| Torque Ripe For M&S Community |
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I have only been in the M&S industry for 6 years, but over that time, I have seen the emergence of trends. The commoditization of graphics engines has occurred at a rapid pace. Standardization is rampant, and considered a required feature, for those program managers and agencies forced to rebuild multi-million dollar proprietary solutions when contracts, extended by monopolizing closed solutions, finally became too expensive to maintain. Lastly, fidelity and visual acuity are no longer considered a luxury. Visual systems require visuals better than a Nintendo 64 if you want to immerse your audience. This is especially true when your training 18 and 19 year olds like many within the M&S community. Garage Games, through the Torque Engine, is providing a solution that satisfies the needs of most of the desires that are driving this trend.
Years ago, engineers built their graphics system when building their M&S systems. Programmers made their work more efficient by sharing software rasterizers. The machines that ran these programs used brute force methods to achieve polygon throughput. The computer systems running these programs cost its owners millions of dollars to purchase and maintain. Not millions for a computer farm, millions for one or two machines. Spending a couple hundred grand developing the software paled in comparison to the cost of maintaining a refrigerator of CPUs. Then the PC arrived. Software became the expensive part of programs and graphics apis like OpenGL and DirectX matured providing means for even more efficient programming. Ask anyone who had to write custom drivers. Graphics solutions dropped in price by double digits every year. And contrary to what you may think, the drop in price was also accompanied by an increase in visual fidelity. In many circumstances, these jumps were fueled by the game industry converts. It was a grave time for those who believed they had developed a $50,000 a license goldmine. I had many people look at me in the eye and reply, oh, another IG, too bad for you (IG stands for image generator). Torque is one of the first engines I know that provides a commercial level product at a consumer level price. I can honestly say that I didnt think it could happen. The most common quote from those in the M&S industry that I heard was, How do those guys make any money? The license structure for Torque will support a whole new set of customers that require visualization and dont have billion dollar budgets. I cant imagine trying to compete with their engine on price. It cant be done. I believe that there are many within the M&S community who believe that the Torque Engine provides sub-standard utility to justify the price. I hope to be part of that solution. Let me jump back in time again to the old way of creating simulations. A group of very smart men and women would write a program for a specific type of M&S application. That worked well (excluding cost), but several problems occurred. Many times, the contractor, who was now sitting comfortable in their monopolized, proprietary position, stopped providing the service they one did. Its the proverbial, you dont bring me flowers dilemma. The other problem, solved with a similar solution, occurred when the owners of these projects tried to use two applications together. After all, why shouldnt you use a helicopter simulator and urban operations simulator together? The answer was a series of standard communication protocols. The first widely adopted was DIS. The replacement for DIS was HLA. The open source version is CIGI. These interfaces provided the ability to connect one simulator with another. It is very common for someone to ask me if I am DIS or HLA compliant. When you ask someone in the M&S community this question, the answer is ALWAYS, YES or YES, weve implemented most of it. The truth? Id say the most honest answer is, Yes, weve implemented 10% of the standard so that I can say we are compliant. I would implement the remaining 90% but chances are your simulator is very specific and uses a myriad of user defined packets so that fact that I speak DIS and/or HLA is somewhat irrelevant. If we start a contract I would love to charge you for the ability to connect your sim with mine. And this was still a better answer than rewriting everything from scratch. I see the Torque engine as a continuation of the standardization process. By using a standard rending engine (Torque?), a buyer will see many advantages. First, if they retain the rights to the art they develop, they can reuse it in many other simulations that are also based on Torque. Also, if they need to, they can switch vendors to another Torque based graphics provider. The community is another advantage of a full source solution. As a rendering standard, the buyer is no longer tied to the developer for advice. There are thousands who are trained in Torque, if they want to hire a consultant, they can. The possibility for a large number of Torque based graphics vendors exist because there is such a large number of available developers. Lastly, but not least, the graphics play a role in the M&S industry. There is a push in the M&S community known as Serious Games. Personally, I hate the name, but I like the concept. Since the game industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, a lot of R&D takes place. Graphics, along with game play, is the key to a successful game. Several years ago, generals and colonels compared their $40 ps2 game with their million dollar simulator. Why cant the simulator look like that? One reason is that the simulation industry doesnt share like the game industry does. Also, its just not as important to the sim industry, and those who are really into high end graphics, tend to want to work in the game industry. Ill admit it, TGE doesnt have the best rending pipeline in the industry, but it still will add a lot to the average simulation rendering engine (note TSE addresses many of the highest end graphics solutions). Do great graphics make great simulators? No, not alone they dont. There are many in the industry using game engines to make simulators look better without adding a better M&S solution for training and visualization. There are specific cases where enhanced graphics add an incredible amount. These cases include visual intensive situations like situational awareness, hazmat, forest fire, and sensors (IR,night vision, etc ). Another important case is when a desktop solution is a supplement to live training. If you expect people to train on their own, it needs to look good enough to keep people engaged. The Torque engine provides this ability with consumer game level quality. So what is it going to take to make this happen? A change in mindset; the M&S industry doesnt move that fast. Exposure; many in the M&S industry still arent aware of the functionality of the Torque engine. And lastly, time. In time, there will be hundreds of code modules that will enable Torques ability to infuse this market. I cant wait to see them hit the market. |