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AFRL's OpenDIS Plugin Now Available

Air Force Research Lab’s OpenDIS plugin for Unreal Engine is now available as open source on the Unreal Marketplace and on GitHub for Unreal Engine 4.27. Support for Unreal Engine 5 is coming soon.

GRILL's plugin uses OpenDIS for sending and receiving DIS data in Unreal Engine.

AFRL’s Gaming Research Integration for Learning Lab (GRILL) is using the Cesium for Unreal plugin to visualize their DIS training simulations on the high accuracy WGS84 globe provided by the Cesium for Unreal plugin and on global terrain and imagery available through Cesium ion. With both commercial and government off the shelf gaming technology, GRILL builds tools for simulations that support operational efficiency and effectiveness.

To add even deeper and more expansive modeling and simulation capability to Unreal Engine's visually realistic environments, GRILL created an open source plugin that allows a user to interface with DIS.

Using the GRILL OpenDIS plugin with Cesium for Unreal

Networking options presented in the AFRL GRILL OpenDIS plugin.

DIS stands for Distributed Interactive Simulation. It's a protocol created by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) defined in a set of IEEE standards. DIS is one of the most widely used protocols in the US DOD, NATO, and other allied nations for real time simulations.

DIS works as a standardized approach to connecting simulations using a series of messages with specific formats that contain detailed information about individual players in an exercise. With DIS, simulations send a group of agreed-upon messages back and forth to each other over a network, which tell other simulations where the various things (called entities) in their own simulations are located, what they are, and what they're doing. If they're moving the entities will have a speed, and their location will change over time. Information about the current state of each entity is passed in a message. The various messages that can be sent not only tell movement and location, but also define the interactions between entities such as fire, detonation, Identification Friend or Foe, and emissions, among other things. It creates a common language so that simulations can work together in time.

OpenDIS is an open source implementation of the DIS protocol. OpenDIS is an effort to create a full implementation of the DIS protocol in Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, Objective-C, and C#. The project uses a BSD-style open source license and is developed mainly by the MOVES Institute at the US Naval Postgraduate School.

Visit Unreal Marketplace to get the plugin.