BISim rolls out major revamp to VBS4 and bags new Mantle ETM customer, says CCO
BISim will showcase the new version of the Mantle ETM terrain enterprise at I/ITSEC. (Photo: BISim)
The VBS4 updates include a range of new features and general improvements, while the latest version of the terrain enterprise Mantle ETM supports Common Database (CDB) format.
Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim) has finished the largest software update of its flagship product, the VBS4, the company told Shephard in an exclusive interview a few weeks ahead of I/ITSEC 2022.
The new update includes an array of novel features and general improvements. The 2D map has been revamped and now supports online sources from Google Maps and Bing. The software’s visuals are also improved significantly with volumetric clouds, 3D grass and updated global roads and buildings.
Despite the significance of these updates, the company’s main focus at the world's largest military training show will not be on VBS, but on its terrain enterprise, founder and CCO of BISim Pete Morrison told Shephard.
BISim launched its cloud-based Mantle ETM terrain product at the last IT2EC exhibition in London.
This allows operators to build any kind of terrain and use it in sync with third-party training or simulation software. Mantle ETM carries out an automatic combination of many different data sources and exports them to different runtimes in a correlated manner.
‘We’ve got the latest version of that software,’ Morrison said. ‘We have been contracted to continue working on that for the US Army.’ Within the army’s Synthetic Training Environment (STE), the platform can provide a digital twin of the Earth to reinforce a synthetic military environment.
Another, undisclosed, military organisation recently signed a multimillion-dollar contract with BISim for Mantle ETM.
The company will showcase the new version of the terrain enterprise at I/ITSEC between 28 November and 2 December. Morrison said that working with the new customer is different as none of the new formats involved were VBS formats.
He explained: ‘We were working with OGC CDB [Common Database], which is a military terrain standard. We worked with Unreal as well on the game side to build the online pipeline for this customer at the enterprise level for managing all of the terrain data and exporting it to the CDB format.’
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