dis-rs is an implementation of the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol for Rust. It provides structures and functions to build PDUs in applications, send them out via a network and parse received byte streams into PDUs.

Constructing PDUs is done via builder pattern constructors.

Given a buffer with data from the network, the library can return multiple PDUs in multiple DIS versions present in the buffer.

The library supports both versions 6 and 7 of the standard.

Here is an overview of the DIS PDUs/features supported by dis-rs. 'Read' means reading a PDU from a byte stream. 'Write' means constructing a PDU in a struct and serializing it to a buffer.

dis-rs uses the SISO-REF-010 reference to map the wire level encoding to actual names of enumerations and values in code. E.g., one can use the enum PduType::EntityState in code instead of remembering that a 1 means that specific value.

The code for these enums is generated using a build script from the published SISO-REF-010.xml file. Which is currently a v30.

PDUs are constructed using idiomatic new() or default() functions on the structs for PduHeader or PduBodys. Some PduBody variants require the new() constructors to have arguments. Further fields are set using .with_field_name() functions.

The main data structure is a Pdu, which consists of a header and a body. The body is a variant of PduBody, an enum that wraps a specific struct for that PDU type in a variant. The specific body structs, e.g. an EntityState, can be wrapped / converted to a PduBody by call the to_pdu_body() function on the struct. Further, the body can be merged with a PduHeader using the associated function finalize_from_parts(header, body, timestamp) of Pdu. This will give you a complete PDU.

The library exposes three functions to parse data into PDUs from a buffer: parse(), parse_v6() and parse_v7(). Each function works the same, where the general parse() function returns all valid PDUs from the buffer and the others filter out v6 or v7 version PDUs.

To serialize a PDU to bytes (DIS wire format), simply call the serialize() function on a Pdu, providing the buffer as argument.

• SISO: https://www.sisostds.org - Organisation maintaining the DIS standard and reference material.
• A lot of great background material on DIS can be found at OpenDIS: http://open-dis.org and https://github.com/open-dis.
• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Interactive_Simulation.
• DIS Data Dictionary (version 6 only): http://faculty.nps.edu/brutzman/vrtp/mil/navy/nps/disEnumerations/JdbeHtmlFiles/pdu/.

The library currently consists of two crates:

• dis-rs: main library containing PDU definitions and parsers, builders, etc
• dis-derive: lib containing a derive macro previously used by dis-rs. Now superseded by generating enums based on SISO-REF-010. Likely to be removed or repurposed in the future.

Copyright (C) 2022 Zeeger Lubsen