Open-DIS

Open Source Distributed Interactive Simulation Protocol in

C++ and JavaDon McGregor (mcgredo <at> nps.edu)

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

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

Open Source DIS Strategy

Do it, do it right, and give it awayThe free version should be higher quality than self-written

implementationsCreate 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 cyclesAligns with DoD Modeling and Simulation Strategic Vision

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

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--it’s just

more XML data

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 won’t.

Delta 3D

The C++ work was done in cooperation with NPS’s 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

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 M&S networking standard

• Supporting tools: Loggers, data analysis, etc.• DIS Enumerations• In general: create reference open source

implementations of DoD M&S standards• Hook up DoD protocols to commercial MMOG

frameworks