Esri, the biggest player in the Geographic Information System market, held its international users conference last week in San Diego. As usual, it was a very impressive event.

Many of us in the Modeling, Simulation & Training industries use, or have used, Esri’s ArcGIS tools to prepare geographic information for use as source data in our terrain database generation workflows. Well, this year Esri stepped into the 3D site model generation business by acquiring Procedural and their City Engine technology for building 3D urban environments.  Those of you who know me, know I’ve been a proponent of procedural terrain generation for years, I even authored an I/ITSEC paper on the subject in 2004.   So, on the flight to San Diego, I took the opportunity to give City Engine a try.

It is somewhat axiomatic in the documentation biz that “no one reads the doc”, unless you make a mistake – then everyone reads that section. In the Entity Editor documentation for VR-Forces 3.12, we described a feature that wasn’t actually in the product – the ability to edit 3D models in the editor. Since then, every now and then someone asks how to find that feature and we’ve had to admit the error. No more! In VR-Forces 4.0.4, you can edit an entity’s 3D model, XR model, and 2D icon in the Entity Editor.

The Entity Editor lets you quickly and easily change the 3D model used to represent an entity. When you change a model in the Entity Editor, the entity’s model definition also gets changed. (In other words, it is fully integrated with the settings in the Visual Model Editor.) 

For a number of years, the MÄK RTI has supported a useful feature called FDD (or FED if we’re talking about HLA 1.3) file distribution. The original idea was that often during federation development you might find the need to update your FDD file. This often meant going around to every machine you were using and updating the local copy of the file. Obviously, this is both tedious and error prone. With FDD file distribution, only the federate that created the federation execution needed to have a local copy. When the federation was created, the file was distributed through the RTI to the rtiexec, which then distributed it to every other joining federate. This guaranteed that everyone was using the most up to date file and there were no discrepancies. There was one obvious downside to this feature however: start-up times were slower.

Last week, alongside my colleague Gary Schrader, I attended and exhibited at the AFCEA-GMU (the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association - George Mason University) C4I Center Conference in Fairfax Virginia. The conference consisted of various speakers with expert backgrounds presenting topics consisting of C2 Integration Operations, Research Testbeds, Cyber networks, and C4I cloud computing, to name a few of the topics and papers. 

Dr. Michael Hieb, Research Professor of George Mason University, presented the C4I simulation based environment for Concept Development and Assessment developed on VR-Forces.  His research group also exhibited and demonstrated with their Brazilian partners ITA (Institute Technology Aeronautics) their joint collaboration solution based on VR-Forces. 

On a quick walk around the show floor here at ITEC 2012 in London, I was excited to see the number of partners and other product vendors demonstrating new integrations between their products and ours:

1) Antycip Simulation is demonstrating a new dynamic ocean visualization plug-in to VR-Vantage, based on their MyOcean3D technology.  This plug-in generates realistic-looking waves by using fast-fourier-transform techniques to generate a dynamic height field, encoding the height field in a texture, and passing the texture to custom shader code running on the GPU.  The shader supports vertex displacement both vertically (for crests and troughs) and horizontally (for curling and breaking wave tips).  In the demonstration, a ship simulated by VR-Forces bobs and rocks realistically on the waves.  This is accomplished through a dynamic form of "ocean clamping", where a simple physics model is run in VR-Vantage to offset the ground-truth positions and orientations published over HLA by VR-Forces.  The MyOcean3D plug-in to VR-Vantage is already in use at one customer site, and we are interested in hearing whether you'd like to see this become part of the standard product offering.

The weather in Atlantic city is definitely IFR conditions ("Instrument Flight Rules" - or for us recovering army helicopter pilots, "I Follow Roads"). There's zero visibility and clouds all the way down to the surface. I'm not the least bit worried though, I'm at the Air Traffic Controller's Technical Symposium with a large number people who are used to landing aircraft of any size in these conditions.

Periodically, MÄK reassesses platform support for our product line. We consider a platform a paired version of compiler and OS. For example, Windows 7 and MSVC++ 8 is a single platform, while Windows 7 and MSVC++9 is a different platform.  In order to support the most popular and stable platforms while maintaining commitment to quality products, we need to limit the total number of platforms we support as part of the standard product offering.

In general, when deciding to support or not support a platform we consider a number of factors:

Earlier this month, VT MÄK, alongside our corporate partner DiSTI Simulation, held the regional Asian Resellers Conference in a Songdo, Korea - a small town nestled in the hills located just outside of Icheon.  The event was well attended by distributors who came as far as Australia, India, Singapore, and Taiwan to our local distributor in Korea.  We welcomed over a dozen resellers and 30 attendees, each representing their respective regional companies and territories. 

During the two-day event, the attendees were exposed to the latest product technologies of VR-TheWorld and the entire suite of Simulation, Visualization, and Interoperability products, as well as DiSTI’s HMI tools such as GL-Studio, Replica8, and corporate roadmaps. The event was a great success and we hope to see everyone at the next resellers meeting scheduled to be held in Singapore.

In VR-Vantage 1.5, we will be making some small changes to the Track History feature. Track Histories are currently limited in how long they can get. This is for performance reasons because, as you can imagine, creating infinitely long track histories will cause the application to run out of memory.

In 1.5, we will allow the users to specify the length of each track history segment and also the total number of segments allowed per track history. This lets you have longer track histories if you have fewer entities, for example. 

At MÄK we take developer documentation seriously. We recognize we haven’t always gotten it right, therefore we are continually trying to make it better. With new product releases starting this quarter, we will be overhauling how we present development documentation. The changes may be relatively subtle but we believe you will appreciate them.

Historically, we have always had two places developers needed to look to understand our APIs: The Developer's Guide, which was in PDF format, and the Class Documentation, an HTML guide to class usage. These two competing formats sometimes got out of sync because they weren’t reviewed at the same time, or because the class docs were generated automatically from the code thereby instantly reflecting changes. To solve these problems, we started moving code segments from the Developers Guide to the Class Docs, but this just made the split between the two documents more troublesome.