British Soldiers Can’t Look Past ‘Realism’
Last week’s post from Sean Nack suggests that players shouldn’t let an obsession with “realism” get in the way of enjoying Battlefield 3, but apparently the British Ministry of Defence is having a hard time making that same argument with its own soldiers.
The Guardian reports the British military has turned to digital simulations to prepare soliders for duty and that “troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic.”
Thousands of UK troops who served in Afghanistan played Virtual Battlespace 2 as part of their training. The program is based on commercial gaming technology because soldiers “tend to lose concentration” if they military simulators don’t look as realistic as that copy of Black Ops they played back home. Andrew Poulter, the technical team leader at the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Portsdown, Hampshire is the guy who’s in charge of dealing with this kind of thing:
“Certainly, there is a level of computer games experience in recruits. So the plots have to be realistic and the image generation has to be high quality. A lot of the older systems can be very clunky. If you put someone behind a block display, it is harder for them to be completely immersed.” But though the commercial games “may look graphically beautiful, they have to be entertaining rather than realistic”.
Poulter and his nine-strong team will adapt the software so that the weapons perform as they would in combat “The weapons need to be credible. If they fire a rifle and the bullet travels three and a half miles, then that is not right. If they are steering a vehicle, then that has to be right too. Realism is more important than entertainment. Levels of immersion are very important.”
Here’s what we want to know: what do the soldiers think? How VBS2 compare to BF3 or MW3? Do they really care about realism? Can any FPS game really help prepare someone for combat?
![Der Gro?mufti von Jerusalem [Amin al Husseini] bei den bosnischen Freiwilligen der Waffen-SS. Der Gro?mufti ist auf dem Truppenubungsplatz ein[getroffen] und schreitet die Front der angetretenen Freiwilligen mit erhobenem Arm ab.](http://images-undertheradar.military.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/nazicollaborators300.jpg)
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3 Comments
No one is saying that the troops don’t want realistic handling weapons and vehcles. We get that. What we want is something that looks decent. COntract some high quality game studios to work on the graphics, animations and all that stuff.
Sev — and who’s going to pay the going rate for Games Developers and Graphics Artists and AI specialists? Not the MOD for sure — that’s why we started using derivative of COTS apps in the first place — minimum investment for potentially most return.
A Games Company that can turn over $1BN for a AAA game is NOT going to any work for a $5M Military contract UNLESS its a bonus Five Mil that requires almost no extra work for the in-house developers who already work on the NEXT game. (i.e. VBS2 is using the original Armed Assault Engine, Armed Assault 2 and add-ons are already two generations of graphics/physics modelling ahead of this).
The Military (despite what their egos would have you believe) are very small fry in this now — Games and Entertainment companies will always lead the way now in terms of Graphics and to a lesser extent Physics and AI.
What we need are well trained military personnel who can see past the “shiny” and into the “realism” and know enough about both worlds (Military Sim and Commercial Games) to successfully pull in the “everyday Tommy” and convince them (because they know it to be true) that a level of “looks right” is fine, as long as the “is right” going on in the background really is “fit for purpose”.
Hello all
First up the problem with both the CRY, COD and BF3 raft of game engines is that while they make very realistic Hollywood film games, they just do not make realistic simulations. Which is why when it comes down to it the military dismiss them.
Secondly their lighting and graphics is primarily aimed at the console crowd which is very long in the tooth and old fashioned both in terms of hardware and in terms of extensibility, even when they get ported to PC and boast the latest version of DX, the reality is that they just use the sticker with only a vague nod to its capabilities in the the form of Hollywood shinnies, and frankly not realistic graphics.
Thirdly all three are shoebox or corridor shooters. They can not produce the required scale. Bullets fly upwards of 300m right on up to 3000m artillery shells fly miles. Then you throw in aircraft. Those engines are just not up to showing terrain sizes in the hundreds or thousands of square miles.
Fourthly those game engines do not deal with ballistics. In most cases there are no bullets just a laser tracked LOS coming out from between the entity/avatars eyes; it is not even coming out of the gun.
Point Five they do not model movement, the avatar is a camera on rails. This has effects on ballistics and refocus visual acuity. Failing to simulate these means any product that results in bad training. Making a soldier think will be able to do the things they see in a Hollywood film game.
Point six. Those three game engines are not capable of the entity counts required, that is everything from bullets to soldiers, to tanks to, helicopters to all the clutter from civilians and even animals. VBS and the RV engine runs to entity counts in the many thousands.
Point Seven the game engine makers need to realise that the military do not need, want and indeed cannot afford the very latest games PCs every year, and that current console platforms are too limited. A Few may know that the game industry dwarfs both the film and music industry combined but it is doubtful they realise that their industry is ten times the size of the military simulation market.
Point Eight
The game engine and and old style military simulation development environments are completely the opposite.
The game engine environment is Rapid Application Development.
The Bespoke Simulation Business model is one of: secure a contract to do a research project, secure another contract to expand it into test environment, secure another to create a product based on the test environment, secure increased costs to test it, secure bigger costs to implement it on a small scale, secure, bigger costs to implement it on a medium scale plus a support contract that the costs are kept to maximum to ensure the maximum cost, on which to the base the cost plus percentage on so that profit is maximised and incidentally ensuring the product will always be late to market.
The reason game engines can work in the military simulations market is because the development costs and most importantly the Beta Testing is covered by the game, which is developed in a the high tech bleeding edge cut throat and 100% capitalist games market. VBS is just an additional product based off the cash cow of an already developed engine.
A bespoke simulation supplier could never and will never be able to apply a development team of the size and skill that a game engine creator can. Most bespoke developers have actual development teams of perhaps 6 often low grade and badly paid developers. Nor can it take advantage of a community to beta test and develop new product. It is stuck in a national secure lab.
The COTS producer can employ the best in the world and afford it. It then gets to use the latest testing software and indeed the full might of the most toxic beta testing arena known to man: the open market of screaming anarchic games players and the hacker and pirate infested Internet to scrub every last bug out of their product.
This is an economy of scale advantage that a games engine has over other sources of simulation environment.
The sales models are also completely different The Bespoke business model seems to be secure a flexible budget first then develop.
COTS means you have already developed the product and supply it ready to work out of the box at a set up front cost. Maybe even let the customer try it for free first. Agree a license and some support package over a fixed term.
Point Nine
BI Sim Changed the market.
BI Sim did things a different way:
To be a real competitor to BI Sim any game engine based competitor has to open their engine up to modding in the same way that Bohemia Interactive did. This is frightening for game developers and BI is one of the few to do it. By doing so BIS gave itself an army of developers to recruit from. Many of them serving or former military personnel. The most important thing to open up is the scenario development platform. That is the key.
In the military this means the scenario developers are the, officers, training sergeants, and experienced soldiers in the field.
Issuing VBS with a soldiers boots!
The whole marketing concept for VBS was to make it Ubiquitous. Issue it with a soldiers boots! That every soldier is encouraged to download or directly given on DVD at least the lite version of the simulation, is the VBS business model.
Most countries buy VBS as either lab licenses which are considerably discounted or the enterprise license usually along with the support package allowing them to install as many copies as they like. So the price per individual license is not relevant to most militaries.
The US Army paid 17 Million US dollars for the enterprise license. Compared to the 4 Billion dollar cost of CCTT it is very very cheap, not only that but it can be used to upgrade the dodgy software in other systems. It can also be used in a bog standard laptop in theatre on a ship or in barracks thus removing the cost and requirement of expensive training labs.
Versatility first, focus second
VBS is also very versatile in what it can train, but it is capable of being focused to training need using the Modding tools. Most Bespoke products are pure focus designed to do one job and one job only, a universal simulator destroys the specialist business model of the high priests of development being necessary to create each individual simulation in as expensive a way as possible at dear old cost plus.
Marketing Math, prices designed to encourage 100% buy in
The US Army Active personnel is 1,477,896, Reserve personnel 1,458,500 plus any number of additional seats for training and research departments, and also officer training colleges etc. If we say a round figure of 4 Million seats we will not be far wrong 17 Million divided 4 Million works out to around 4 dollars per seat. That puts the per seat cost at less than a quarter the cost of them buying ArmA and yes the costs were designed that way.
The pricing structure was designed to encourage the customer at each stage to see it as a far better option to buy the next discount phase up. It was also designed to make it obvious for the military customer that VBS was cheaper than ArmA. BIS were not interested in selling individual licenses, they could never make a profit selling that way which is the same as the existing business model, the concept was to CHANGE THE SHAPE OF THE MARKET from the high cost low volume bespoke specialist model to the Mass Market model used in the games market that BIS as a business was designed to compete in.
The US Army, USMC, UK MOD, CA and ADF all followed that strategy and the whole of NATO as well; and most of the PFP countries are in the process of following it too.
By doing this BIS ensured the maximum amount of sales and flooded the market, thus seriously disrupting its competitors, and allowing it to take advantage as the stupid ones go extinct and the brighter ones spend time and money rearranging the company to cope with the new market environment.
Market exploitation from a position of strength
VBS is now busy hoovering up modification contracts and expanding into more and more roles. Most of their competitors are having to ask if they can develop on the platform, BI-Sim say fine here is our developer partner pricing structure and hoover up more cash. The customer wants training in VBS their first port of call is the originators of the program BI-Sim, they want code refinement or new MODs, they want a source of local developers or administrators for labs to get security cleared, who is their first port of call? BI-Sim and this communities former and serving military members of course.
Games is a far more lucrative market, as I say the whole thing about VBS is that it is a Cash Cow developed off an existing product. Entering this niche market is a sensible strategy.
So in order to compete any game engine based solution has to achieve both similar community of developer capability and pricing. That is because BI-Sim purposefully changed the market. Essentially it undercuts the competition, just the same as Microsoft did to IBM, but be aware just like the PC boom that followed Microsoft’s PC revolution there is now a simulation boom in the offing so the developers of the Game Engines have identified the coming market what they have not done is identify how to exploit it.
All in all it means the military gets more bang for its buck.