SimsUshare CTC Quick Start Guide
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Hello, this is a video that’s going to take you through a quick start for using the command training center. In particular I’m going to show you how to log in and setup your users, how you use the SimCloud for simulation storage, then how you run an exercise both as the instructor or controller, which is a web app, meaning it’s through a browser, and I’m going to show you what it looks like as a participant through the SimsUshare app. Let’s get started.
So if I go open a browser and go to ctc.simsushare.com, enter in the email address and password that we provided you, and press login. This is the home screen for the CTC. You can check out your running multiplayer exercises, your simulations that you’ve loaded––this is our SimCloud. You can also, if you’re the administrator for the account, change your users, add users, modify users. So let’s start there. When I go to users it shows you I have one user which is Jonathan, my first user, and the user level key here is admin. There are two levels of users. An admin can actually run multiplayer exercises, create and edit users, upload simulations, delete simulations, whereas an organizer––another level––and I’ll go here to create another person here, I might say this is going to be a captain or so at my fire department. Let’s say this person is just an organizer, so that means they only can run exercises and view simulations. They can’t create users or delete or change simulations. So here if you wanted to create some users you just go into the user tab, enter their email address, put their actual name, password, and choose the level that you want.
You as the admin can actually create other admins as well. So let’s say if I created this person, when I want to go back and modify them, it will also let me delete that user. So let’s go right now into our SimCloud to see how you can view simulations in your cloud account as well as bring them in. So by default I have one simulation in here called ISO IN ACTION. I want to click on it and click preview. A window will show up and it will then show you your simulation running in the little window here, and I can move around and do the stuff that I can do in the simulation. This preview window is still not finished in terms of all the effects and everything, but that’s what we’re going to be developing during this beta testing period for the CTC.
So now I can add a simulation here by uploading it into the browser, but the easier way to do that to have your simulations is to go into the SimsUshare app that you need to download as a new version. You can go into either edit or play and when you go to the menu, you’ll notice there’s now download as well as upload simulations. If I click on upload, I connect to the Sim Repository, the SimsUshare SimCloud, and you can buy your own SimCloud as well in the future. So that’s why this can have multiple entries. I hit connect. It’ll ask me for my credentials so I enter my username and password. It stores the last good password that has been used. I hit okay, and now I see on my device I have all these scenarios in my Repository on SimCloud. I can list the Sims, there’s only one ISO in action. So what I can do is click on a scenario that I want to upload, I click greater than, and that says now it’s going to be sent over the repository. I can put multiple simulations into that. If I click on it, notice here it’s saying there’s a sim conflict because it already exists on the SimCloud in your account. So I can either override which is the update with the current version from SimsUshare, or I can copy it to a new sim. So I’m going to just cancel out over here and I’m just going to worry about uploading residential. I hit start, it’ll say packaging, transferring, and in a moment it will say transfer complete. Now, if I head back over to my SimCloud here, and I’ll just refresh, but you’ll notice residential is there. And you’ll see that once I click this, it’s actually going to play that scenario. So you’ve seen how to create users, how to upload simulations, update simulations. Let’s see now how to create and run an exercise.
I go to exercise. Notice there are no exercises running––they would show up because you can run multiple exercises with different users at the same time. I hit create, I give the name of the exercise. The participants the only ones who are going to see that––I’ll just call it House 1. I’ll give it a code and I’ll just say it’s house1 like that. It’ll say what simulation should I use as the basis of exercise? I’m going to click ISO, I hit create, and now I’m in what’s called the exercise staging area. This is where participants will come in. If I’m over here, one of the menu items in addition to upload in the play area, is start CTC multiplayer mode. So, again, I’m just going to go back over here if you kind of missed how we got here, hit play, go to the menu and you say start CTC player mode, I go and choose my server, hit connect and let’s see this is the last good exercise. The exercise code was house1, and my unit name is going to be Engine 1. So I hit join and now you’ll notice on my dashboard over here as the instructor, it’s saying Engine 1 is ready. Engine 1 now has the scenario loaded. And I’m actually going to now show you, if I were to create another window, and remember you get to your new window by going here and clicking new window, I could actually have two participants running at the same time. Play, I go here, two or more. I connect. It will ask me, there is my exercise code but I don’t want to be Engine 1 I want to be here Battalion 1. Again, you’re typically not going to run multiple participants off the same computer. This would be good though for your testing. I hit join, and waiting for control to start one. Now if we actually go here, we have Engine 1 and Battalion 1 ready. When I hit start, now if I go back over, you’ll see they now enter the exercise. Now if I go back here to show you what this is like, you’ll see both of them have entered the exercise.
Now if I go back to the exercise, you’ll notice there’s a timer that gets started. 13, 14, 15. And notice now you have two tokens––Engine 1 and Battalion 1 on Side D. You’ll also notice if you scroll down, you’ve got preview windows which we are going to discuss. Basically the way that you place units is you just click, so let’s say that I want to move Engine 1 to Side A, click Engine 1 and I just drag to Side A. If I now look over and see what Engine 1 is looking at, Engine 1 is at Side A. Notice that Battalion 1 is at Side D, so you’ll see those are different views. Now, if I actually move Engine 1, let’s say I have arrows, and I’m going to move Engine 1 over to Side B, when I click the arrow here, you’ll notice the Engine 1 token jumped over to the location of Side B. So your dashboard here is going to track where your different units move.
Now, you can actually see kind of a preview of what the locations look like. You can just click on a location header and you’ll notice it gets turned into, that preview window shows you what it would look like. You could also click on a unit, and now notice it says following Battalion 1 at Side D. So what that means is now if Battalion 1 moves around, so watch the preview here. If Battalion 1 moves to A, notice how this preview window now shows you what Battalion 1 is actually looking at. Of course, you see Battalion 1 is now at A. If I want to move multiple units at the same time, I click on multi-select and now I can select units Battalion 1 and Engine 1, and now when they’re both white like this I click and drag, move them to Side D, and they both move there. You can see when I actually go, now he’s at side D and I also have there Engine 1 and Battalion 1. Notice this is Engine 1, this is Battalion 1. So that shows you how to move units around. And of course, the units can move by themselves.
The other preview window here says your private view. This is for you to just move around wherever you’d like if you wanted to preview what locations would look like. So no one else is seeing this, this is just for you as the instructor. Lastly, the communication chat here gives a little transcript, timestamp by the time of the scenario, which you can pause as well if you want to talk to your participants about something. I can go here and say here, “Hello from instructor.” So when I click this, now you’ll notice on these windows you’ll see a little message show up here. So with this is how you can tell a unit to do something or to report something, whatever you’d like. You can either send it to all or you can say send to specific units. It kind of drops out of the window here, but you can send messages to specific units. That’s really all that you’ve got here.
And again, here’s the pause if you wanted to pause. When you pause it, of course, you’ll see over here the smoke, all the animation stop. You can always resume it or you can reset it back to zero, in which case it would be paused at zero. The key thing here, though, is when you’re finished with the exercise, you’re all done, you really want to press End Exercise because the exercises continue to run even if you move away from this page. Notice I’m now at users. If I look at my participants, they’re still going. They’re still in the exercise even though there is no formal instructor. If I go back to exercises, I can go here. Now there’s House 1 running. If I click House 1, when I join now I’m back exactly where I started and I actually can clearly move people around, see what they actually do. So End Exercise is how you end the exercise for everyone. You want to do that otherwise your exercises will continue to run.
Now similarly, if I were to go back, let’s say I was on a different computer. I could actually have a second or third instructor also join the exercise. Maybe I’ve got a lot of participants and I need different people to handle different sets of users. So you can actually use these exercises, you can open up multiple browsers if you have more than one instructor to control that same exercise.
So finally what I’m going to do here is to kind of clean up. I’m going to say end the exercise and that’s all done. And you’ll notice on the participants it says the exercise was terminated and it finishes.
That gives you not a brief but somewhat run-through through the CTC to get started. There’s a lot more details. We discuss the details in the more detailed SimsUshare Academy class on the CTC. One of the critical things is how to report feedback. Please visit simsushare.com/ctc to see what’s been reported during the test period, how to contribute your feedback, or just email or call us directly. Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to hear what you’re going to be doing with it, and I hope you find it really interesting and useful. [/vc_column_text][vc_btn title=”View All Developer Resources” color=”green” align=”center” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fsimsushare.com%2Fhelp-developer%2F”][/vc_column][/vc_row]