outside visuals brainstorm

[choffmann]

The outside visualisation is one of the major concerns of us cockpitbuilders with a considerable number of threads in this forum. Reviewing at least the recent threads I feel that there is yet no perfect solution for the alignment problems using the current available software and hardware and combinations thereof (curved screens, TH2G, Sol7, Wideview).
I myself have no experience with any of these visual augmentation devices, but I would like to start this thread to collect your experience and thus finally come to a preliminary "best suitable" solution. Also, I would be interested how the visuals are performed in a commercial Level-D simulator as build e.g. by Thales. With the ACES studio closed down and MS telling us that MSFS will somehow go on, could we expect MS to look further into this problem? What are yor opinions?

Cheers Chris

[Trevor Hale]

It is my opinion that MS will never solve this problem, and I think everyone needs to accept this reality. But I think your best possible solution is SOL7 Hands down.

Trev

[Michael Carter]

I agree. The best solution is not usually affordable by the average sim builder.

No system is going to be perfect, but we're not building $12 million dollar simulators either.

The graphics available for FS are still better than what I've seen in commercial simulators, even though the system to represent them is still not up to the same level as a commercial rig.

[David Withers]

he he.. I've seen Thales sims with three-ten year old projectors running outside visuals in a department of defense environment!.. (i wont delve into it anymore for fear of incrimination or something)...F1-11 sim.

what i mean is...in some cases the big boys are feeding off us. 15million dollar sims have their place but level 4 and 5 sims do also. they are cheap.

i have also seen a level four 737 "type" sim that had all sorts of dramas with its outside visuals. each projector was 50k. each pc was a 16 core cpu!!

the partner in charge of the visuals wrote their own software to zip the three images together. didn't work that well. think they went to matrox. they used fds, phidgets, pm and fsx.

at the end of the day.. i have seen some pro sims with the same visuals we have. there seems to be two categories. projected displays and collimated. one is associated with 15million dollar sims the other with training aids and home sims.

anything that is not a 15 million dollar sim has the same dramas as us. is usually based on pm software and is level 4 or 5 or whatever.


collimated is out of the question for us. the other thing is..we as a whole are making headway in development faster than any one company is.

to answer the question.....matrox+ warping software+ over clocked pc.