VR-Engage is MAK’s multi-role virtual simulator. It lets you “Get in the Game” by directly controlling human characters or vehicle platforms in a variety of roles: Control a soldier’s avatar like a gamer using a keyboard-and-mouse interface; fly an aircraft using HOTAS hardware and touchscreen cockpit instruments; connect separate driver, gunner, and commander stations for multi-crew vehicle training; fly a virtual drone, or control a UAV sensor or remote camera using an off-the-shelf gamepad. Our customers use VR-Engage as the basis for trainee stations, for experimentation in battle labs, or to allow instructors or white cell operators to take manual control of wingmen, targets, or OPFOR characters.  When used together, MAK’s VR-Forces CGF and VR-Engage role-player stations provide correlated and consistent AI-controlled and player-controlled entities in a unified whole-earth, multi-domain synthetic environment.

VR-Engage 2.0 is a major feature release with a brand-new game-inspired user interface for joining scenarios, choosing roles, and navigating application features. This release also includes major improvements to the workflow for extending or configuring VR-Engage for custom roles, entity types, and I/O devices. And it delivers tons of new content and features as well. 

For a full list of improvements and bug fixes, explore the full VR-Engage 2.0 release notes.

VR-Engage 2.0 is built on the new VR‑Vantage 3.0.x rendering engine – which brings advanced new visual features such as horizon-based ambient occlusion, IR illumination, and localized weather effects. It is also built on the new fully multi-threaded VR‑Forces 5.0.x simulation engine – allowing VR-Engage to play in scenarios with much higher entity counts, greater performance, and more intelligent, coordinated behaviors for the non-player entities. 

New Application User Interface

For VR-Engage 2.0, we have modernized the application user interface to more closely resemble commercial game styles for menus, options, status overlays, pause screens, and more.  Semi-transparent UI elements, minimalist design, and clean separation of in-game controls from configuration functions are hallmarks of the new design. 

User, Admin, and Lockdown Modes 

As more of our customers deploy VR-Engage in deliverable training systems, it has become more important to limit player access to administrative functions that are more appropriately handed by the Instructor/Operator. In the default User Mode, VR-Engage players can no longer reset or restore their characters, pause or change scenarios, or control time or visual settings. A separate Admin Mode still allows VR-Engage players to do these things – to support battle lab or experimentation use cases. A new Lockdown Mode is even more restrictive than User Mode – leaving the job of assigning roles to stations to the VR-Forces-based IOS rather than allowing players to choose their own roles. 

Improved Configuration 

We have refactored and enhanced two of our key systems for extending and customizing VR-Engage: Our “Role Refactor” gives customers more power to create, edit, and manage custom roles – inheriting common parameters from generic role parents, so that role-specific configurations are simple, and only need to include parameters that are unique to the role or entity type – e.g. eyepoint location, weapon HUDs and status overlays, Vortex mechanism files for specific vehicle dynamics, etc.  Our “Input Refactor” greatly eases the job of customizing VR-Engage to work with new I/O devices – by providing an abstract, named set of run-time functions that can be mapped to various device axes, buttons, and other elements. 

Content

We've added hundreds of new models all attributed with textures and properties for visual rendering as well as material classifications for physics-based sensor rendering. New models designed for immersive scenes include rotating parts (wheels, blades, treads) and new particle systems for realistic visual effects. We've added so much new content that it would be impossible to list it all here. You can view the full listing in the VR-Forces Entity Model Catalog.

Other Features 

Some of the other new features in VR-Engage 2.0 include: 

• Support for Laser Designator / Rangefinder devices, and improved binoculars overlays 
• Ability to land helicopters on carrier 
• Lasing of targets from vehicles 
• Built-in configurations for Xbox controllers 
• Option to automatically reduce texture resolution when running on GPUs without enough texture memory for the highest-fidelity models and terrains 
• Improved heuristics for limiting the amount of terrain data that is paged in when using binocular or other sensors with magnification – without sacrificing visual quality  

Please have a look through the VR-Engage release notes for a complete list of improvements and bug fixes.

As always, please share your questions and comments with your “engineers down the hall” at support@mak.com, or explore the support resources available at www.mak.com/support.