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.

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.