December 01, 2009. Orlando, Florida : VT MÄK, (MÄK), a company of VT Systems Inc (VT Systems), today announced the release of the Entity Boost plug-in for VR-Forces. This module is the latest component of a cross-product strategic initiative to support greater scalability for large exercises. MÄK will be demonstrating the scalability capabilities of Entity Boost and other MÄK products at I/ITSEC in their booth (#1819) and at the Innovation Showcase on Tuesday, December 1 at 2:45 pm.

As part of the initiative for greater scalability, MÄK is leveraging diverse technologies including multi-resolution modeling, multi-threaded design, multicast filtering, cloud-computing, and the High Level Architecture’s (HLA) Data Distribution Management (DDM). Nearly all MÄK products, including VR-Forces, VR-Vantage, VR-Link, the MÄK RTI, and the MÄK Data Logger, will be updated as part of this effort to better support large exercises. Combining the capabilities of the products and the technologies, MÄK can provide a platform for scaling up to 100,000 entities and beyond.

The new VR-Forces Entity Boost plug-in adds support for Interest Management through the use of HLA’s DDM. Interest Management is a key to solving system-wide scalability problems.

In many scenarios, no individual participant needs to know about all the entities all at once. Interest Management means limiting the number of entities any single application needs to handle based on its areas of interest. There may be tens of thousands of entities in the virtual world, but a simulated security camera application only needs to know about the two hundred pedestrians that are passing in front of it at any given time.

Upcoming releases of VR-Vantage and the MÄK Data Logger will add support for Interest Management and DDM as well.

VR-Forces is MÄK’s software toolkit for generating and executing battlefield scenarios. It can be used as a tactical leadership trainer, threat generator, behavior model testbed, or computer generated forces application. VR-Forces customers include RUAG, the Thales Watchkeeper UAV program, and Raytheon’s DDG 1000 program.

VR-Vantage, which is built on OpenSceneGraph (OSG), consists of the next generation MÄK Stealth, MÄK’s 3D information station; Vantage IG, a desktop image generator for viewing out-the-window scenes; and the VR-Vantage toolkit to extend the included visual applications or even build new applications. The MÄK Data Logger is a simulation recorder.

“Over the past few years, we’ve seen the requirements for large scale simulation grow dramatically. It used to be that simulations with a few thousand entities were considered large. Now our customers need to scale up to tens of thousands of entities and beyond. We want to make sure our products support our customers’ requirements without needing a supercomputer or specialized cluster. With a modest network of standards PCs, along with simulation and visualization tools from MÄK, customers can scale the heights of simulation.”