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For more than 20 years, MÄK has upheld a steadfast commitment to open standards with our native support for High Level Architecture (HLA) and Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS).
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The HLA protocol has evolved and changed quite a bit over the years, adding more and improved features like FOM modules and update rate reduction. As a part of our continued support for the standard, MÄK has worked to ensure that our entire product line supports these new features, as well as maintains compatibility with older systems.
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DIS, on the other hand, has largely remained the same with a noticeably more limited feature set than HLA. The standards committee has recently approved DIS version 7 to rectify some of these limitations and, of course, we will support this new standard throughout our entire product line.
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What this means for you
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Because all MÄK products use VR-Link and its protocol-independent interface, updating our whole product line to support this new standard is painless. Whenever we add support for an updated protocol, a simple recompile of our other products is often all that is needed.
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Our customers gain this advantage also. If you purchased VR-Link fifteen years ago and integrated it into your product, enjoy an easy upgrade to the latest version of VR-Link with very little work. Almost magically, your product will support the latest version of HLA. And soon, it will support DIS 7.
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With the release of VR-Link 5.0 later this month, our customers can use the latest version of DIS with minimal recompiling effort. As is our norm, we will continue to support previous versions of DIS indefinitely. It is our job to keep up with the newest standard so you don’t have to
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What’s new in DIS 7?
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DIS 7 has a number of new and expanded PDUs to offer, but the most exciting improvements are in the areas of performance and extendibility.
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Performance
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DIS, unlike HLA, heartbeats all of its entities making it easier to handle late joiners and dropped messages. However, this also means that there are more messages than necessary in the network. DIS 7 alleviates this problem by defining different heartbeating values under different conditions.
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For example, you can now set a heartbeat value for entities that are stationary, so that they update infrequently. Moving entities update more often.
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Similarly, you can now set a different heartbeat value for each entity type. Fast moving airplanes can update rapidly so as not to miss their complex maneuvering. At the same time, tanks on the ground update at a slower pace. When optimally configured, this will help DIS exercises scale to new levels.
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Extendibility
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DIS 7 provides a new PDU, called the Attribute PDU, that can be attached to every other PDU to extend DIS. For example, let’s say you want to include a new field "ThirstLevel." You can now put that field inside the Attribute PDU, and then bundle this PDU with every life form entity. This allows every PDU in DIS to be extended however you want. If you are using VR-Link, we take care of the bundling and unbundling for you, so extending entities is a simple matter of adding a new name/value pair to your object or interaction.
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For more information, write to marketing@edstechnologies.com
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