Concept study for the use of a render engine for computer games in a flight simulation

Abstract

The Air Vehicle Simulator (AVES) is operated by the German Aerospace Center and provides a highly flexible platform with up to four different cockpit modules for research and development purposes. During the flight simulation, its visuals are created by the AVESViewer software based on the open-source rendering framework OpenSceneGraph (OSG). Because the further development of OSG was terminated in 2019, a replacement is required in the midterm. This work presents the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) as a possible candidate by conducting a concept study to develop the new UnrealViewer application coupled to the existing AVES environment. At first general requirements for a visual system of flight simulation are specified, and the current AVESViewer is analyzed how those are fulfilled. For most of them, UE4 techniques could be presented that achieve the same purpose as the AVESViewer ones. The two exceptions are investigated in-depth. The first is that the model import process aiming to reuse the terrain models height and image data and the FLT aircraft models was developed, as UE4 can not natively import it. Both model types can only provide a compromise between optimal performance, visual quality, and usability, and although the full potential was not exploited, the general possibility to import the models was shown. The other aspect of the concept study, the controllability via the AVES Visual Simulation Animation Protocol, was successfully shown in combination with a concept for configuring everything via XML and a low input lag.