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thedrifter
03-10-09, 07:21 AM
Published on HamptonRoads.com
For the men and women who play it, this game is no game


NEWPORT NEWS

They've never walked the dusty streets of an Iraqi town or laid eyes on Afghanistan's mountainous terrain. They've never manned the turret of a Humvee or scanned the horizon for a homemade bomb.

They've never served in uniform at all.

But Zach Phillips and Olen Bruce have expertise the military covets. They're computer programmers who create an ever-changing virtual world where soldiers and Marines can practice searching for improvised explosive devices before setting foot in a war zone.

Phillips, 23, and Bruce, 34, are among about 70 employees, mostly contractors, at the Joint Training Counter-IED Operations Integration Center in Newport News. The center, which started in 2007, is part of the Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization and is managed by the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at nearby Fort Monroe. The center's budget this year is about $5 million.

The seven-person simulation department works fast, using fresh intelligence from the field on the latest methods insurgents use to conceal and detonate their bombs. In four days, they can push out a new training scenario.

The scenarios are then added to an existing game engine the military uses for training called "Virtual Battlespace 2." Distribution is simple and quick: Units can download the new programs - which aren't classified - from any military computer.

To start each new scenario, one person in the simulation department develops a plot and maps it out.

A terrain developer creates a backdrop - maybe a midsized Iraqi city or a tiny Afghan village - with the appropriate scenery: deserts or mountains, palm groves or apartment buildings. Phillips, the 3-D modeler, creates a virtual version of the troops' hardware, such as an M109 Paladin howitzer. The programmers devise "clutter," too - civilian vehicles, pedestrians and the like - to populate the screen.

Bruce, the lead software developer, brings the objects alive: He makes the wheels turn, the gun turrets swing and the machine guns shoot.

Another person puts together a story-board for how the game will look. Toward the end, the team stitches together the video and then "play tests" it.

Unlike some commercial games, where bullets travel unlikely paths and vehicles can drive sideways, the scenarios they create are based on physics, so the actions - and reactions - seem realistic.

One of the team's productions, called "IED Gauntlet," depicts a Humvee driver trying to make his way through an Iraqi town. There's only one safe route through streets strewn with "observables" that might indicate a lurking bomb - a large quantity of fertilizer in the middle of a city, certain types of graffiti, the blue plastic barrels explosives come in.

The games can be played by an individual soldier or networked with up to 10 participants, meaning an entire platoon can play. They can be played multiple times, with different actions producing different outcomes.

One recent product had roles for 10: six crewmen split between two Humvees, as well as four insurgents.

The real insurgents fighting U.S. forces adapt their strategies regularly, which means training games have a short shelf life.

For a while, Iraqi insurgents hid homemade bombs in piles of trash and below manhole covers. Another ruse was putting them inside dead animals on the street.

The center's staff tries to produce at least one new training product a week. Sometimes they're based on a blast that wounded or killed U.S. service members.

Bruce said that when he watches grisly videos of such explosions that insurgents sometimes post on the Internet, he's reminded what's at stake.

"The one thing I really get out of working here is I feel like I'm helping someone who is going into harm's way. This is happening. What we're doing could help save lives," said Bruce, who earned degrees in computer science and engineering from Christopher Newport University.

It's gratifying work for Phillips, who graduated from college last year.

Not so long ago, he and his classmates at the University of Texas at Dallas dreamed of designing video games for Nintendo or Atari.

"It definitely helps to know that it's not for some guy just sitting on a couch, but someone going head first into Iraq or Afghanistan," Phillips said.

The work is beginning to get noticed.

In December, at an industry conference, the center's simulations team picked up an award for outstanding achievement in the fields of modeling, simulation and training.

"It's work," Phillips said, "but we have a blast at the end of the week when we get together and play the scenario."

Kate Wiltrout, (757) 446-2629 kate.wiltrout@pilotonline.com

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Ellie