US Army to invest $50M in combat training games

[sbsmac 0]

Article

"In addition to the $50 million, the Army gaming unit has an undisclosed additional budget to purchase a state-of-the-art commercial video game system that will be fielded for training in February."

...

"We have an impending award announcement for the contract that we will make in the next couple of weeks," Stephens said.

Good luck BIS/BIA  

[4 IN 1 0]

i think they are going for the unreal 3 system instead of VBS system

[Spetz 0]

i wonder wat the DoD was thinking when it thought of the "Unreal"

but then again America's Army uses Unreal engine

[dslyecxi 23]

i think they are going for the unreal 3 system instead of VBS system

That would be pretty surprising, considering that the article sounds like it's talking about VBS2 features.

[twisted 128]

Quote[/b] ]Soldiers will be able to drive virtual vehicles, fire virtual weapons, pilot virtual unmanned aerial vehicles and do "most anything a soldier does" in a virtual battle space as large as 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers, she said.

A clue? bolded for clarification.

[Dwarden 1125]

well after reading whole article i can't really tell any other solution to be enough complex and offering rich than VBS2

i mean most likely not Americas Army 2 tho internal army version of AA 1 got some 'compliance' features with others sims too ...

so that probably rules out UE3.5 but who knows maybe they want CryEngine 2

[shinRaiden 0]

The Request for Quote was posted publicly, though I can't find a direct link to an archived version presently. A general summary though:

PEO STRI requested proposals from interested vendors for a product to be used as an immediate-need replacement for Ambush! as a common platform training system. Quotes needed to comprise completed products as well as administrative services, with capability demonstrations to immediately follow the close date of the RFP window.

How this product is to be used is beginning to become apparent from recent press articles published recently. PEO STRI is establishing a new primary sub-group specifically tasked with leveraging COTS technology for training and simulation requirements within Army training requirements. The implication of course is that it would primarily target the Gaming entertainment industry, due to the obvious need for combined entity simulation and visualization.

Looking at the known public history of both Ambush! and America's Army, it's significant to note that both products were not developed or managed by training groups. In the case of Ambush!, it was originally handled by DARPA, which has a specific research orientation. While some of the day-to-day management has transitioned, that 'ownership' still affects the usage and maintenance. With America's Army, it was a recruiting command initiative, that while successful in its original tasking, has never successfully been repurposed into an effective common training platform.

Additionally, fundamental technical limitations of AA due to its nature as a 'cave/corridor' shooter significantly restrict its ability to provide the flexibility for adaptive training. This compounded by the administrative overhead of the myriad contractors and complicated partnerships and history have unfortunately hobbled it from becoming a broad-base flexible training platform.

The most significant aspect of this group creation is that this is a Simulation and Training owned and oriented endeavor. The primary purpose is strictly training. Combined with the administrative backend to provide comprehensive end-to-end support Army-wide as a fundamental training tool for all units world-wide, this represents a significant new endeavor for training tools and methodologies.

-edit-

@Dwarden / 4 IN 1:

The RFP for the phase one immediate requirement was pretty clear that only fully functional 'deliverable' software packages would be eligible for consideration, eg a demonstration of deliverable requirements was scheduled for the week following the proposal close date. That rules out any development proposals or 'engine' projects.

Additionally, from what I've heard, the internal AA version is not substantively different from the public version, only a few slight performance parameters might be tweaked, and they have hooks to various hardware devices and additional models and maps.

One project I heard of a few years back was a group (again, research, not training orientation) got their hands on iirc several thousand session recordings of a given AA map, I can't remember if they said it included public sessions or not. Anyway, they shoveled all the sessions into a data warehouse, then mashed them together and did a stats analysis. The result was that they could then generate an overlay to determine the optimal method to 'pwn' that scenario most reliably. It was interesting to listen to, but I also have some concerns about thinking that figuring out how to optimally run a route being the orientation of the analysis.

@Twisted:

I wouldn't say that that is that much of a clue, but the rest of the technical requirements are well within the capabilities of the Real Virtuality 2 engine, and products based off of it.

[dslyecxi 23]

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=59814

[mr.g-c 6]

A huge Success, Congratulations from my side! The company which could provide the best solutions deserved the win - obviously that is BIS/BIA Technology.

I hope BIS/BIA employees can now sleep a bit better

But now there should be no excuse about "financial issues", IF Arma2 will be bugged-like-hell like it was with Arma1 upon release

[MehMan 0]

congrats to BIS/BIA for landing a huge contract like this.

[SaBrE_UK 0]

Congratulations BI. I hope Arma II benefits in some way from this

[sparks50 0]

Congratulations

[Mr_Tea 0]

Congratulations.

That`s an well earned win of an contract.

[sbsmac 0]

Well done to BIA and Laser-Shot too ! I notice that http://www.bistudio.com/ has been updated and has links to some VBS2 screenshots.

[Inkompetent 0]

Congratulations, BIS!

[misfitko 0]

Congrats BIS.

Really, there isn't any other game out there that can even think of touching Arma/VBS2 in this genre.

Maybe soon ofp2 but i doubt it tbh.

[MAA3057 0]

http://www.army.mil/-news/2009/01/15/15815-virtual-reality-system-lets-army-leaders-practice-integrating-joint-fires-into-opera

tions/

I guess they hadn't upgraded to the new engine, yeah?

[walker 0]

Hi all

The US Army has all ready recieved the first issue of VBS2 with the major Roll Out to be completed by September.

Initial roll out is Fort Hood, Fort Bragg then deployed thoughout the US Army, including Germany and Korea.

VBS2 is accepted as the Defacto Training environment throughout NATO and especialy in ABCA group.

Kind Regards walker

[walker 0]

Hi all

Interesting Article about VBS2 being used to train Engineer officers in the US.

Engineer school tests Virtual Battlespace 2

Tuesday, 08 September 2009

Story and photos by Luke Waack

Assistant editor

The U.S. Army Engineer School opened up its classrooms to be a test bed for the Army’s new Initial Assessment Exercise for captains career course students, and the latest version of a virtual combat simulator, Aug. 27.

The IAE is part of a captains career course re-design to enable more rapid infusion of lessons learned and best practices across all branches and functional areas, officials said.

“What we’re specifically doing here is an Initial Assessment Exercise, which is the first step inside the larger 21 week captains career course across all schools and centers,†said Maj. David Tollenaar, Captains Career Course Initial Assessment Exercise project manager...

Follow link for the full story

http://myguidon.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10896&Itemid=39

Kind Regards walker