£36k
For that money I could just go and buy a small plane.
Flight-sim enthusiasts often spend fortunes building mock-up cockpits in their homes. But who needs to construct anything when you could simply buy one of these badass bubbles? The OVO-4 Home Flight Simulator might sting the wallet - and then some - but it is, it's claimed, a fully enclosed flight simultator that moves and a …
["Small plane" indeed, it's going to be a ULM not a fixed-wing one there. Or a canvas-on-wood glider. With a traffic jam, daylight hours, and horrible weather to further restrict your enjoyment. On balance, a simulator makes sense.]
Bastards! This I can just drop into the attic and play, costing only fractionally more than putting an extension in (and without all the headaches of planning permission, neighbourly consent and works disruption while working at home).
Choices, choices; and the missus to convince.
Aces studio closed in 2009, but in 2010 a new version was announced:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight
and
http://www.microsoft.com/games/flight/
Now, It's anyone's guess in how far this is vaporware just to destroy the new flight sim studio founded by some of the ACES people.
A few corrections first:
@0laf: 36k for a plane? At best it will be a 1970's Cessna 172 with about a week's worth of remaining airframe life.
@Bronek: Yes, MS abandoned the Flight Simulator. However, all FS's are just game engines to drive third party applications like custom airframe models, sceneries, AI traffic etc. As an underlying engine it's great and its support for up to 64 CPU's and 64-bit memory will see it being useful for a good few years yet. FS9 launched in 2004 and wasn't really playable until 2007 due to hardware demands.
@JDX: The requirements are trivial nowadays and most probably met even by run of the mill dells. The thing with FSX is RAM, CPU speed and storage throughput. GPU's don't really contribute to much of anything.
Very cool set up indeed. And for those that think the 36K is preposterous (well, it IS) note that enthusiasts can spend more than half as much just putting together silly wooden models and stack tower boxes side-by-side. A fully implemented, turnkey solution could well be worth it to them, especially if you account for the endless manhours most of them devote to their models.
And no match for the cost of a real sim. (Current costs @~£500 per hour).
My only gripe (and probably any serious enthusiast's too) is that the cockpit is set up very meagrely
for a Cessna variant instead of having a full blown 4-throttle stack and integrated Flight Management Computer. So this would restrict users to flying on the "small-fry" instead of the big beasts.