Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
I play fantasy rpgs all time, yet, for some reason I feel unprepared for a sword fight...
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!!!!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
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 ;-)