VR-Forces: Entity Visual Markings - Configuration and Network Representation

Valid for VR-Forces 5.1.1

Some types of vehicles in VR-Forces support visual markings that can be dynamically changed. This includes things such as country insignia, license plates, car color, airline markings, and more. Details on how these markings are configured can be found in the Adding Content to MAK Applications Reference Manual in the section titled Adding Dynamically Changeable Markings to Models.

If you read that section, you will see some discussion of metafiles that configure the markings available to vehicles. These files define both the types of visual markings that an entity can have as well as the possible values. For instance, the Adding Content manual shows portions of a file that list two different types of markings: “country” and “id”. The “country” marking then has configured values for “German”, “Canadian”, etc. Together the marking type and the configured value form a key value pair that indicates what markings should be placed on the vehicle. So a vehicle that specifies a key of “country” and a value of “German” will have German country markings drawn on it.

Not all entities will support the same marking types. The metafile associated with the entity model will dictate what options are available to it.

DIS and the RPR FOM do not have attributes representing the state of these markings. To specify these values on the network to ensure all remote applications visualize the entity the same way, VR-Forces has added additional network data to represent this. This is done using the Markings state property. (For more information on state properties, please see the VR-Forces Developer’s Guide.) The Markings state property is encoded as a map of string keys to string values.

To access the Markings in a remote application, you can use the VR-Forces remote control toolkit to read this data (or to write it if you are simulating your own entities and wish to specify the markings).