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.'"

Comments

Why UT3?

[Lissajous]

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.

Re:Why UT3?

[Lissajous]

Oops - I take the $350K back (heh - I wish!)...no I didn't RTFA (c'mon...this *is* /. after all). They'll of course be using custom license http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/licensing/ter ms.shtml. But I still stand by the "why not FOSS?" question.
This is precisely the kind of project that could both benefit and benefit from the FOSS paradigm, especially considering the duration of the projects. Who knows what's going to happen to Epic over the next 20-odd years?
I know this is really just NASA wanting some kind of PR exercise, but the concerns of their launch technology (if you excuse the pun) not being available throughout the duration ought to have some sway over how they approach the project.

Re:Why UT3?

[Lissajous]

Unreal is a very good engine. Ogre and all the other open source engines are not.

That's a fairly sweeping statement. I guess ogre being not particularly good and needing bringing up to speed was why they were one of the Google Summer of Code participants?
You might want to, oh I don't know, actually find out about the OSS tech you slate before hitting the submit button.
I suggest http://www.ogre3d.org/index.php?option=com_content &task=view&id=394&Itemid=2 would be a good place to start. Then if you still think that ogre isn't particularly good, why not grab a copy from SVN and back up your claims. Oh, and whilst you're there, fix what you think is wrong with it, and submit it. See - that's how OSS works. NASA wouldn't have to do a thing about it because there's highly informed people like you all around the world making it better for them!

Re:Why UT3?

[MaWeiTao]

While Ogre3D looks fairly good it's very possible it doesn't have the power and flexibility of the Unreal Engine. And more importantly, the licensing of that engine is certainly going to include extensive support. Imagine some NASA developer being forced to browse Ogre3D forums and being called a noob for asking questions.

NASA wants the engine to enabler, not to become an obstacle they themselves have to fix every time they encounter a shortcoming. This is not to put down engines like Ogre3D at all. But if they have the money to spend, why not spend it on a system that is robust and is well-supported.

Is the metric of success wrong?

[wisebabo]

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.

Re:This would be a fun project

[megavlad]

Damn, I missed this oportunity. NASA could have really helped me out. I've been working on a Open Sourced game platform for a few years now, and I was schedule to release a 0.1.0-alpha by the beginning of next month (december). But I have had so manny setbacks (do to the everyday life) that it'll probably be at mid-January.

A few years ago I was talking to an awesome developer that I knew. We were talking about Linux. He made a statement that really stuck to me. He said "I love Linux. It's such a great platform for developers, and some day for every day users. But they're missing something that to me is important -- games. I really don't like to be rebooting and switching OSes just to play a simple game. This is specially anoying at work. I like Linux, but until they get their act together with the game situation, I'm sticking with Windows". I though damn, if the Open Source community doesn't find a way to bring the programmers that like Linux but also like their games, we're missing out on alot of available intelligentsia

And then it hit me. BOOM! "Hey buddy, you're part of the community, too. Don't just be a freeloader, do your part". I also realized that the best way to accomplish this is not to pull any punches, or to do things half-assed. We would have to go for a head shot.

I personally think the way to do this is to go beyond developing a framework, like what Ogre3d is, and instead develop an entire environment, similar to what the Unreal Engine is. Computing power always catches up, but if we design hard-to-use tools, few of us will us them. Don't get me wrong, Ogre3d is good at what it does, but I don't want to spend a week to load a mesh. They key is to have the proper balance of ease of use and power. Games are such enourmous beasts, for the most part, that I believe we have to lean on the side of 'ease of use' so that people can attempt bolder projects and know that the software is doing its best at helping them. Current Open Sourced game toolkits are too difficult to use by teams of less than 5 developers -- that isn't going to work.

I think what we need is a 4 point strategy:

I) A nice Virtual Machine that can be retargeted to different architectures and roles. The one I currenly have is running on Linux, but we, of course could retarget it to FreeBSD; Windows; Mac; as plugins in browsers, Like Flash; on portable devices; etc.

II) Game development is too big for us to continue to use the same tools that we've designed for system programming. The key is to make a language that is designed 100% for game developement. Period. PHP does well because it has one well defined job. The language I have is still missing alot of the constructs we are used to, such as switch statements, but it's definetly shaping up nice.

III) Of course, a compiler that turns that nice language into an equally impresive bytecode. The current compiler I have is still a toddler, so it falls sometimes when it tries to run -- but with enough nurturing I'm sure it will develop into a nice specimen.

IV) And the last, but certainly not least: Community support for addon libraries. 5,000,000 programmers are better than 100 -- with a simple way create native C/C++ classes for the language that allows the virtual machine to do anything the developers want the issue of not having a feasible game platform for Linux and the Open Source Community becomes a non-issue.


I hope developers participate in this project when i release it so that we don't miss oportunities like this NASA thing in the future. vl@d $:

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Low-Grav Instagib CTF on the Facing Worlds map = best game ever.