Overview / Usage

Military Operations is a next-generation wargame built on top of 'Metis': a state-of-the-art large-scale agent-based simulation engine.
By modeling and simulating each and every soldier, gun, motor vehicle, tank and aircraft that participated in famous World War 2 battles, Military Operations puts the player in command of a living and breathing army.

The game's engine tackles the problem of simulating 50,000 agents moving and fighting across a 150x150 km battlefield based on actual terrain data in (accelerated) real-time. The engine tracks every shot fired, fuel and ammunition consumption and includes all elements that were part of the units such as reconnaissance, combat engineers, supply columns, repair workshops and medical units.

An innovative hierarchical control scheme allows the player to control this mass of soldiers in an intuitive fashion and allows them to zoom into the action to observe and exercise detailed control where necessary, leaving the rest of the work to the AI.

Methodology / Approach

The core engine driving Military Operations is called 'Metis' and consists of 2 major parts:

1. A streaming planetary visualization engine, capable of showing the entire Earth in high detail. It does this by loading data from disk and enriching it through procedural generation.

2. A massive multi-agent simulation engine running on the GPU handles all calculations required, including motion, pathfinding, unit formations, unit AI, sensors systems, unit communication, supply system and many more.

The core technique behind the engine is a GPU-based ECS (Entity Component System) architecture that maps very well to the hardware with Components stored in GPU memory and Systems implemented as GPU kernel code allowing massively parallel computations to be performed in very little time.

Technologies Used

OpenCL
OpenGL
ECS
Boost
OSRM
YAML
SQLite

Other links

• Military Operations: Benchmark on Steam
• Military Operations HQ

Collaborators