Game technology, and in particular first person shooter (FPS) games, such as Quake II, Quake III and Unreal Tournament, provide attractive capabilities for some of the traditional modeling, training and simulation (M&S) applications. A PC game-based simulation would be most useful if it operated with existing military simulations using their existing terrain databases (TDBs). However, PC games use different formats from the ones traditionally used by military simulations.

This paper will describe the necessary steps to import the traditional M&S TDBs into the format used by several common FPS games, in particular Quake II MAP format. A brief overview of the MAP format will be provided and compared to the traditional polygonal format used in the modeling and simulation community. Details of the conversion process of an OpenFlight Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) database to a Quake II level will be presented, as well as the conversion of a Quake level to a semi-automated forces (SAF) system's terrain database (TDB) format. A brief overview of a prototype's DIS engine added to Quake II will be provided, along with some lessons learned. Finally, comments will be presented as to the suitability of the Quake II game engine environment format and runtime engine for M&S applications.