Last week MÄK exhibited at the LAAD Defence & Security Exhibition in Rio de Janeiro, along with our local reseller OpenCadd. The biennial event brings together Brazilian and international companies specialized in supplying equipment, services and technology to the Armed Forces, Police and Special Forces, Security Services, consultants, and government agencies.

This year seemed to be the largest show to date, taking up 3 large pavilions, each with a variety of local companies and system integrators, as well as a large South American and international participation. The event consisted of a variety of offerings from very large trucks and armored vehicles to marine simulation training devices.

Once the VR-Forces 4.1 release was completed and uploaded to the FTP site, we decided to have the VR-Forces team relax a little and express their creativity to see what could be accomplished with the new Scripted Task feature of VR-Forces.

If you haven’t already heard about it, Scripted Tasking is a brand new feature in VR-Forces 4.1 that brings scripting to the forefront and allows any VR-Forces user with even just a little programming or hacking skills build their own tasks and behaviors.  We’ve incorporated the well known Lua scripting language into the base VR-Forces, and allowed access to much of the VR-Forces API.  New tasks that you write can now be saved directly into a scenario, and easily exchanged among users.

Using this feature, it is possible to create all sorts of new tasks and behaviors in VR-Forces by combining any of the existing tasks, passing messages between entities, and inspecting the state of various elements in the simulation.  To see just how flexible the scripting interface is, we had one simple rule:  Make any behaviors you want!

VR-Forces 4.1 introduces significant changes to the Move to Waypoint and Move to Location tasks.

Ever since VR-Forces 3.8 (back in 2005), Move to Waypoint and Move to Location tasks have offered the options to move directly to the destination or to plan a path. When path planning was enabled, if the entity identified a vector road network between the start point and destination, it tried to use the road network for the appropriate segment of the movement task. In VR-Forces 4.0, we introduced Road Following, an improved algorithm for moving along roads. Unfortunately, vehicles often had problems making the transition from off-road movement to moving on roads, which resulted in poor vehicle behavior.

To solve this problem, in VR-Forces 4.1, we have separated the direct movement and road following tasks. The result is better overall vehicle movement at the cost of slightly less realistic transitions from off-road movement to road following. We now have three flavors of the Move to Waypoint and Move to Location tasks:

G’day! Last week VT MÄK, along with our technology partner’s Simulation Solution Australia (SimSol) and local reseller JM Computing, attended and exhibited at the Land Warfare conference that was held at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre in Melbourne, Australia.

Land Warfare Conference (LWC) is a major event for users, providers, academics, designers, and manufacturers to meet, present, share, and exchange new and visionary ideas in Land Systems and operations.

Can’t seem to figure out why the play/pause/rewind buttons in VR-Forces are disabled? Wondering why you can’t create/load new scenarios in VR-Forces? I originally posted this question/answer in our forum – since it’s a common problem, we wanted to point it out here as well.

Usually this means the front-end and the back-end are not talking to each other. This could be the result of a number of things, ranging from your own network to a firewall problem.

If you've eliminated all possibilities of your computer interfering with itself, it is likely that you have two network cards on your computer. When this is the case, you need to specify a device address in the VR-Forces launcher dialog box. It conveniently has a drop down box of IP addresses you can select from. Usually the first non-127.0.0.1 address is sufficient. Select this and launch VR-Forces from here. If the buttons are still disabled, we encourage you to let us know, either here or on the original forum post.

VR-Forces 4.0.4 gives you Pattern of Life with B-HAVE, enabling you to quickly and easily add realistic background traffic into your simulation. But that’s not all, folks. We’ve put together a (non-exhaustive) list of more additions and improvements we’ve made to VR-Forces! Contact us if you have questions or concerns.

Radar Modes - Being able to configure named modes for radar systems is an important part of electronic warfare (EW). VR-Forces now allows users to configure multiple named modes for radar systems. A named mode could be “off” or “low power” or “search”. This is all done through configuration files. The F18 has two modes “Track” and “Search”. Users can create new specific modes and then set them through plans. (continued...)

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.) 

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.