SARGE: SourceForge.net
Unity Technologies
SARGE Games

License

First and foremost, please cite the SARGE project in your publications. Additionally, please cite any relevant publications listed on my personal site www.jeffcraighead.com

For distribution purposes SARGE project is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use these files except in compliance with the License.

You may obtain a copy of the License at

www.apache.org/licenses/

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Copyright 2008 Jeff Craighead

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The Search and Rescue Game Environment (SARGE) is a game based intelligent tutoring system for search and rescue and other law enforcement robot operators. SARGE can also be used as a relatively high fidelity simulator, my lab has been using it for over a year as I've built it and it's worked out quite well.

The SARGE project aims to provide a multi-platform (Mac/Win for now) training environment that is EASY TO USE. The project was created out of frustration with the other robot simulators out there.  They are either complicated to use and develop for or don't provide the best physics simulation, usually both. I (the SARGE dev team) originally planned to use USARSim as the base for our work with using games for training robot operators, however the commercial release of the Unreal3 engine was delayed by nearly a year, delaying a vital upgrade to USARSim.  Since USARSim uses the Unreal2 engine, that meant we would be stuck using the old Karma physics engine instead of one of the more advanced engines like Havok or PhysX. We really didn't want that.  Additionally, building new vehicles and sensors (basically general development) for USARSim is a pain in the butt, though less so than other simulators out there.

In any case I decided it would be best to find a new engine that used either Havok, PhysX, or ODE - the three "best" physics engines available at the moment. After about a month of looking around at Ogre, Torque, Blender, etc. and talking with some other people doing serious games research we decided on Unity3D from Unity Technologies.  This is not a free engine (though neither is Unreal) but it is relatively affordable ($250 standard, $1400 Pro [$750 for academic users]).

The Unity development environment is Mac only at the moment, but can export builds to Windows*. Programming is done in C# (Unity has the Mono runtime embedded), a JavaScript clone (I say clone because it is not quite the same  JS implementation you would find in a browser, and has some Unity specific features), or Boo. C/C++ can also be used if you have the Pro version and a need to access some custom hardware.

If you use SARGE for academic or commercial purposes, please cite the project as well as any of my related publications (see www.jeffcraighead.com).