Infusion of a Gaming Paradigm into Computer-Aided Engineering Design Tools

This project introduced into the VTB interdisciplinary system designsimulation environment several gaming concepts such as network-centric multiplayer interactions, detection of interferences between independent client-side simulation models, and simplified human interfaces to physics-based models. It also developed new computing methods that facilitate exploitation of the gaming environment for design purposes. Technical progress can be separated into two broad categories realization of a hybrid physics-based gaming environment as a surrogate for a highly-interactive design environment, and improvement of simulation speed so that the physics-based gaming environment can operate fast enough for effective human interaction. The multiplayer gaming environment developed here couples a multi-disciplinary engineering simulation software VTB with a gaming engine to produce an environment that allows participants to define vehicles from component parts, operate the virtual vehicles in realistic environments, and race them against each other in a multi-player gaming environment. The computational intensiveness of the detailed simulation models would slow game play, so we also developed algorithms to partition large simulation models into several parts that could be processed on multiple cores of a CPU. We also demonstrated that graphics processing units GPUs can be used to execute system models at speeds significantly greater than can be accomplished with off-the-shelf CPUs.