Silicon Graphics, Inc. is the leading manufacturer of high-performance visual computing systems delivery interactive three-dimensional graphics, digital media, and multiprocessing supercomputing technologies to technical, scientific, and creative professionals. Their Visual Magic Division is charged with producing the application development software and collaboration environment that add value and differentiation to Silicon Graphics systems. Using an Ada compiler and development environment, they provide the software foundation for creating a wide range of visual simulations, including battlefield and flight simulators.

Paintball and Fireflight, two virtual reality games developed as internal pilot training projects, reached new levels in depth and complexity of interactivity. The development of the games has been possible only by employing the capabilities of the Ada 83 programming language.

Paintball is a multi-player, multi-tasking simulation written in MP/Ada for both military and commercial part task training applications. Created entirely with Ada tasking, it marked a new level of integration between real-time interaction and visual simulation. By interfacing with Silicon Graphics’ IRIS Performer^TM database, Paintball demonstrates previously unseen capabilities for the visual simulation market.

Fireflight is a mission planning scenario that uses roughly 65% of the Paintball code. By mapping raw satellite data in real-time, Fireflight enables the user to “fight” a forest fire by flying over a simulated Yellowstone National Park.

These games maximize the processing power of the Onyx^TM RealityEngine^2TM graphics supercomputer by using multiple processors, with a range of 200 to 100 tasks driving the real-time graphics. By pushing the limits of the Ada environment, SGI demonstrated that tasking is a powerful construct that no other language offers. Likewise, having ported Paintball to Ada 95, Silicon Graphics has proven the power of the object-oriented extensions of the language.