On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 20:23, Curtis L. Olson wrote: > This is why all those oddball home/hobby cockpit builders aren't as far > off their rockers as it might first appear. They are taking a huge step > towards a more realistic simulation environment.
Dead right. I'd never knock them - more like admire their enthusiasm. And as you say, an open source sim like FlightGear is much more likely to be able to interface to all these home-made instruments. > And I'm sure all these > people have spouses who understand the importance of a realistic flying > experience. > Yeah, right! :-) > having the flight model right exactly on, is less > important than having a full scale cockpit with controls that have the > right amount of force feedback at the right times. An enclosure is a > huge addition... Not sure about whether FlightGear currently allows for force feedback, but of course, if anyone's flight sim could do it, FlightGear could. Does FlightGear provide output data that would allow you to tip a cockpit on hydraulic rams (or any other system) to try and model changing G forces for the pilot? I've mentioned the possibility in other mails on this thread for a revamped future FlightGear instrument model to cater for separate windows (maybe on other display heads of course) which would help implement fascias using LCD panels behind cutouts. I'd have thought that the cockpit-builder types would be clamouring for such an addition, yet no-one's apparently all that enthusiastic. Do the current crop of cockpit builders happen to use real simulated physical instruments wired to USB or something? I read elsewhere that the 747 guys were simulating a glass cockpit, so maybe they didn't have any "physical instrument" scenarios to cope with. Hasn't anyone tried a cockpit-build for a WWII plane with FlightGear yet? Steve. BTW, nearly unrelated - one of the Discovery channels in the UK recently ran a documentary on recreating the Dambusters raid on the Ruhr in 1943. They had a (rather crude looking) mockup of a Lancaster bomber and a crew of modern RAF types who tried to simulate reproducing the raid. Whose flightsim was that? Unlikely to be FlightGear, unless the TV people commissioned their own Lancaster FDM. Did anyone apart from me see it? It looked like the instruments panel for the Lancaster was simulated with the old "lcd panel behind holes cut in plywood" trick. Actually, I'm not even sure they bothered with the plywood. They certainly didn't appear to bother with putting a skin on the fuselage of the fake plane - they just ran it in a darkened warehouse. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
