hello

[camelpipe]

hello everybody new to this and need all the advise I can get.
Christmas just gone I received a 1 hour flight sim instruction from my wife as a present and now I am completely hooked on it.
could someone tell me how to get started and how to build a flight sim myself.

[RayS]

Welcome to the dark side! (We have the good cookies here...)

Perhaps the best place to start is here: http://www.mikesflightdeck.com/mfdb/brfs/brfs.html

Even though the book is relatively outdated as far as what technologies are out there for the sim builder, a lot of the basic concepts and narrative still ring true today.

Many sim builders have gone before you, learning the difficult and sometimes expensive lessons, so you have the luxury of experience on this site.

From this point forward, opinions start to diverge on how best to start the project. My own personal opinion is to start building from the inside-out. Meaning build something that you can fly right away. A stick, rudders, throttles. I've discovered that the more time you spend building, the less interest in flying you might have as the building part can get tedious at times.

[xplanematt]

Hi new guy, welcome aboard! You are in luck, there are 10 easy steps to building a flight sim:

Step 1: Build a nice PC and install X-Plane ( http://x-plane.com )

Step 2: Buy some microcontrollers and many wires

Step 3: Spend months on the flight sim and microcontroller/electronics websites

Step 4: Mix the microcontrollers and wires until smoke does not come out

Step 5: Find a dead airplane and chop its nose off, trailer it to your garage/basement/living room/driveway/neighbor's yard

Step 6: Stick the now non-smoking assemblage of microcontrollers and wires in the airplane nose

Step 7: Mount that new X-Plane PC in the back of the airplane nose

Step 8: Thank your wife for putting up with your insanity, reminding her that it was the Christmas gift she gave you that started it all in the first place

Step 9: Fly a lot, and invite your friends over so they can fly too

Step 10: MUWHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!

Now, if you've made it this far without getting angry at me, I do have some REAL advice. Do check out the link Ray provided, it's got a lot of good info. Do put together a good flight sim computer (whatever rig you have now may be entirely sufficient, for that matter), buy a good yoke and rudder pedals, load one of the popular sims like X-Plane, Microsoft Flight Sim X, Prepar3d, etc, and spend some time flying and learning the software. From there you can add little by little as you learn. At that point, the most important step would be to figure out what YOU want and have the resources for. Do you want an airline cockpit, fighter style, or general aviation, or even a helicopter? Do you want motion? Will the sim be type-specific, or will it be a general sim for several different types of planes? How much space do you have? What sort of tools do you have access to?

Once you've established some initial goals, browse flight sim forums to find people doing similar things. This website is a great resource, but there are others as well. In my case, for instance, one of my first steps (after having just the computer and sim software for several years) was to build a very simple control box with throttle controls and some switches. I then made my own joystick using an old computer case. Later, I bought a real aircraft instrument off ebay and modified it with RC servos. This morphed into writing my own instrument panel software and drawing it to a monitor that was mounted to the back of a metal instrument panel. After that, something-or-other happened and I now have the nose of a retired business jet in my garage............don't worry, you can stop the addiction before it gets that bad if you really want to.

Matt

[camelpipe]

Thanks guys just ordered XPlane 10 and a Saitek Cessna Licensed Pro Flight Yoke System.
will let you know how I get on but again thanks for the advise and will check out mikesflightdeck.

[RayS]

...don't worry, you can stop the addiction before it gets that bad if you really want to.

Matt

Hehehehe "I can stop anytime I want!"

...sure you can, Ray... Sure you can.............

[RayS]

Thanks guys just ordered XPlane 10 and a Saitek Cessna Licensed Pro Flight Yoke System.
will let you know how I get on but again thanks for the advise and will check out mikesflightdeck.

Others may disagree, but I think it was a good choice going with X-Plane. X-Plane relies heavily on the graphics sub-system (GPU-Bound) over FSX/P3D which is CPU bound. If you really want to get great frame rates, X-Plane is the way to go. Plus if you ever decide to go with a curved screen, expanding your field of view in X-Plane doesn't give you that weird stretching effect at the sides like FSX/P3D does.