Vegetation in the MAK Earth Terrain Engine! 

Why Generative AI is worse than Procedural Generation — because sometimes you don’t want machines to “think”, you want them to do what they’re told.

This is the story of MAK ONE’s ability to generate deterministic terrain vegetation over the entire planet.

(Virtual) Fireside Chat with Jim Kogler about MAK ONE

Spring is just around the corner, but it’s always the right season for a [virtual] fireside chat with Jim about what’s new in this release of MAK ONE.

Here's what's new in HLA 4

As we highlighted last year, HLA 4 has passed the first round of IEEE balloting. MAK is proud to have worked diligently alongside the interoperability community to progress the open standards process to reach this milestone.

Keep reading to learn what's new in HLA 4...

Q4 What's Up MAK Newsletter: Happy Holidays from MAK!

Whether you're spending the holidays in a snowy mountain chalet or keeping things cozy at home, we wish you and yours a holiday season filled with joy and togetherness. May the coming year bring prosperity, success, and continued collaboration as we embark on new and continued ventures together!

Enjoy this final newsletter of 2023. And spoiler alert, there's a gift for you inside...Check it out!

Here's to a bright year ahead, 

Your friends at MAK

NTSA Modeling and Simulation Awards: Gladiator Delivery Team wins Training Systems Acquisition Award! 

Congratulations to the entire Gladiator Delivery Team for winning NTSA’s Training Systems Acquisition Award!

The Gladiator Program represents a shift in paradigm for delivering collective synthetic training environments. The UK RAF, with the help of Prime Contractor, Boeing Defense UK and Subcontractor ST Engineering Antycip, brought together commercial companies to work alongside a professional White Force to develop a COTS-based Collective MDO Training Environment.

How to Configure MAK ONE’s VR-Engage Virtual Simulator with Accurate Vehicle Dynamics based on an Existing Model

By Len Granowetter

MAK’s VR-Engage virtual simulator application, part of the MAK ONE suite, includes a built-in vehicle dynamics simulation, using Vortex, by CM Labs. Vortex is a mature and powerful COTS physics and dynamics engine that provides a simple authoring UI, allowing users to model at whatever fidelity is desired – including modeling of multi-axle drive and steering systems, dynamic loads, wheeled and tracked systems, physics of turrets and other parts, etc. However, the MAK ONE platform is also capable of using pre-existing dynamics models and external code that is not based on the Vortex physics engine. Here's how to configure VR-Engage with accurate vehicle dynamics based on an existing model. 

VR-Engage 2.0.3 has arrived! Here is what's new.

By Len Granowetter

We just announced our mid-2023 set of maintenance releases for the MAK ONE applications – VR-Forces, VR-Vantage, and VR-Engage. For the most part, maintenance releases are about bug fixes, optimizations, and other minor configuration changes that make our customers’ experience better. But sometimes, maintenance releases also include some targeted new capabilities that are additive or low-impact - that’s the case with the VR-Engage 2.0.3 release.

An experiment with ChatGPT-Powered Customer Support

By Jim Kogler (**edited by ChatGPT, Morgan, and Dan)

I have been approached by multiple customers suggesting the idea of developing a support system by training an OpenAI/Chat-GPT system on our MAK documentation set. They believed it could potentially provide some level of autonomous help desk for our customers. Intrigued by the possibility of automating support, I decided to give it a try. However, I must say it hasn't gone well, and as a result, we won't be releasing it just yet.

Learn how AI can sometimes be misleading...