UK Ministry of Defense Improves War Games For Console Generation

hypnosec writes "The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) has begun updating its Battlespace2 and other simulations to bring them in line with commercial wargames like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. Andrew Poulter heads up the technical team behind the war-game and said that while back in the '80s and '90s, military simulations were state of the art, today they have fallen far behind commercial alternatives in terms of graphics and plot. With that in mind, the MoD has been investing heavily in what's known as 'Project Kite' (knowledge information test environment), designed to bring the training software to the forefront of military shooters. Some of this is down to the current generation of new recruits having been raised on shooter titles from both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. This means they've gotten used to high-quality first-person shooter games. Taking a step down in graphics and immersion is hardly a way to train a soldier how to react in certain situations."

Comments

Important distinction

[kamapuaa]

So remember slashdot, national militaries use these games as both training and propaganda, but actually there's no relation between video games and violent acts.

Re:Important distinction

[Mr EdgEy]

These games often take part using real rifles to aid in the training process as it's cheaper and easier than having guys out on a range.

Small difference between that and CoD using a controller.

Re:Important distinction

[IICV]

So remember slashdot, national militaries use these games as both training and propaganda, but actually there's no relation between video games and violent acts.

Well, it's not like these are two mutually contradictory positions, is it?

I mean, does playing Microsoft Flight Simulator or X-Plane make you more likely to fly airplanes? Does playing Angry Birds make you more likely to throw birds at pigs? Does playing Deus Ex make you more likely to get implants? Does playing World of Warcraft make you more likely to do the Safety Dance?

Even if a video game can train you in skills transferable to real life (and honestly, if you've played MW3 or BF3, you'd know that they're not at all realistic except maybe in the graphics department), that doesn't mean that it somehow forces you to use those skills.

Re:Important distinction

[Charliemopps]

I play fantasy rpgs all time, yet, for some reason I feel unprepared for a sword fight...

Re:Important distinction

[geekmux]

These games often take part using real rifles to aid in the training process as it's cheaper and easier than having guys out on a range.

Small difference between that and CoD using a controller.

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Putting a real rifle in their hand isn't going to easily remove years and years of disillusioned immortality. Good luck to them surviving on an actual battlefield where bullets hurt and frag grenades kill, not just turn your vision red and vibrate a piece of fucking plastic in your hand. And standing there breathing for 45 seconds doesn't suddenly heal you.

Cheaper and easier does not always mean better.

Re:Important distinction

[sempir]

These games often take part using real rifles to aid in the training process as it's cheaper and easier than having guys out on a range.

Jeezuz...these people must go through a shit load of monitors!!!!

Re:Important distinction

[drinkypoo]

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Your hands are working, but nothing is coming out.

There's TONS of FPS games that have realistic damage models. We could go back to Tactical Ops for Unreal Tournament, which is like cheaterstrike without the goofy classes, with more realistic weapons, and with many one-hit-kills. A hit with anything in the head with no head armor will off you almost every time, sometimes you can take a glancing 9mm.

Cheaper and easier does not always mean better.

Ditto snarkier.

Re:Important distinction

[mickwd]

"There's TONS of FPS games that have realistic damage models."

Of course. I've lost count of the number of computer games that actually injure or kill you.

Re:Important distinction

[rolfwind]

You're forgetting about the fact that the target audience here(basically a bunch of FPS addicts) have known nothing else but FPS games and the ridiculous rules within. The ability to take 20 rounds before "dying"(and then being revived again) is completely normal concept, yet hardly imitates real life.

Putting a real rifle in their hand isn't going to easily remove years and years of disillusioned immortality. Good luck to them surviving on an actual battlefield where bullets hurt and frag grenades kill, not just turn your vision red and vibrate a piece of fucking plastic in your hand. And standing there breathing for 45 seconds doesn't suddenly heal you.

Cheaper and easier does not always mean better.

That's okay. In 40-100 years, we'll be killing 3rd world citizens with remotely piloted terminators, which will completely into line with current FPS shooters.

But until we get there, most people kinda know their bodies != what's on screen. And the ones that do think that, well, a round of darwin awards on me.

Re:Plot!?

[Fluffeh]

There are many FPS games with amazing plots.

The Unreal (not tournament) series had a great unfolding story about life on alien worlds.
Doom had a simple, yet interesting plot that you got into. This was nicely followed with each title in the series.
Gear of War? While I haven't played that, the story telling is supposed to be great?
And even going back to days when FPS was still in infancy, what about titles like Heretic?
Dead Space? Deus Ex? You can't play a few games online without touching the single player mode of a game and say it has no plot or that no-one plays for the plots.

Battlefield is just a game, not training material

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully they don't take Battlefield's system of how the game progresses as part of the "realism" that they are after. The game, while it does have great graphics, sound, etc., it shouldn't be used as anything similar to a training ground. While I'm sure the "realism" aspect is there somewhere, there are too many glaring aspects about Battlefield that makes it obvious that it is Just A Video Game.

And what plot? Not only are the plots in FPS games lacking in almost all cases, but how do they compare to a plot in a war? Is there a plot in a real life war?

Re:Plot!?

[Trepidity]

A few hours ago, Mars received a garbled message from Phobos. "We require immediate military support. Something fraggin' evil is coming out of the Gateways! Computer systems have gone berserk!" The rest was incoherent. Soon afterwards, Deimos simply vanished from the sky. Since then, attempts to establish contact with either moon have been unsuccessful.

You and your buddies, the only combat troop for fifty million miles were sent up pronto to Phobos. You were ordered to secure the perimeter of the base while the rest of the team went inside. For several hours, your radio picked up the sounds of combat: guns firing, men yelling orders, screams, bones cracking, then finally, silence. Seems your buddies are dead.

Re:Obvious solution for future UK adversaries

[Fluffeh]

I am not sure that it is possible to make a vehicle look like a hollow box made out of green, red and blue Pool Noodles. Also, the octagonal wheels found in most graphics from the 80's would give the vehicles terrible handling.

Hope they are realistic

[Osgeld]

you cant take a rocket propelled grenade in the face in real life for only 25% health damage like you can in many FPS's

Re:Hope they are realistic

[bre_dnd]

I learnt all I cared to learn about hand to hand combat in paintball. You'll last 5-10 minutes before being shot.

The only way to win, is not to play.

realistic training

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to see some of the training being conducted with Virtual Battlespace2, check out: http://www.youtube.com/tbocsims

If you want to know where this is heading...

[GrpA]

Then you may want to read the free book: "Military Diorama" - http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35490

This book is presently in use with the Military Simulations industry ( or at least with specific companies within it ) as a context model to help people understand why simulation technology is important.

If you want to examine the ethics behind testing of human subjects for reactions, you can also read "Turing Evolved" which is set 28 years after Military Diorama and is also a free book. http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/34627

Both of the books are free to download and distribute ( released as "Shareware" ), well reviewed on all major ebook sites and both examine the technology of military simulations and the ethics behind them. One of the larger military simulation companies reviewed both stories and now uses them as a context model to explain where the technology is going and what it's purposes are for. They described Military Diorama as "A lot closer to the truth than many of us like to admit"

GrpA.

So in this story "the West" wants better games...

[ibsteve2u]

...while in the very next story China is looking at moving into space in a big way. I take it there are lower "labor" costs and higher profit margin in games?

combat simulations? sure..

[Cederic]

the current generation of new recruits having been raised on shooter titles from both the Call of Duty and Battlefield series. This means they've gotten used to high-quality first-person shooter games. Taking a step down in graphics and immersion is hardly a way to train a soldier

Unless, I don't know, you want a soldier to know how to react to a situation in a professional, reasonable, efficient, safe, appropriate and lawful manner.

All the games will teach him is "Don't touch the door until your sergeant tells you to open it", "headshot the bad guy at the first opportunity" and "don't use your initiative because we didn't program in that path of action".

Please, if you're not the UK, do use MW3 as your military training aid.

Arma 2 is VBS 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphically Arma 2 is on par with Battlefield 3 and COD. VBS 2 is essentially Arma 2.

Arma 3 and the next iteration of VBS will blow away the console ports. BF3 had tiny playable maps compared to Arma.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBS2

America's Army: Operations

[Anonymous Coward]

AA:O completely took me by surprise many years ago. Who thought that the US Army of all things would produce a tactical shooter that was ACTUALLY good!?

Of course, being the geniuses they are, they managed to fuck it up, though it did take a little while. The Special Forces patch is where, after that, it started to really go downhill. It stopped being a 'video game' and became just a 'promotional tool'. Which it always was, but that's still not an excuse to let quality bottom out...

The problem: They hired an actual game dev studio, then fired them as soon as the game was done. They have done this many times. This is NOT how you make and support a video game.

A shame all in all. I still look fondly back on those days. They really had something special. Getting to shoot(and shoot beside) real military personnel was also greatness. =D

VBS2

[FoltynD]

MOD UK is cutting budgets and everything so they will for sure throw away theirs VBS2 1.5 and 2.0 licenses and hardware (irony) just to buy 10 times more expensive less packed fancy visuals console 'sim' where hardware cost only 3 times more :) latest major installment of VBS2 is 1.5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R1gCGaunLA the upcoming (already being evaluated by customers) is VBS2 2.0 http://armory.bisimulations.com/products/vbs2/overview?qt-vbs2_sidebar=8#qt-vbs2_sidebar which has graphical level of ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead /Take On Helicopters and BI Simulations already shown ARMA 3 renderer in action for the VBS2 usage ... journalism w/o facts ftw. :)

Its disturbing

[peawormsworth]

I feel it is disturbing using video games to program the mind to be comfortable with death and killing. But reality is that in heavy situations, the amount of hesitation over killing in battle and subsequent shell shock results can be as high as 1:1. Meaning 1/2 of ur men could become effectively useless in heavy battle. Providing a framework for the mind to accept and rationalise the horrors that can occur is essential in getting the most efficiency out of ur men. I hate to admit it, but a soldier who doesn't think twice before killing is an ideal soldier. Its sad though that we have to do program minds like this. And its a little scary that they tools we use are the same ones our children play with. But I suppose it is in line with military recruitment commercials that imply joining the military is a good way to "see the world" and drive cool machinery. These "games" are evil, but if you believe peace requires war and peace is the goal... then our re-programming tools should be top of the line.

graphics not big deal, physics and ai may be

[Anonymous Coward]

The physics in some of our games suck. You get shot, and somebody comes over and waves a wand and you are healed. I would guess the military has had better physical simulation for a long time.

I know that Atari Race Drivin' is still the most realistic driving game I have ever played. It's graphics are primitive, but effective. Newer games are ridiculous, and noneffective.

If the military put effort into terrain climbing, including fatigue simulation, fighting boredom, responses to surprises...

If you have to take a shit and are caught with your pants down, have to drag your injured... These could be worthwhile, but it could work with minecraft style graphics.

Re:graphics not big deal, physics and ai may be

[FunPika]

The best type of physics fail I generally see in games is that no matter how many times you get shot, you are completely fine until you hit 0HP.

My experience writing military game engines

[mdarksbane]

I had a job for three years as a developer on a 3d engine (Image Generator) for the military.

In theory, you could make some great graphics for this stuff. Because normally it's running on a dedicated box that you are building from scratch and delivering as part of a solution, that you can stuff the highest end graphics card imaginable into. Moreover, since the simulation needs to be high end, most of the physics, AI, and control are handled by an entirely separate computer, leaving yours free to just render network packets.

However, then it starts to get difficult. One technical issue is that most of these simulations are running on network using different military simulation protocols. Protocols that are not designed to handle quick-twitch gamer reactions, or good animations, but to show symbols on a top down map. Moreover, depending on what your packet source it is, it may be difficult to get positional updates regularly enough to even make a plane "fly" smoothly - let alone handling infantry reactions quickly enough. Not to mention that the engine I worked on could support play boxes a couple hundred miles across... in CoD3 you can only see a few hundred yards at a time. Imagine walking across all of the generated terrain in the MS flight sims...except for it all has to be accurate to aerial footage.

But that isn't the real problem with making the engines look nice. The real problem is that the brass don't care about good lighting or artwork. They mostly care about your support tool setup, how easily it integrates, how cheap it is, and how big of an playbox you can support well. This means that the number of artists on a project is 1/50th of that on a good title.

Most modern games have a small core of engineers, and then hordes and hordes of artists tweaking every aspect of the characters and levels. The shop I worked at had about 3 programmers and a single 3d artist, who also had to do the animation and texturing. Our competitors had two programmers and an artist. I know one major IG shop, one of the big names in flight sims, who were down to one developer.

Even selling your licenses at something like 10-20k per seat, you can't afford to hire many artists. There's steady work providing these solutions, but there isn't the "make it big" potential. The market is too niche, fairly fragmented, and not driven by graphics.

And that was the commercial side of things. The military itself had a couple engines that it always was paying someone to work on, but they tended to look even worse. They'd usually try to get contractors to work on them as part of implementing a larger training setup, but the contractors had no incentive to do more than the bare minimum on that engine than to get that one sim up and running.

I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, the backend engine part of most military sims is a harder and more annoying problem than it is in video games, every deployment requires weird custom code, and there's little to no monetary incentive to spend cash on the armies of artists it takes to make a game look good...

Which is too bad, because everyone writing these engines *really* want to make them look good ;-)

Re:Plot!?

[LoRdTAW]

Max Payne. It was the first time I felt like I was playing a novel. The story was great and the graphic novel panels between scenes really immersed you into the story.

for consideration

[P-niiice]

"What are you doing private?" "Teabagging you , sir."