Will,
I will keep you posted on both the special effects stuff...... and on the homebrew cockpit developments.
Hey... check out the fighter cockpit that this guy built...... it is at his
http://members.tripod.com/fcsimulator/ address. Pretty realistic looking....plus a hydraulic canopy. ;) He's using the "glass cockpit" idea for some of his gauges in that one.
Just got the FSUIPC and WideFS licences installed and running on the home network correctly, and downloaded some freeware instrumentation stand alone gauge programs (sort of like those from Project Magenta ....but not payware).
They work GREAT so far! This "glass" idea makes some things pretty simple.
So now in testing here, on a separate monitor on another (cheap) 300 Mhz PII PC, I can see any one of a number of complex guages running there. And that gauge shown there meshes precisely in real time with the gauges in the default aircraft showing in FS2004. Appears to be absolutely NO hit on framerates at all.
Just flew most of an instrument approach using ONLY the instruments shown on the OTHER PC screens (not looking at the FS2004 screen at all)........... and it worked great. And that gauge is LARGE.... no more squinting at the regular screen when this is all set up. On the FS2004 screen, the attitude indicator gauge might be 1 1/2" tall...... on the other monitor it is something like 9" tall.
So from the ease of this setup so far with the network and data exchange program...... I can see this happening for real. It will be FAR easier in some aspects than I though initially. And thanks for the keyboard hack idea. I was thinking along those lines already..... but your suggestion helped to keep me on track with it.
best,
.....................john