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NASA Playing With Unreal Engine For Virtual World
An anonymous reader writes "Daniel Laughlin, Project Manager for NASA's Learning Technologies Office spoke at the International Space Flight Museum in SecondLife and said that they are using the Unreal 3 Engine to create a synthetic world for training. The mission? The moon by 2020, and Mars by 2035. He said, 'We are combining the efforts of a commercial game developer, two universities and two NASA mission directorates into the project. If we can't check off all three boxes at the end, then we'll have done a poor job.'"
I always preferd the low-grav levels myself :)
Our diversity is our strength
So what sort of spacecraft are they going to put this Unreal engine onto? I hope it provides enough thrust to get us where we're going.
is to find a way to play video games at work. I'd be more inclined to believe it was work related if there really were gun toting zombies on the Moon.
* Armstrong decapitates Martian with the Shock Rifle * Armstrong decapitates Martian with the Shock Rifle ** DOUBLE KILL **
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
And a good thing, too, or they'd be completely unprepared for the Skaarj - and that's only if they make it out of the prison ship!
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
It's $350K for heavens sake! Why not http://www.ogre3d.org/ coupled with http://www.ode.org/? Surely combining those with 2 university departments where you'll no doubt find people already familiar with the source code would be a more sensible approach to developing serious games.
Sheesh. Money to burn.
Also converting between nautical miles, and standard miles.
This is a project that should be open sourced. I bet there are alot of folks that would love to work on something like this.
Too bad the gravity gun will suck.
Won't those project either bog down in a Democrat controlled congress or get axed completely if the Dems get a President in next time?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I know there's speculation of water on the moon and Mars. But I didn't think there was enough for any type of water vehicle. Maybe that's part of the post-terraforming stage of the game? :)
low grav w/ insta kills was fun! The engine is so fast and dead-on accurate compared to many others.. /shrug ;)
..somebody get on that
I am not sure on UT3.. but with the second engine in a mod like Red Orchestra you could see the limitations of it.
For instance... snipping across the map w/ full res up. The trees disappear on the horizon allowing you to shoot people through them. The dead guy thinks he was concealed behind some branches.
I assume the UT3 engine will take care of this
In time, a virtual earth to run/fly/shop, look at mapping, etc. with this engine would be fun stuff.
Kill your TV
They are using the DOA beach volleyball engine in their simulations. They will surely return to the moon before us.
Go check out the developer's web site
http://www.virtualheroes.com/
There is a USA Today News release talking about this very thing.
So what are our options for trickjumping, wallhacking, ... on the moon and mars?
Dependency hell? =>
Who knows, maybe descent would be a better model? You never know if some Bush terrorists have beat us there.
By then they can start using Duke Nukem Forever.
fuvoo: watch something
For the Mars mission, I think the Doom 3 engine would have been better. Anyone else agree?
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
wouldn't effort be better spent on getting the nitty gritty very detailed physics down first and dedicating the majority of processing power to that? for professional applications like what I can forsee nasa needing a nice overly pretty 3d engine would be the least of their concerns. if accuracy is really needed for rendering I just wouldn't trust most 3d hardware either.
if the simulator gets to the point it simulates the stress and forces on all hardware involved to some insanely small degree, thats awesome imho. If your doing that level of computation however, bah to graphics, secondary thought.
Memorandum
To: Sim training participants
From: SIMCOM
A number of items have come to our attention regarding the simulation procedures for the upcoming moon landing, and clarification is required on a number of points:
1. Rocket jumping or use of stun grenades for propulsion will not be feasible, please stop requesting these items from the mission planners.
2. As you will be physically on the moon, there will be no "l4gging".
3. Please do not accuse fellow trainees of "hax". It has become a growing morale issue.
4. "Pwnage" is not an approved item in the radio communication guide for NASA missions. Please stick with standardized phrasing for clarity.
5. When on the moon, the action of "strafing" sideways will not be practical in the EVAsuits, so please take this into consideration. Also, there have been a number of collisions and falls in the hallways from sim trainees attempting to employ this walking method. The base physician has speculated that the unnatural gait is causing people to literally "trip over themselves", so please stop.
6. Two of the inflatable habitats have lost pressurization during tests because of inadvertent puncturing. Subsequent interviews have revealed that trainees were looking for "wall hacks" and accidentally damaging the structure. This could cause a significant safety problem during the mission, so please use care.
Finally, the practice of attaching large "sig" images to all internal e-mails has become disruptive. The use of animated gifs with flashing text and, in some unfortunate cases, nudity, has become both a workplace harassment hazard as well as a visual distraction. Please use the standard signature generator to create a plain text sig with your contact information.
Regards,
SIMCOM
Office of simulation
I'm not sure I understand this correctly; from the quote (in the article which I DID read) it seems like the metric of success is who they are including. Shouldn't the metric of success for a simulator be how well they are training the astronauts or, for an educational learning tool, how well they are introducing concepts to their students?
Please don't tell me that this project is mainly driven by the desire to include as many different organizations together. This sounds like trying to have the space shuttle being built in as many congressional districts as possible to spread the pork around.
If you want to make a 'bumpy shiny' Doom 3 era massively normal mapped low poly bald space marine game - like Gears of War, I guess UE3 is appropriate. Outdated graphics tech for anyone except those who get off on seeing lots of bright lights on metal.
This project is either:
1. Wasting money on technology they don't need where massively lower cost or free alternatives are widely available
2. Wasting money on the wrong company's tech. There are graphics companies that specialize in these types of projects that can provide custom tech that matches what they are trying to accomplish with the goals of this project for much less money.
Definitely sounds like there is a pc game fanboy in a decision making position where he shouldn't be. Someone needs to be fired over this waste of taxpayer funds.
I'm investigating the use of solitaire in network monitoring and systems development and programming. I think that putting the red seven on the black eight is equivalent to calling a procedure from a library with parameters seven and eight. ...That's what I've been telling my boss & cow orkers anyway...
Winning a game of draw-tree is equivalent to completing a sub-project.
No I didn't read the article, but judging from the blurb I can assume they plan to be able to fake another moon landing using the Unreal Engine by 2020, and a further Mars landing by 2035? Amazing.
Wouldn't the Doom 3 engine be more fitting or are they saving that for the Mars mission training scenarios?
They should have used the GPL'd Quake 1 engine, the testcase is already there: Ziggurat Vertigo
... of an astronaut after his two fellows died in the exploding return-vehicle: "Double Kill!" After another look on his oxygen indicator: "Multi Kill!"
SL is a virtual world, but it's a pretty crappy example of the tech.
This is getting as annoying as my mom constantly referring to herself as 'surfing the blogs' and for pretty much the same reasons.
Note to article writers: referring to Second Life as some sort of euphemism for Virtual World does a huge disservice to the many, many shared-world 3d engines that are out there, as well simply convincing everyone that you don't know anything about it.
Second Life is an absolutely horrific application of virtual world concepts, novel only in the universality of rights it gives its participants. The graphics are atrocious (1990 would like its polygons back, please), performance is sub-abysmal (is it normal that when I see more than 4 people on my screen, my fps drops to 3?), and efficiencies are nonexistent (I recall one of the Linden Labs guy referring to it running on 000's of servers...which, if true, suggests that they're running no more than about 1 server per 10 players online at a time).
To put it bluntly, I was a beta tester of the "Visual OS" ViOS that was never released. I cannot see anything in Second Life in 2006 that is superior to what ViOS was in the 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViOS (and it's successor Croquet looks to do everything SL does, even better).
A brief glance at Wiki's MMOG list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MMORPGs) lists 9 3D-based MMOGs just in the A's that all look substantially better and perform (AFAIK) substantially better than Second Life.
-Styopa
Moon by 2020, Mars by 2035? Right. And in 1970 they were saying we'd be on mars now. NASA just wants to keep the money coming; if they do manage to even get back to the moon by 2020, they'll be staying at a Chinese or Brazilian base there. Maybe the Chinese will let us visit the Glorious People's Space Colony of Mars. If NASA wants to stay ahead, they've got to start running faster.
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
It would be great (read *great*) if they would integrate this new virtual world work with their existing NASA World Wind.
Animoog.org
SL is still stuck with havok1. How is this cutting edge? There is havok3 already. When SL was nearing 1.9.9 everybody though - oh right, it's almost 2.0 with havok2. But now we have 1.13.0.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
I wonder if NASA also has plans to make particle weapons to exterminate all of the gun wielding aliens on Mars.
Welcome our Game playing NASA overlords..
All the better for preparing for the inevitable scrootch-gun battles with Gidney and Cloyd and their army of Monstrous Mechanical Metal-Munching Moon Mice.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I would think the Havok Engine (as used in HL2) would be a better choice. Unreal is more of a arcade engine. Maybe they added more physics in the new Unreal Engine?
In other news, since 2035, the Olympics have become purely virtual. No longer do athletes train their physical bodies, as we've all learned in 2025 that it's definitely mind over body. This proto-android controlled telepathically by a pro-gamer is simultaneously better at and impossible-to-beat-in all Olympic sports. Since then, all athletes (including boxers and sumo wrestlers) have converted to telepathically connecting to FightBots whose HP are directly proportional to the athlete's IQ.
War, also, has become less of a national tragedy. No longer do millions of soldiers dying causelessly. The world now has scrap-metal cemetaries and designated "dead-zones" for the billions of proto-droids whose existence have devolved in the name of human-decreed-entropy. Gamers who control these droids often get pissed their that their console quits working in the middle of a pointless war, and they engage their smaller robots in local brawls and gangwars.
Can you imagine this happening?
No, nautical mile probably will not be used even when Mars is terraformed. Even if it is used, it will not be the same as the Earth's nautical mile.
Here lies the definition:
Nautical Mile is the a minute of arc along a meridian of the Earth.
... are very interesting. A part of it [highearthorbit.com]: "The details are fairly light, but it seems as though NASA is building a VR game on space exploration (remember Microsoft's Space Simulator [planetmic.com], or the free and open-source Orbiter [ucl.ac.uk]?). I wonder why NASA is rebuilding their own engine rather then picking up and using existing simulators (like Open-SESSAME [sf.net]) on top of the Unreal graphics/physics engine."
Animoog.org
That's a great idea. Using a 3D engine to generate fake pictures of Man landing on the moon should be much easier than the last time when they actually filmed the whole thing on earth. Plus, when the uncooperative truth tellers stick evidence of the fake in the video, they can just regenerate it!
Agreed and the sad part is all the comments that don't address the usefullness of engines like unreal in getting work done. Basicalliy it's jokes, or "why didn't you pick my pet choice"? So much for this being a geek forum. I personally find "serious games" interesting.
So in other words ideology triumphs common sense. Maybe your post should be attached to the "what's wrong with OSS" story?
"Oh, and whilst you're there, fix what you think is wrong with it, and submit it. See - that's how OSS works."
For an advocate that argument is particularly bad. Imagine Toyota telling customers that if you don't like what's being offered then go engineer your own. The ONLY reason OSS gets away with it is because it's free. It's also bad becase it creates the perception that OSS intentionally writes poor code, so they can charge people to fix it.
What other kind of engine would you use in a Virtual world? If NASA used a real F-1 engine, it would probably destroy the server!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
"Especially since our tax dollars are paying for all this."
Slashdot accounting; "all your bases belong to us".
"They are now working with the America's Army development team and the Federation of American Scientists to make a short(10 to 20 minutes) prototype."
Only two of those is a government organization. Care to point out the line item in the combined budget that's yours?