The United States Army and United States Marine Corps employ the Virtual Battlespace 3 (VBS3) commercial game for first-person small-unit training and have invested significantly in training scenarios constructed using proprietary tools and data formats. Open standards data structures need to be utilized in order to move toward improved interoperability, address the statutory intent for open competition and affordability, and protect investments made in models, terrain, and other elements of scenarios that are separate and distinct from the game engine source coding. Expanding capabilities for open scenario interchange will improve scenario reuse while creating greater opportunities for simulation data interchange and open competition for future virtual training capabilities. This paper describes and demonstrates initial application of Extensible Markup Language (XML) technologies to represent and interchange simulation scenario data. Design of XML data structures to capture a subset of a VBS2 scenario’s data content is successfully demonstrated, and the capability to transform content from the XML model back to the VBS2 scenario data formats utilizing an Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) document is discussed. Proposed extensions to existing and developing simulation standards are made in order to accommodate the set of data used in VBS2 scenarios. The research provides a foundation for future efforts to determine the feasibility of creating an open XML schema that addresses all critical aspects of a simulation scenario, which will enable open competition for the first-person “games for training� requirement while preserving investments in proprietary data structures.
Simulation Scenario Encoding for Reuse
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