What’s New


VR-Forces Entity Boost Plug-in ― Now Available

MÄK is proud to announce the release of the Entity Boost plug in for VR-Forces. This plug in is the latest component of a cross-product strategic initiative to support greater scalability for large exercises. To accomplish this, MÄK is leveraging diverse technologies including multi-resolution modeling, multi-threaded design, multicast filtering, cloud-computing, and the High Level Architecture’s (HLA) Data Distribution Management (DDM). Nearly all MÄK products, including VR-Forces, VR-Vantage, VR-Link, the MÄK RTI, and the MÄK Data Logger, will be updated as part of this effort to better support large exercises. Combining the capabilities of the products and the technologies, MÄK will be able to provide a platform for scaling up to 100,000 entities and beyond.

This new VR-Forces Entity Boost module adds support for Interest Management through the use of HLA’s DDM. Interest Management is a key to solving system-wide scalability problems. In many scenarios, no individual participant needs to know about all the entities all at once. Interest Management means limiting the number of entities any single application needs to handle based on its areas of interest. There may be tens of thousands of entities in the virtual world, but a simulated security camera application only needs to know about the two hundred pedestrians that are passing in front of it at any given time.

Designing, developing, tuning, and deploying a large-scale distributed simulation environment and scenario still takes a lot of expertise, resources, tradeoffs, effort, and time. Unfortunately, we haven’t made that fact go away. But what we can do is offer a scalable platform upon which to apply your expertise (and ours) to meet your project’s requirements. Whereas in the past, these large-scale scenarios were beyond reach, now they are possible with MÄK’s products.

If you need to scale up to just a few thousand entities, the COTS products and our standard product training course may be all you need to get started. But for projects with more aggressive requirements, you will probably want to engage MÄK’s Services Team to help you take a system-wide approach to scalability, and get the most out of MÄK’s tools.

Entity Boost is being released at no additional cost to customers with active VR-Forces maintenance contracts. This module requires an installation of VR-Forces 3.12. You may use the links below to download the Entity Boost module. To purchase or renew your maintenance, or any other sales question, please contact (from North America) or your local MÄK reseller (in other locations).


VR-Forces 3.12 is Available Now

VR-Forces 3.12 is here. This new version of VR-Forces includes 3D GUI technology built on MÄK’s VR-Vantage 3D visualization toolkit. The real focus of 3.12 though is the improved management of large scale simulations.

With VR-Forces 3.12, large scale simulations can be managed by planning multi-level simulation of aggregates. Aggregate groups of entities join together when not interacting and de-aggregate into individual entities when in designated zones or when in proximity with other aggregates or entities.

And with our dedication to Terrain Agility, we’re bringing you ways to use the whole Earth as your simulation area. You can build basic scenarios anywhere in the world instantly using streaming terrain image servers.

MÄK has also added more realism to our VR-Forces models. Now tactical smoke can block sensors. DI-Guy is fully integrated so you can have realistic human characters. There is also support for Prisoners of War, many-sided battles with dynamic allegiances, and laser designation of targets and laser guided missiles.

VR-Forces 3.12 is also easier to use now you can

  • Configure aggregate units graphically, including formations.
  • Quickly task entities using toolbar buttons.
  • Dynamically trade off visual quality versus high performance though GUI.
  • Easily configure distributed simulation network connections.
  • Configure GUI display units to your application domain and needs.

Want to see 3.12 in action? You can click here to download a recording of the recent VR-Forces 3.12 webinar.

For more information please contact your MAK Account Manager, area reseller, or email us at . If you are under current maintenance, you can contact Fay Nickles for license keys at .


VR-Vantage Available Now!

MAK᾿s new 3D visual solution toolkit, VR-Vantage is now available.

VR-Vantage has three components

  • The MÄK Stealth 3D viewer application
  • Vantage IG, an application for creating out-the-window and camera views; and
  • VR-Vantage Toolkit which allows you to customize the included applications or to build your own tailored visualization application.

One of the most aspects of VR-Vantage is its terrain agility. It does not have a single “native” format for terrain data. VR-Vantage᾿s Terrain Agility ensures that customers᾿ pre-existing data is supported. The product loads a wide variety of terrain formats. If a certain format cannot be loaded, customers can use the toolkit to tailor it to support a custom terrain format.

But Terrain Agility doesn᾿t stop there. Users can compose terrain “on-the-fly” directly from source data (such as DTED elevations or GeoTIFF imagery) without the need to pre-build a terrain database. Raw elevation is dynamically tessellated into polygons and imagery is draped on top. Point features, like buildings or streetlights, are automatically replaced by 3D geometry.

VR-Vantage can also use streaming elevation and imagery data directly from web mapping services, like Yahoo!Earth. That means you can pick a spot anywhere in the world to simulate ― just click and simulate.

VR-Vantage is also a perfect fit for your budget. It comes with a rich set of built-in content. The product includes Boston Dynamics᾿ DI-Guy to animate human characters, a selection of DiSTI᾿s GL Studio vehicle interfaces, IDV᾿s SpeedTree for dynamic vegetation, and Sundog᾿s SilverLining for weather effects and volumetric clouds. MÄK continues to negotiate with other partners to include more built-in functionality in future releases. VR-Vantage also includes top quality 3D vehicle models that support damage representations and articulated parts.

For more details, contact your account manager. Or email us at