Sim Flying /Sim Racing

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IndyWS6

IndyWS6

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Anyone into either? If so, which, and what kind of rig do you have? I built a flying sim rig over Christmas break last year for DCS and MSFS and have spent an embarrassingly little amount of time on it (free time - I can’t find it…). Now I’m waiting for the cockpit (last piece) to build a driving rig for iRacing, etc.
 
Sim racing.

I've been with Gran Turismo since v3 and it still does it for me. Perfect mix of polish, convenience and fun. ACC was a nightmare for me with all the tyre-pressure shenanigans and constant aero and suspension tweaking. I call it pay-to-win - reliably-good tunes need to be bought from 3rd-party vendors such as Coach Dave.

I've still got ACC there for the odd occasion. WRC '23 for rally.

Logitech G Pro. The load cells are great. The build quality is great. The service is great and TrueForce™ is amazing.

My rig's always been a chipboard stand that I drove from a kitchen swivel chair. These days I'm sharing my buddy's rig which is thick tubular steel and MDF with an electric car seat. I supplied the new wheel, wheelbase and load cells.

How 'bout you Brother Indy?
 
Monkey Dude… ACC? School me. I dislike the idea of being forced to buy setups from third-parties to be competitive, but realize it might be required. That can also translate to control configuration maps. Some of the setups are stupidly complex. I miss the old days when you bought a game on CD/DVD, there were no “cheats”, there was a level playing field and it was relatively simple to jump in fly/drive/shoot people. To that end, I’m looking for a Win98 O/S CD to downgrade a capable old dual proc workstation to load a stash of old games I still have. Nostalgia… But I digress. My SIL competes in iRacing (his team was P2 at 24 hours of Daytona last weekend) and my wife bought him a button box for his wheel for Christmas, not knowing he already bought it. Being a nice guy, I said I’d take it - not knowing I’d be spending $2,500+ to build a rig around it ?. Details in subsequent posts…
 
So… This is my flight sim rig. Boeing sim cockpit from Next Level Racing, Logitech X-56 H.O.T.A.S. and accompanying rudder pedals. Wireless keyboard and mouse combo. I have the mounts and gear for additional screens (munitions, targeting, etc), but haven’t gotten to them. Everything connects to an onboard powered USB hub so I can scoot that heavy SOB into place and connect one cable to the PC. I built this for DCS ( which requires a ridiculous amount of control configuration) and MSFS, which has a level of realism that can be taxing… ?
 

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Used to have one that my husband built. The seat came out of a 70s Porsche from the junkyard. I think it was like $20 and mint.
 
These are the components I have so far for the driving sim rig (excluding the keyboard and mouse trays that don’t warrant pictures…). I’m waiting I’m waiting on the cockpit and seat sliders from Advanced Sim Racing. It has a 15+ day delivery timeline because they fabricate to order. Not stating that because it’s exotic (it’s not, it’s $600) but that’s how they do business. I’ll post more when I get to the build. I enjoy that part. Should be fun.,,
 

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IndyWS6 said:
My seats say “Boeing” and “Tony Kanaan”. Porsche would be cooler…
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We had everything from that car including the mounting rail and seatbelt. IIRC we originally had one out of a jaguar but it was uncomfortable to all of us after a while. But heck, you could probably get a power seat with heat if you wanted to get crafty with some 12v.
 
NowYou'rePlayingWithPower said:
We had everything from that car including the mounting rail and seatbelt. IIRC we originally had one out of a jaguar but it was uncomfortable to all of us after a while. But heck, you could probably get a power seat with heat if you wanted to get crafty with some 12v.
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The TK seat is built to be compatible with sim rigs and reclines. The cockpit will come with seat sliders for easy forward/backward entry/exit adjustment. Should work out well. The Boeing seat has a 5-way harness and one is available for the TK seat. I’ll be sitting in a spare bedroom. Seems a little overkill ?
 
The electric seat on my buddy's and my rig allows presets so when drivers swap, one hits a button and... job done.

IndyWS6 said:
Monkey Dude… ACC? School me.
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Assetto Corsa Competizione. It's a GT3 / GT4-only sim.

Sounds are overdone and the physics took a turn for the worse a couple o' years ago. UI is boring and the game environment is sterile (lacks polish and vibe) but it's pretty-good other than that. Oh, and the career mode sucks and there's no decent built-in matchmaking, meaning that most serious users not only buy setups but use a 3rd-party website to organise races and matchmaking.

BTW, you can't just buy a setup for a particular car; you need to buy one for every track you'll drive. That's a lot of setups (total # of cars x total # of tracks).

As I suggested earlier, I'm super-happy with Gran Turismo. The handling and FFB are pretty-damned-good now and navigation and playing overall are fun. Nobody does polish like these guys. You can count the bugs anyone noticed over the past 3 years and 55 updates on one hand (I can only think of 1 right now and it was hilarious - became a meme). Amazing.
 
Monkey Man said:
The electric seat on my buddy's and my rig allows presets so when drivers swap, one hits a button and... job done.


Assetto Corsa Competizione. It's a GT3 / GT4-only sim.

Sounds are overdone and the physics took a turn for the worse a couple o' years ago. UI is boring and the game environment is sterile (lacks polish and vibe) but it's pretty-good other than that. Oh, and the career mode sucks and there's no decent built-in matchmaking, meaning that most serious users not only buy setups but use a 3rd-party website to organise races and matchmaking.

BTW, you can't just buy a setup for a particular car; you need to buy one for every track you'll drive. That's a lot of setups (total # of cars x total # of tracks).

As I suggested earlier, I'm super-happy with Gran Turismo. The handling and FFB are pretty-damned-good now and navigation and playing overall are fun. Nobody does polish like these guys. You can count the bugs anyone noticed over the past 3 years and 55 updates on one hand (I can only think of 1 right now and it was hilarious - became a meme). Amazing.
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Thanks, Monkey-Dude. I’ll have to check it out. The iRacing league looks awesome but demands more time and motivation than I have. Some coworkers race Automobilista weekly and I might pick that up as a starting point. I need to get something or the only thing I’ll be able to do is fire up the configuration software
Doesn’t seem like there’s much interest in sim flying or racing around here. Everyone must be saving their 1’s and 0’s for the Fractal’s and the Kemper’s…
 
Yeah, iRacing, or iWaiting, as Il like to call it, chews up an unnecessarily-large portion of time IMHO.

I think you'll like ACC if you're happy to just race against the AI. The difficulty level is super-granular, offering a 1->100 sliding scale.

I can tell you that even 'though the handling took a turn for the worse post-v1.7-update, IMHO you'll find it better than Automobilista, Race Room, Les Mans Ultimate, Renn Sports and so on.

If you had a PS5 I'd recommend GT7 hands-down, no questions asked.
 
Fun topic. I admit I'm more of a vintage gamer than the new stuff but I do like some modern/current games, especially sports related and racing.

So the funny thing is not long ago I added a simple 360 degree wheel to my setup so I could properly play the old skool racing games like Pole Position, Power Drift, Out Run, etc, they're just so much more fun with the vintage wheel vs an xbox type pad or arcade joystick. Then realizing how fun that was I started looking at "current" race games to see how well the wheel would work with one (if at all) since it was great with the classic stuff. Turns out that wheel is not even compatible let alone feel right with modern games (duh). I say all that because while looking on YT I stumbled across "Automobilista 2" and was pretty blown away with the game and more importantly, the setups some folks were using!

I immediately grabbed the game and a Logitech wheel and holy shit, it's been such a blast!! Seriously, I can't stop playing now! The force feedback and feeling is amazing, I didn't realize how much I've been missing out (first ever "real wheel" and pedal rig for me), it blows away using a simple gamepad. I'm not a fanatic tho lol, not yet, I mean I've seen clips of dudes using special seats, wearing racing gloves, VR gear and even have fans blowing on them to increase the realism lol - that's all cool but for me, at least now, just adding the pedals and FFB wheel has me enjoying the hell out of racing games, totally hooked...seriously, I haven't touched a guitar since I got the wheel haha.

As foor flying sims, I used to really be into those back when they were huge, thinking the early 2k's when you could easily of had 3 or 4 nice WWII combat games installed on your PC....that genre seems to be extinct now sadly, the last decent WWII combat game I played was IL2 Sturmovik, etc. Feels like we're WAY overdo for a new one (and I'd be all in).

First shot is with the 360 wheel for the old games, the others are for when it's time to get serious lol

Battle-Station.jpg


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Racing-Setup.jpg
 
Nice setup and cool arcade vibe I like it ?.

I built a driving rig for Xbox/Windows last winter with the Logitech G923 wheel and pedal set (got a free shifter with the package…). Very similar to yours. (Not sure why the picture rotated 90 degrees). I’ve used it maybe twice. For the new rig, I wanted a little higher quality. Not that I need it or can justify it. I really need to find time to play with the toys or quit building them ?.


“Back in the day” I enjoyed PC games, too. I suck at console controllers, but was pretty good with mouse and keyboard. Quake, Doom, etc., but I was addicted to flight games. I had the original MSFS, all of the Jane’s series (“US Navy Fighters, etc.) and flew them with the old school F16 flight stick and throttle setup (long before the ease of USB). Can’t think of the brand name…
 

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Nice vibe there @Crunchity :rock:

My "back in the day" story is simple:
I loved the arcade games of the late '70s through the '80s.

Played nothing since then until I stumbled upon Gran Turismo 3 (1999?). Since then I've only played MAME occasionally for the '80s hit and Gran Turismo, with a little bit of WRC & ACC thrown in, but yeah, 99% GT.

Somehow I skipped all the RPG's and whatnot and have only bought Playstations for Gran Turismo. :dunno:
 
Was hoping to start assembly today, but… Two of four boxes for the cockpit (last item) were delivered Thursday but UPS listed the other two as having an exception clearing customs coming from Canada. Now scheduled for delivery on Monday. Maybe next weekend…
 
Ignore the riff-raff, it’s a spare bedroom and needs a little organization, but I finally found some time for assembly. Ready to fire if up and make sure the control software “sees” all of the hardware devices…
 

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Monkey Man said:
Nice bro'! :cheers:

Good gear and cable management.
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Thanks, man. Cable management is my jam. I’ve built (literally) 3 data centers and pulled, dressed and terminated tens of thousands of feet of Cat 5/6, 208V 3P to rack UPS’s, etc. I don’t have the tools and material to cut and terminate USB cables to length, so some of the routing is best available. OCD will force me to re-do a few things, but it’s a decent start..,
 
IndyWS6 said:
OCD will force me to re-do a few things
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I actually suspected this. :LOL:

Still, even if you never get around to going that last few percent, it looks very-decent overall IMHO and nothing to be sneezed at.
 
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