©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Let’s Get Serious: Gaming Techniques for Simulation and Training Jeff LeBlanc, MAK Technologies

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. About MAK  Who we are  Founded in 1990; Based in Cambridge, MA  Founders worked on SIMNET team  Pioneer in adapting game technology for military tactical trainers  What we do  Develop distributed simulation tools & toolkits for developers  Use our tools to build military tactical trainers

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Serious Games  Computer and video (console) games can be used for more than just entertainment  Education / edutainment  Marketing and advertising  Social policy and management  Training  The Serious Games marketplace is huge, rivaling the gaming or entertainment industries  Serious Games aim to provide training and education to the user, while also providing and engaging and entertaining experience  The latter supports the former

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Serious Games History  Army Battlezone, by Atari in 1980  Late 80s saw SIMNET, by BBN, distributed real-time simulation  Edutainment was tried as a business model in the 1990s. It failed to be profitable…  Marine Doom, 1998, early attempt at training  Serious Games Initiative launched in 2000  goal: "to help usher in a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs, technologies, and development skills"  Use game development techniques and technologies to build ‘serious’ tools

©MÄK Technologies, Inc.SIMNET  Military simulations have tended to be a bit "heavy"  Dedicated hardware  Physical proximity  Expectations of mechanical accuracy  SIMNET changed that, providing a networked multi-user interactive simulation  Support for hundreds of simultaneous users  Grandfather of today's MMOs?

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Sons of SIMNET  Close Combat Tactical Trainer (CCTT)  Improved visual displays, networking  Spearhead (MAK, 1998)  Used many of the same underlying technologies  Showed a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) PC could be used for training  Gamespot gave it a 7.4!

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Seriously Unreal Gaming  Gaming technology began to drive the simulation world  America's Army (2002), initially released as a recruiting tool  Based on the Unreal 2 engine  Adopted as a platform to build trainer apps on  MAK Game-Link, a toolkit to allow Unreal games to interoperate with sims and trainers built to industry networking standards (DIS/HLA)

©MÄK Technologies, Inc.Game-Link

DIS/HLA Protocols  Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) is a standard conducting “massively multiplayer” simulations  Entity state information encoded into Protocol Data Units (PDUs) and broadcast over the simulation network  Damage state, direction/orientation vectors, articulations, etc  Entity Type information encoded as 8-bit enums describing platform, country, and capabilities  Example: “1:2:225:1:3”1” is a US F-16 Falcon  Dead Reckoning is performed between updates

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. DIS/HLA Protocols  High Level Architecture (HLA) came around in 1996, providing an object-oriented specification for distributed simulations  Communication is managed by a Runtime Infrastructure (RTI)  “middleware”  Individual members of the simulation are called federates. The total environment of the simulators is a federation.  The Federation Object Model (FOM) describes what the shared objects and events (interactions) are allowed in the simulation

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Interoperability Issues  By adhering to the standards, simulations / trainers can be developed independently and work together  Important issues  Acceptable entity types  Models, if required  Terrain database  Coordinate systems  Thousands of entities  Expected visuals  Non-realistic display  Symbology (2525B)

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Types of Serious Games  Social Impact Games lists over 200 games in a variety of categories:  Education ("Algebots", "MeCHem")  Public Policy ("Cyberbudget", "So You Want To Be a Brooklyn Judge")  Health and Wellness ("Ben's Game", "Re- Mission")  Business ("In$ider", "Virtual Leader")  Military training ("Battle Command 2010")

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Battle Command 2010  Staff planning trainer built using MÄK’s VR- Forces simulation engine  Users role-play staff officer positions in distributed game environment  Maneuver, Intelligence, Fire Support, Engineer, Logistics  Rehearse tactics & planning at brigade & below

©MÄK Technologies, Inc.VR-Forces  Object-oriented toolkit for  Networked synthetic environments  Requirements & operational analysis  Simulation for strategic & tactical decision-makers  Embedded trainers  Mission rehearsal

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. MAK Stealth  3D virtual environment visualizer  Provide the “God’s eye” view of the total simulation  Built on the Vega Prime graphics engine  Game-like appearance, but different goals  Non-realistic rendering  Thousands of entities  Gigabyte-sized terrains

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. Demo Time!  Time for a demonstration of VR-Forces and Stealth

©MÄK Technologies, Inc. In Conclusion  The Serious Games industry is entrenched, and growing  Game technologies are providing a low- cost alternative to the old ‘do it yourself’ solutions  Be aware of, and involved in, existing standards  Questions?