What you see is a glorified DIY joystick controller with a LCD ('MFD') and plenty of RGB inspired by a VF-1 (Block 6) Valkyrie of the Macross franchise.
I use it mainly to play Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, X4: Foundations and plenty of other Space Pew Pew.
It's mobile and can be stashed easily because my battlestation is, unlike most gaming rigs, also my workstation and has to move a lot. It's also frequently occupied by my kids who also love clicky buttons and compete with me for stick time :D
It's completely DIY and made on a budget (no really). It's also Work In Progress, like probably any home cockpit out there.
For the PC it's just a joystick and an additional display. The magic starts to happen when I manage to interface with the games to display live game data and adjust the blinken lights depending on the current ship telemetry.
Am I crazy? Yes, probably. It's a hobby and when Corona happened indoor hobbies became kinda a thing again 🤓
Edith says: Should have added this from the beginning: I do foster a project website that has additional details, pictures and videos: 🌐 https://SimPit.dev (yes it's slow - hold the line :P)
Videos are usually mirrored to 📹 https://tube.tchncs.de/a/bekopharm or 📹 https://www.youtube.com/@BekoPharm (pick your poison).
Additional content may be found on 🌐 https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/ or on ☠️ https://hackaday.io/bekopharm
Ha, that's fucking awesome. Also probably the only way to make E:D actually fun to play 😅 I put in about 100h before I got tired of how shallow it ultimately is
Not going to defend ED but this type of game is usually more about the journey especially with friends. Yes, the grind is unreal and also nothing for me which is why I almost completely ignored engineering so far. I do enjoy other parts of the game though.
100h? My would you look at my SC playing time: just 57h and half of that is walking back to the spaceport xD
Unfortunately I have no friends because I'm a bit of a twat, and while I get your point about the journey – it's pretty much what I enjoyed for that 100h – it didn't manage to carry me too far.
Notably for the vast majority of that 100h (probably closer to 200–300h tbh, since I also played on PS4 when that was a thing) I explored; I absolutely loved the "magnificent desolation" of being out in the Black, and the slowness of explorer gameplay compared to the pew pew "careers." I just wished there'd been more variation to the planets and the life you could find on them, more variation to Guardian ruins, and so on, and so it started feeling like I'm just seeing the same half-dozen planets and plants over and over, and it started feeling like a grind in itself. Tried my hand at some of the other career options but nothing really did it for me as much as exploration had, and I eventually sort of drifted away from the game. Never did much engineering to speak either beyond some easy to get FSD things and grind discoveries for a while so I could get a better ship (a lot of this was before the huge bump in exploration payouts so it really was a grind 😅).
SC – or more likely their single player game, Squadron whatever – seems like I'd enjoy it, at least conceptually. Lessee if they manage to release Squadron, I might give it a whirl if it'll run even passably on a Steam Deck (my only gaming device for the foreseeable future, although that might not be a relevant horizon when it comes to that game getting released).
I personally burnt out after only 70 hours of in-game time, the way they kept releasing patches and DLC that added more and more levels of grind onto the game finally ended up absolutely killing all my enjoyment of the game.
Yeah Frontier really dropped the ball with game design for E:D, the ratio of grind to content is just ridiculous.
I mean it's definitely a fun game for a while and it gives space a sense of scale like nothing else, but everybody I personally know who's tried it has ended up exactly where you and I did. It's a mile wide and an inch deep, and sooner or later folks realize they're just doing the same mission, seeing the same planets, visiting the same Guardian ruins, seeing the same spaceports, again and again.
The planetary procedural generation is somehow especially disappointing. While, yes, they're all unique in a mathematical sense and the fact that it's a 1:1 simulation of our galaxy based on real astrophysics is extremely cool, once you've seen one icy lump you've seen them all; the variety of planets you can actually land on is very small, they're all barren and have no weather, no oceans or anything like that, just rock or ice. And if you're playing as an explorer the "alien life" you can scan is limited to a handful of plants that all look identical except for some minor color variation. So the fact that the topography of this particular icy lump is different from that other icy lump is lost when that's the only thing that distinguishes them
I got bored of Elite Dangerous when I remembered I don't like trucking simulators.
Anyway, No Man's Sky is more fun.
Heh, personally I enjoyed the space trucking in E:D and don't like NMS all that much. E:D's more realistic aspects like the physically modeled solar systems and their ridiculous distances, let alone the distances between stars etc etc are what drew me to it and what make NMS a bit meh for me.
A combination of NMS and E:D that's closer to E:D, with the possibility of sufficient amounts of space trucking and wandering around planets gawking at the scenery is what I'd need 😁