I'm heading out today to the Fall SIW Conference in Orlando - the semi-annual Simulation Interoperability Workshop hosted by SISO (www.sisostds.org).  As usual, MAK is participating in many ways:

• We will have a booth in the Exhibit Hall, Monday through Wednesday - showing off all of our products of course, but with a particular focus on the Interoperability products. 
• I am proud to be chairing a new SISO Study Group on WebLVC. WebLVC is a new protocol we have proposed as a starting point for a eventual consensus-based SISO Standard.  It is designed to support interoperability between web-based client applications and traditional modeling and simulation federations.  For more information on WebLVC, check out http://labs.mak.com/weblvc/weblvc-protocol.html. The WebLVC Study Group meeting is Wednesday, September 12, at 1:30pm. 
• We will be giving a presentation at the newly-resurrected RPR FOM Product Development Group on Wednesday morning - on the technical history of the RPR FOM. 
• Aaron Dubois, our Product Development Manager for Link Products will be giving a product capabilities presentation as part of the LVC Tools Workshop session on Thursday afternoon, September 13, at 4:00pm. (continued...)

Last week, MÄK was pretty excited to release of VR-Forces 4.0.3, which included HLA Evolved support! At this point the complete MÄK Product lineup supports the latest version of the HLA Standard. 

This means that users who want to build federations that take advantage of FOM Modules and other HLA Evolved features will now be able to do it with VR-Forces. FOM Modules is a particularly powerful feature. It allows subgroups of Federates in a larger Federation to share FOM extensions without propagating the FOM extensions to everyone; most federates that don’t use the module can completely ignore it knowing that they will get the information they require in the base FOM, while the subgroup will get information from the base FOM as well as the model.

This week MÄK is presenting at the Air Traffic Control Association Conference Exhibition in National Harbor (across the river from Washington DC)

We’re demonstrating the simulation technologies that are helping our customers at the FAA Tech Center study system concepts to improve pilot’s abilities to make decisions in bad weather.

If you have upgraded to a new version of the MAK RTI, you have probably noticed that the RTI include paths have changed. This means that MS Visual Studio project files which worked with pre 4.0 RTI versions likely no longer work. This problem manifests itself when your previously compiling application can no longer find RTI.hh or some other standard RTI header file.

I am frequently asked the question "Should I upgrade my existing HLA Federate to HLA Evolved?" I confess, I cringe when I hear this, mostly because there is no clear answer and usually the inquisitor expects such. Anyone making the decision to upgrade the version of HLA they are using needs to answer a few questions first:

Just a quick note of good news. IEEE officially released the published IEEE-1516-2010 standard today. You can now order printed copies and download the PDF from www.ieee.org. Keeping with our promise to support IEEE, MAK is pleased to also announce the release of the MAK RTI Version 4.0!

An HLA Evolved compatible MAK RTI is almost ready for release. As we have been awaiting its release we have received a few requests for more information about HLA Evolved, specifically the work required to update a federate to the latest version of HLA. I was always surprised about this because I have always used VR-Link; our plan is to make VR-Link source compatible, so there will be almost no work required to upgrade a federate using VR-Link.

Today I just wanted to provide a status update on our upcoming MAK RTI 4.0 release, and the corresponding VR-Link 4.0 release .  These releases will add support for HLA Evolved to each product. As most of you know, HLA Evolved is the latest version of the IEEE 1516 standard which was released this spring.

Frequently people write to support and say “My RTI Crashed!”, or they write “I have 10 federates, and the RTI is installed on Machine X.” When I read sentences like these I sometimes cringe. I cringe because RTIs really don’t crash; a component of your RTI crashed. Maybe I cringe because I have been working with RTIs for a very long time.

I'm heading out today to the Fall SIW Conference in Orlando - the semi-annual Simulation Interoperability Workshop hosted by SISO (www.sisostds.org).  As usual, MAK is participating in many ways: 
- We will have a booth in the Exhibit Hall, Monday through Wednesday - showing off all of our products of course, but with a particular focus on the Interoperability products. 
- I am proud to be chairing a new SISO Study Group on WebLVC. WebLVC is a new protocol we have proposed as a starting point for a eventual consensus-based SISO Standard.  It is designed to support interoperability between web-based client applications and traditional modeling and simulation federations.  For more information on WebLVC, check out http://labs.mak.com/weblvc/weblvc-protocol.html. The WebLVC Study Group meeting is Wednesday, September 12, at 1:30pm.
- We will be giving a presentation at the newly-resurrected RPR FOM Product Development Group on Wednesday morning - on the technical history of the RPR FOM. 
- Aaron Dubois, our Product Development Manager for Link Products will be giving a product capabilities presentation as part of the LVC Tools Workshop session on Thursday afternoon, September 13, at 4:00pm. 

We also wanted to alert you to a relevant paper being presented by one of our customers.  Mark Pullen of the George Mason University C4I Center, will be presenting a paper entitled "An Open Source MSDL/C-BML Interface to VR-Forces".  If you are interested in using VR-Forces with MSDL or C-BML, I encourage you to attend.  Check the SIW Agenda for presentation time - Mark's paper number is 12F-SIW-036.