UTSAF: a simulation bridge between OneSAF and the Unreal game engine

Rapid advances in consumer electronics have led to the anomaly that consumer off the shelf (COTS) gaming hardware and software now provide better interactive graphics than military and other specialized systems costing orders of magnitude more. UTSAF is bridging software written to take advantage of the power of gaming systems by allowing them to participate in distributed simulations with military simulators such as OneSAF which use the DIS protocol. UTSAF parses DIS PDUs and uses the information gained to control entities within the Unreal game engine using the Game-Bots modification. This paper describes the advantages of game engine based simulation and the UTSAF bridging and control architecture. Our main contribution is to build a simulation bridge that enables affordable high-quality 3-D viewers for military simulations.