MÄK Blog

Posted By Jim Kogler Product Manager, Link Products on July 30, 2010

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. You can learn all about HLA Evolved here.

Currently the RTI team is done with development and working through the Quality Assurance process. At the moment, it looks like the release is about two weeks away. For RTI customers wishing to use HLA Evolved: your RTI is coming up. For those of you who will continue to use HLA 1.3 and HLA 1516, this release of the RTI will provide a number of bug fixes so we recommend you upgrade also. Like all RTI releases the upgrade process should be painless. However, for developers there will be one minor change: Because the C++ header files have the same names for both HLA 1516-2000 and HLA Evolved, we have had to change the structure of the include directory. This minor change will mean people developing HLA Federates will need to change the include file path in their development environment. Additionally, we have renamed some of the RID parameters to make things more consistant with HLA Evolved Switches (Also to make configuration easier in general). More detailed information about these changes can be found in the release notes of the release. As is the MAK way, we want to encurrage interoperability between HLA Evolved and other HLA versions. Therefore, our wire standard remains compatible between all three versions of HLA. We call this a mixed mode federation.  That means you will be able to run HLA Evolved Federates with HLA 1.3 Federates and HLA 1516 Federates. Some restrictions will apply, but as with HLA 1.3 and HLA 1516 mixed mode federations, they are limited.

VR-Link 4.0 is currently in development. We actually have most of the work done, but need to do a lot more testing and greatly improve our examples. We expect a release in September with full support for HLA Evolved. The good news is, we believe we can preserve source compatibility between releases. This means you should really be able to just recompile your federate with new C++ preprocessor flags to build an HLA Evolved federate.  Migration of a VR-Link federate to HLA Evolved should take you about as long as it takes you now to compile your existing federate.  If you want to take advantage of some of the new features of HLA Evolved, like modular FOMs, or Update Rate Reduction, that’s going to take a bit longer. However, using the easy to use VR-Link API, even that will be fairly trivial.

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Posted By Jim Kogler Product Manager, Link Products on July 14, 2010

As you all know, MAK is always looking for ways to improve communications with our broader community. This Blog is one important component of that effort. The MAK Blog is a channel through which we can convey important information about our products,  or comment on industry trends and other changes. While Blogs are typically one way communication devices, they don’t always have to be that way. To help improve our communication with you we have recently enabled comments in our Blog.

Starting now, logged in users can comment on any new Blog post. Unfortunately, because we live in a world of SPAM, users need to log-in to verify that you are a real person. Additionally, we will moderate all posted comments. That said, we will likely approve all comments that are respectful and on-topic, no matter what the viewpoint. So comment away!

If you have any additional feed back on ways we can improve communications with you, please feel free to write to support@mak.com, or comment on this post

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Posted By Brett Wiesner Product Manager, Visualize Products on July 12, 2010

The VR-Vantage team is in full swing now as we build the next version – VR-Vantage 1.3.

We’re planning lots of stuff in this release: visualization of aggregates, visualization of feature data, sensor volumes, inter-visibility lines, radio communication lines and much more. And all those features are being built for both 2D and 3D!

During our development cycle, we will release “Top Of Tree” (TOT) development snapshots when features are completed. These will be installable releases that customers can download and try out (or use) at their own discretion. Theses snapshots are unsupported releases that didn’t go through QA, however we still want to give our users access to let them preview new features and submit feedback during the development cycle. We’ll post the links  here when they are ready.

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