Virtual war: The army and technology

Posted at: Thursday 6th September 2007 by James Gorbold

James Gorbold joins the British Army at its high-tech Land Warfare Centre to see just what the military are doing with the most expensive computer games in the world.

While PC gamers expect to be able to play with each other in the same game, the military wants the ability to link different simulations. To make this happen, a number of companies are working on network protocols that allow different simulators to communicate with one another. One such example is Calytrix LVC Game (www.calytrix.com), which already supports several off-the-shelf military simulators, allowing joint infantry and armoured vehicle training. Looking further into the future, the British Army also confirmed that it's working on a project to network the Army Air Corps' Apache attack helicopter flight simulators at Middle Wallop with the CATT, allowing true combined arms training sessions.

The trade-off between realism and better graphics is also likely to become a thing of the past as PC game developers and hardware manufacturers move into the military simulation market. Although id Software was the first PC game developer to publicly admit selling a version of one of its games to the military with Doom II, several other companies have made serious inroads into this market. One such company is eSim Games (www.esimgames), the developer of Steel Beasts Professional; this game was developed from Steel Beasts, which was hailed as one of the best PC tank simulators when it was released in 2000.

However, the real poster boy for this movement is Bohemia Interactive (BI). With offices in the Czech Republic and Australia, the company (www.bistudio.com) has been developing PC and Xbox games since 1999 but is probably best known for its highly successful Operation Flashpoint (www.flashpoint1985.com) and Armed Assault (www.armedassault.com) games. The success of Operation Flashpoint provided Bohemia Interactive with the means to develop a military-spec version of the game, Virtual Battlefield System 1 (VBS1), which was released in 2001, and is currently used by the USMC and the Australian Defence Force. Earlier this year, an updated version based on Armed Assault, Virtual Battlespace 2 (VBS2) (www.vbs2.com), was released. VBS2 is based on an all-singing, all-dancing DirectX 9 engine, which makes extensive use of pixel shader effects such as HDR and depth of field blur, making it far more graphically advanced than any other military simulator. Not surprisingly, there has already been a lot of interest in VBS2, such as the purchase of an enterprise licence by the MOD in May for the British Army.