3DoF Project with electric actuators/cylinders

Hello there !

Since this is my first post here I will try to quickly explain the story and why I'm here. (I'm french so I should start with an apology if my english is not perfect..).
​

It's been a couple months since I bought my wheel (T300) and the Oculus Rift. Several weeks ago, I invited my uncle (who is a "diy" man) to play some race simulation with my wheel and the Oculus. He got a little sick and had to stop playing while I never had motion sickness problems.

Afterward he told me that he wanted to start a project, that we could do together, to build a motion simulator using a sport car seat or a computer seat, mounted on some sort of "arm" on the center of the seat, and then 4 electric actuators (or cylinder, I'm not sure about the translation, but it's those things used to open/close the gates, for example, but in a faster version) at the 4 corners with some "U" at the end so they can move without tearing the seat apart. Also we will use an arduino and a shield (or more, I don't know yet) to control the motors.

Well he told me that he took care of the "assembly part" and that I had to take care of the software part. So I began to do some research and ended up on Xsimulator and Simtools.

Now, that being said (congrats and thank you if you managed to read till this point), I downloaded Simtools GameEngine and GameManager to begin with. But I'm kind of lost with them. I got the impression that you need the plugin of the actual game to make it work (I'm playing mostly with Assetto Corsa & PC2). We want to make sure with a voltmeter that on the output of the montage we will have relevant values before we buy the actuators/cylinders, the seat, etc.

Since I'm a total noob in this world, I want to know if this project is even doable, also, if I understood it correctly it's a 3DOF (pitch, roll and "up&down" I guess ?)

Thank's for your help and if you can give me some ideas or trails about the software part I would be grateful. And in any way thank's for reading.

Thank you for all these links, this is very good to start with, perfect !

Here are some news about the project. The Arduino kit is bought and I started testing the softwares.

At the moment I'm OK with the game connecting to SimTools, tried setting Roll and Pitch movements like it was a 2DOF and wanted to try out the 2DOF Virtual Sim (credits to perdixero) but I can't manage to make it work, the virtual sim seems connected because there's something written in "Data recieved" but the axis don't move at all, stuck on "127" values, I must be missing something..? I configured the Interface settings, network type, with the local IP and all, the game (LFS for the moment) is connected to the software.

Also, I'm a beginner in Arduinos but the "motors" we will be using are 2 wires motors, which actually are actuators (or cylinders), like the hydraulic ones but for some obvious reasons they are electrics. So I wanted to ask if someone know if there is a "reverse" function in the arduino program to pilot the motors, and what program should I use to control the Arduino (I saw SMC3 but I fear it is for 3 motors setup, having 4 cylinders in our case...

Thank's a lot for your help here and I hope i'm not wasting your time by my questions. Have a good day.