Over the past 10 years, simulating immersive and realistic graphics for simulations purposes has been an ever-demanding challenge. SOGECLAIR SIMULATION’s Rail Business line, explored the idea of using next-generation game engines over a decade ago to enhance the trainee experience and produce more lifelike simulation solutions for the transportation industry.

The company's primary challenge involved the creation of large world terrains featuring rail lines to simulate Freight and Passenger Operations in different parts of the world. Typically, this would entail the simulated terrain of at least 400km². The expectation of the end users was to have a highly realistic and immersive environment to engage in positive training for the Train/Tram and Truck drivers to enhance and retain their skills on route knowledge, situational awareness, and procedural training. In response to these training indicatives, SOGECLAIR SIMULATION turned to UNIGINE over a decade ago and continues to be impressed by the capabilities offered by UNIGINE's Sim SDK.

David Todd, Graphics and Track Design Team Lead, states: 'UNIGINE Sim was the only enterprise and commercial game engine which suited the needs of SOGECLAIR SIMULATION to support the following simulator functionality.

Our company’s simulators feature best-in-class visual realism for the graphical environment powered by the UNIGINE 2 Sim Engine. Over the years SOGECLAIR SIMULATION has been a step ahead in providing high-quality immersive and realistic graphics to indicate a high degree of realism to the user to enforce positive training by using the high detailed rendering support by UNIGINE.'

For SOGECLAIR SIMULATION, a critical requirement was the ability to support large world terrains to handle the overall Freight and Passenger train networks for different regions of the world. Unlike other simulation game engines that encountered technical scaling issues, UNIGINE enabled SOGECLAIR SIMULATION to successfully develop larger terrains effectively meeting Rail Customer’s needs.

SOGECLAIR SIMULATION’s multi-threaded, modular architecture was well supported by UNIGINE to negate motion sickness while using the simulators. Leveraging the advantages of multi-core processes, SOGECLAIR SIMULATION enhanced simulator performance achieving higher frame rate and rendering to deliver the highest quality of graphics required for the simulators. This helped eliminate any motion sickness associated with the use of simulators.

UNIGINE’s capability of handling environment fidelity, dynamic lighting, shadows, and particle effects have assisted SOGECLAIR SIMULATION to develop cutting edge, enterprise simulation software visuals. This capability enables the integration of functionality such as real-time weather conditions and add reaction of the train model based on the real-world physics. SOGECLAIR SIMULATION engineers make use of the easy-to-use User Interface of UNIGINE Editor to adapt and create robust graphical environments to cater to customer needs, paving the way for greater efficiency in terrain generation.

Over the years, SOGECLAIR SIMULATION has successfully developed over 850 simulators demonstrating continuous growth in the Rail Simulation Business. The realism, robustness and the immersion the company’s Rail Simulators provide are backed by the powerful UNIGINE Sim SDK.

'SOGECLAIR SIMULATION is eyeing a promising future with UNIGINE as they continue to grow and improvise the Simulation Fidelity and realism using the new functionality UNIGINE has added to the latest version of the simulation engine. In doing so, SOGECLAIR SIMULATION aims to provide the best graphical fidelity and immersion to its customers', David concluded.