommissioned huey, in return when complete I will rent it to them cheap so that they can increase training and reduce damage.

 

After all this simulator with the amount of visual input will allow for simulated auto rotation like no other sim can do!

 

This unit will also run the original flight controls in place to the point where they join the swash plate at the main rotor. after that it gets simple, more later on that.

I will use the hydraulic system on the huey and run it from a 3 phase electric hydraulic power pack on the floor. this will allow for better feeling on the flight controls.

yes that last part is all about a REAL helicopter, not a sim!

yes power up the hydraulics on the helicopter to give the correct feeling. It is what I do in life, hydraulic test stands and hydraulic overhauls for flight components.

 

trust me when I say there is some neat stuff about to happen!

[FSFIan]

I don't know what you are already familiar with from reading the forums and contacting ED / Belsimtek, so the following may not be news to you. Anyway, here are a few pointers on where to get started.

 

You will need to get each monitor to display its view of the 3D world. Take a look at the Config\MonitorSetup folder in your DCS World installation directory (you can probably start with modifying 3Cameras.lua).

 

To connect your real-world cockpit to DCS, you will need to wire all that stuff up to microcontrollers. This should be no problem for you given that you have an ample supply of maintenance personnel and computer geeks.

 

Then you need to get this talking to DCS. DCS: World provides a mechanism to run your own Lua script inside the simulation environment (Export.lua). This script can read and manipulate the cockpit state. Finding the correct argument numbers to read and the device IDs and command numbers requires reading through the Lua scripts for your module's cockpit (Mods\aircraft\Uh-1H\Cockpit\Scripts, especially devices.lua, clickabledata.lua and mainpanel_init.lua) and a little experimentation and guesswork. Note that the comments in devices.lua for the UH-1H do not always match up with the actual numbers (for example, there's a jump from 4 to 6 in the comments after HYDRO_SYS_INTERFACE).

For a starting point, take a look at my work-in-progress DCS-BIOS project, which supports most of the Huey controls (everything except the analog gauges should be there).

Edited October 30, 2014 by [FSF]Ian

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

the budget for the computer system and the screen system is $9,000 usd, but in reality most things here in Thailand are cheap so that will mean our purchase budget would be more along the lines of $18,000 USD if built in USA. that is parts and materials NOT labor costs. we are a group of professionals building the thing and labor is free at this point.

[Rangi]

Then your going to need a Thailand map. If you can pay to have one commissioned you may be able to recoup cost by selling it to the community. You will have to wait until the new EDGE rendering engine is out (due end of 2014) and see if ED release the map building tools.

[Boltz]

I think you really need to get those 14 monitors plugged in and DCS World installed first. I don't know much about servers but DCSW is one hungry beast when it comes to performance. My worry is that one PC will not be able to run 14 screens with a decent frame rate, since you will be renting to the police for training then this needs to be realistic and about a stable 60fps.

 

What resolution will you be running each screen at? You said full HD earlier. That's 1920x1080 and 14 screens of it: 29,030,400 pixels. A 4k resolution screen has 8294400 pixels and rather than rendering a single viewport like you would with a 4k screen you are going to need to render 14 of them.

 

All I can recommend now is that you get DCSW running on all screens with a separate viewport on each and take the Huey for a spin. Check your fps and decide if it is playable. This is the reason people tend to use projectors for a large setup rather than cladding the walls in screens. the resolution might be amazing but at huge expense in both PC hardware and game performance.

 

Boltz

[Tumbleweed]

I have nothing technical to add but I just wanted to wish you guys luck with this. Sounds like it's going to be amazing when it's finished. :thumbup:

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

ok frame rate will be the issue I agree, this is going to be greatly affected by heat!

we are starting with 2 x Xeon CPUs running at a full time turbo of 2.5gig, these units each have 6 cores and 12 strings giving us a total of 12 core 24 strings, this is plumbed into 64 gig of ram.

It is jumping out to 4 x Radeon R9 270X graphics cards.

DCS on one screen hardly uses this system, FS2004 running on one screen uses 3% cpu and 4.37 gig ram.

This is going to go a stage further when we have the system running, it will be submerged in oil that has a refrigeration system to drop the temp down to about -40 C ( - 40F) when idle with a desired running temp of - 20 C ( -4F) this way we can run it on any hanger floor in the world without overheating problems, it also gives a thermal buffer in case of a failure, it will take time to heat the oil giving you time to save and shut down.

All systems will be submerged including graphics cards and power supplies along with motherboard.

The graphics processors put out an amazing amount of heat so heat management is very important to holding a constant frame rate.

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

where the fun will begin will be the software set up on the system, how to make all the screens work. I feel we will be ok on the hardware side of things, if need be we can increase specs with some overclocking and push the system up to nearly 3 gig on the cpu's with no problems with overheating, if 24 cores at 3 gig super cooled is not enough then we will get bigger processors.

If the ram is not enough then we will add another 64 gig and see what it says.

this mother board can handle up to 512 gig ram and 20 hard drives we can expand this system to what is needed.

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

this system was designed to be expandable, as no one really builds things this big as a rule so I expect to come across many problems over the coming months, hence leaving ourselves options for computer expansion. the interesting point is that we are building this to be professional system, that means we will do what it takes to do it professionally, time is not an issue, quality is.

As we are not building this as an order from a client, we set the time line not a client, so the engineers on the floor are the ones that control the project.

What we need we can get. as long as we are making good progress then our investor is happy. as long as we are making progress out partners are happy (police)

This has been set up for pure engineering without the crap of politics and major time lines, we have goals and they are hard and fast, but they are only timeline goals set by us not a client.

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

as this is a server board it is set up to move data, that means with more than one flight sim they will be able to interact, an instructor with a good laptop will be able to log in with VR glasses and head movement software and be in the co-pilots seat from anywhere in the world.

The goal is to reduce the cost of training if you dont have to fly the instructor out and put them up in a hotel then you are saving big money, if you can run it like a standard class over weeks of training then you get better memory retention.

There are some fantastic options!!!

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

FAA approval

Dont need it, I dont deal with civilian companies, this is for the military and they dont come under FAA rules.

the military are self governing, if the Air Force loose a plane the Air Force investigate not the FAA!

the FAA does not give approval on F22 flight simulators :-)

[aeliusg]

The reason you are getting such low usage is because DCS is limited by the clock speed of a single core. Don't expect performance to scale linearly if at all with the addition of further cores. With such a prodigious rendering scheme, you will be limited by DCS's outdated engine's ability to push geometry and such to your GPUs through that single thread bottleneck even more than the GPU's ability to render such a scene.

 

AFAIK DCS has no multiple PC rendering capability a la FSX or Prepar3d.

[BHawthorne]

If you want assistance on the screen and multi-projection I can help. I also can put you into contact with management at Immersaview. Immersaview SimVisuals or Warp might be an option or if you want something simpler, Nthusim Plus would work for exterior visuals.

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

Please please please, the more brains on this the better!!

[Thai Police Flight Sim]

the only way we can make this work is with a collective group of people spanning a wide range of industries, so anyone interested in working with this system is welcome, call it a form of crowd funding on an intellectual level.