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DOOM For ATAK.
The Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) is a powerful geospatial mapping application widely used in tactical and operational scenarios. While its core functionality revolves around shared situational awareness, the platform’s extensibility offers the potential for creative integrations, perfecting the functionality for each individual operator’s needs.
One such ambitious endeavour was refactoring the classic game Doom into an ATAK plugin, demonstrating both our technical expertise and the platform's versatility. Admittedly this started as a bit of an internal Xi Systems joke as an old reference to ‘Will it run Doom?’ along with the typical ‘How hard can it be?’. Fortunately, id Software released the source code under the GPL-2.0 license which allowed us to start this endeavour legitimately.
ATAK Versions, Plugins and Development Rules
ATAK and its plugin ecosystem has ensured that what started out as a situational awareness tool has morphed into the central pane of glass for the dismounted soldier within the tactical environment. Plugins are what allows a user to extend the ATAK core functionality to controlling UAV’s, ingesting data streams through to deploying artificial intelligence at the tactical edge...
De mystifying the TAK protocol
Originally ATAK used Curser On Target (COT) as the protocol of choice for communications. However this has been augmented with a TAK protocol based upon the Google Protobuf serialisation protocol. This provides a more efficient transfer mechanism; through the act of serialisation with Protobuf, the message is significantly reduced in size, therefore allowing more messages to be transferred within the same network capacity...
Key Considerations for Planning an Optimised MANET for Seamless TAK Server Deployment in Tactical Networks
In tactical environments, where flexibility, real-time communication and interoperability are of paramount importance, MANETs play a crucial role. The integration of TAK (Tactical Assault Kit) servers into MANETs plays an essential role providing real-time data exchange, video streaming, GPS tracking and other situational awareness data...