Designing Simulations

Designing good simulations takes work. Designing great simulations takes passion. A gifted simulation designer blends good software technical skills with subject matter expertise in the professional area that will use the simulation when it's completed.

Designing a single, hiqh quality simulation typically takes about 200 man-hours of production time. The three structure fire simulations included with the base distribution of NIMSpro™ each took about 200 hours to complete from start to finish, plus or minus. While you can certainly build a simulation in less time, the accuracy of the modeling and versatility of the finished simulation are lessened as you cut corners.

While simulation design is not for the faint of heart, it is a pretty straight forward process. The following steps provide a good general approach:

1. Determine the training objective
2. Select a building or site that supports the training objective
3. Get permission from the property owner and occupant
4. Tour the site with SMEs and discuss the training objective
5. Sketch a site plan and/or floor plan
6. Determine what portion(s) of the site must be included to support the training objective
7. If something doesn't support the training objective, it's eye candy — cut it
8. Determine how players will move through the site (movement plan)
9. Create a list of necessary photos (shot list)
10. Schedule time to do a photo shoot, 1/2 day minimum (don't underestimate how long this takes)
11. Shoot photos with a good digital camera with a wide angle lens
12. Prep all site photos (e.g. set size and resolution)
13. Populate the database with the visuals (photos) and movement info
14. Load the simulation and test the "3D construct"
15. Animate the visuals and create situation levels as necessary to support the training objectives
16. Load the new visuals and situation levels in the database
17. Test, debug as necessary
18. Release

Design Tools

NIMSpro™ is not bound to any one design tool. As a simulation designer, you are free to use whatever tool you want. The current release of NIMSpro™ version 1.x supports SWF and JPG files. The design documents plan to support many more file types natively in future releases. Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a terrific design tool that supports photos, graphics, animation, audio, video, etc. There's virtually nothing a talented designer cannot accomplish using Flash. Adobe Flash is nearly a "must have" for designing scenarios.

Fire and Smoke Effects

There are several tools available for creating fire and smoke effects. Which one you choose depends largely on your training objectives. If you are training firefighters, company officers, battalion chiefs, or other senior fire officers, then you need a tool that will create high fidelity smoke reproduction. This is necessary because there are important visual cues in the appearance of smoke and its behavior that are meaningful to firefighters in size-up, decision making, and strategy and tactics. We think the best tool for this type of fire simulation design work is MXinferno™, a plug-in for Adobe Flash that is produced by FutureFD.com who is one of the corporate sponsors of NIMSpro™.

Tools other than FutureFD.com's MXinferno™ are available, such as Digital Combustion's Fire Studio, ESIS's Fire Simulator, as well as some basic animated GIF files available from the Long Beach Fire Department Training Center. MXinferno™ works natively in Adobe Flash to produce SWF files as an output. You will need to convert the output of all the other tools to an SWF format to use them with NIMSpro™.

Audio

Use Adobe Flash.

Video

Use Adobe Flash.

Animation

Use Adobe Flash.

Interactive Experience

Use Adobe Flash.



Are you seeing a pattern here?

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