Question Full Scale Racing Sim Rig Software. Student Project

Greetings!
My name is Justin Bush, a Senior Mechanical Engineering Student at Georgia Southern, and we are making a Sim Rig which we plan on having a full size race car, a Sharp Chassis, mounted onto the rig and have the car itself articulate around instead of the normal car/racing seat you see in sim rigs. The sub-team I am on is dealing with the software and we are having a hard decision with which software to use. We have narrowed it down to SimCommander and SimTools/XSim. While SimCommander is mighty hard to find information on, SimTools/XSim seems to be very open. I have a list of questions that I will email, or call, the SimCommander Support line in hope of shedding light on the mystery that is SimCommander.

Questions that we have are simple, like how does SimCommander sense the "bumps/dips/etc." in the game and translate that signal to the acuators/butkickers/etc.? Is it just a straight signal or is it encoded a certain way that we have to calibrate our software for?

We are building a large scale rig to be operated outside, and plan on incorporating "real world effects" such as wind (from fans?), smoke from crashes?(fog machine), and perhaps even dirt & dust, so is it possible to incorporate these machines/motors into the software and have them operate how we want them within the simulator?

Has anyone used SimVibe and is it worth it? does it work with any other software besides SimCommander?

Any input would be much appreciated, and have a good day!

Justin.

P.S. Although we attend the same school and are essentially on the same project, we are on a different team than the team mentioned in the thread started by Joel. We are two competing teams making two different, competing designs.

Simcommander is commercial software meant to go with their product. I don't believe they'll give you any support on a DIY project. Maybe if you purchase actuators from them however I believe it'll still be limited. The community here is amazing and some tools works excellent.

I'm curious about how the project is requested at school. It seems like it wouldn't be enough work for a whole year. I also would've thought that for a school project there would have been a requirement for some type of new or innovating feature. I hope this doesn't sound negative just curiosity about the school program

Hey Piaman!

No worries about that, and thank you for the response. We have a semester (4months) to complete this project, and with debugging and calibration, we really only have around 3 months at the max. If we had this and only this to do during that time, yes it would be done a lot quicker, but we also have other classes/projects (4 more myself) and our jobs so we only get to touch on this project for a limited amount of time per week.

As for the project is concerned, an outside client is the one funding this and this is what they want, so we are going to deliver! Some, if not most, of us on the team have little experience with Sim Rigs so we are learning fast because we have to.

I agree on the community here, only been a part of t for a few hours and have learned a lot from these threads! Thanks again.

Justin

I will take a look at those FAQs, I should've taken a look there already! Thank you @noorbeast ! I think we are leaning towards SimTools as of now and I will check out Game Dash, thanks again!

Justin

So is it one client and twi teams building or is there two separate clients for the end projects. Does the one client commit to both end projects or just the one they like best?

Thanks for responding. I really want to go back to school for something like mechanical engineering but that bloody high school requirment throws me off. Too old to go back and do high school now.

Oh it is never too late @PiaMan ! I believe we are going to have two design ideas and the client will either decide both to be built, or decide on one, and if that is the case we will all come together and finish whichever design is chosen. I will definitely keep the thread updated as will my colleague in the other thread I am sure.

Thanks again.
Justin