Application Scripting Interface

For the boss men out there, understanding the worth of a particular aspect of a simulation requires a functioning example and generally some text in the form of a paper. One particular aspect I'll highlight in this article is VBS2's Application Scripting Interface or ASI. In particular I'll move around the domain of Agents or AI actors and this paper here. 

Basically the paper is the result of research into populating VBS2 with realistic virtual actors that are controlled through the ASI. To summarise the goals there was intent to improve behaviour of the agents (non-player characters) through a third party model. Essentially through a plug-in DLL, the context the agent finds themselves in is evaluated, that information is then sent through a model internal to the DLL to formulate a response to that context. The response is generally a combination of commands including doMove, used to move the agent to a particular location that is deemed advantageous given their current role. In one example the objective of an agent was as a suicide bomber to move themselves to a position where they'd cause maximum casualties with their payload.

This however is not the only purpose for the ASI, other examples include improving interaction with other HLA/DIS simulations, or influencing VBS2 based on information from a separate program. The possibilities are almost limitless as the ASI is a direct line into the VBS2 scripting language. However it must be noted that a lot of things possible in the ASI are also possible in plain scripting with no DLLs, unless you're looking to talk to something externally.

Over time as more ASI examples come to light and they're documented I will post the document links here. There is a lot of potential in this that is yet to be explored.

For those of you interested in exploring CoJACK (mentioned in the paper), there is a site here.

Jamie.