Open-DIS

1
Open-DIS

• Open Source Distributed Interactive Simulation
  Protocol in C and Java

Don McGregor (mcgredo ltatgt nps.edu)
2
Distributed Interactive Simulation

• What is it?
• Well-known military modeling simulation
  protocol, standardized in IEEE-1278 family of
  standards
• Used in real time military simulations
• Can interoperate with High Level Architecture
  (HLA) via gateways
• Actively being developed via the SISO DIS PDG
  200x standard is upcoming

3
Open Source Standards

• DIS is a classic candidate for an open source
  implementation
• Standardized in 1995, relatively slow moving
  target
• Many client applications
• Extremely long product cycles in DoD means
  licenses become a major issue as companies move
  on
• Why is the government paying for this code over
  and over again? In either buying a commercial
  implementation or paying contractors to write it
  for their own applications, the government has
  been paying people to write the same code for
  decades

4
Open Source DIS Strategy

• Do it, do it right, and give it away
• The free version should be higher quality than
  self-written implementations
• Create an open source reference implementation
  and stop re-inventing the wheel. Make it easier,
  better, and simpler to just download the code
  rather than to write or buy a version
• This requires a simple open source license that
  does not contaminate proprietary vendor code
• Works well with long product life cycles
• Aligns with DoD Modeling and Simulation Strategic
  Vision

5
Open-DIS

• Two implementations right now, trying to converge
  to one
• DIS-XML can read and write to XML, Java only
• Open-DIS Java and C source, but does not yet
  read write XML. This should be fixed shortly.
• Open-DIS is the first open source C
  implementation

6
XML Advantages

• Preferred format for archiving
• Access to the full range of XML tools,
  including databases (XML and relational),
  transformation, web services, etc
• Can ship XML-ified DIS across XMPP
• DIS data is no longer an island--its just more
  XML data

7
Getting the Code

• Source code is available for download at
  http//sourceforge.net/projects/open-dis
• License is BSD. Non-viral, intended to be as
  friendly as possible to commercial adoption
• We do not want to hear the excuse but this will
  make us open source our proprietary code--it
  wont.

8
Delta 3D

• The C work was done in cooperation with NPSs
  open source game engine, Delta3D--the objective
  is to have the game engine able to work with DIS
  and military sims, plugged in with SimKit
  discrete event simulation

9
Future Work

• Lots of potential future work here
• DIS-HLA gateway, using the Portico open source
  HLA implementation to bridge to the other major
  DoD MS networking standard
• Supporting tools Loggers, data analysis, etc.
•  DIS Enumerations
• In general create reference open source
  implementations of DoD MS standards
• Hook up DoD protocols to commercial MMOG
  frameworks