Enhancing The Flight Simulator Experience Using HLA

Commercial Flight Simulator Packages often lack the ability for the player to know where he is on a geographical scale. Unless the player is familiar with the location of the flight there is no means to determine the direction that he must fly to reach his destination. This paper will show how the capabilities of the HLA regime allows a geographical map display to be linked directly to the flight simulation software and display, in real-time, the location and resulting path of the Flight Simulator aircraft. Additional player challenges may be created as a result of such development through the incorporation of a scenario generator/controller. This enables multiple participants to co-exist and potentially interact in the same simulation along with other computer generated forces (CGF). With innovative solutions for the implementation of HLA technology, lateral application of these techniques may be used in the military arena for use in systems design, tactical development and force disposition studies. This paper describes the systems architecture implemented for the development of the flight simulator environment enhancements. It discusses the use of FOM hierarchies, federation communities and their ability to enable systems model development to be distributed amongst disparate groups of software developers. The requirements to adapt legacy software and commercially available packages through the use of ambassadors and/or libraries are also discussed.