What HEAT Capture is

HEAT Capture is a Windows application that records data from simulators, hardware sensors and wearables during an exercise, and delivers it to your HEAT platform instance. It runs on an operator workstation next to whatever produces the data.

Everything this documentation set covers is one of four kinds of component:

• HEAT Capture is the host application. It loads capture modules, records sessions, buffers everything to local disk before it leaves the workstation, and streams the result to your HEAT platform instance. It is the one component every deployment has.
• Capture modules are packaged .NET components that HEAT Capture loads to read one data source - a simulator’s own data feed, a wearable sensor, a hardware device. A module runs inside HEAT Capture’s own process tree, each in its own child process. See the module catalogue for what is published and what each one needs.
• Capture plugins run the opposite way around: inside a third-party simulator or engine, observing its running state and publishing frames to HEAT Capture over the network. Use a plugin when the data source is a simulator that cannot host a HEAT Capture module directly - MACE, Unreal Engine or VBS4, for the plugins currently published. See the plugin catalogue for the supported hosts.
• HEAT ProtoLib is the protobuf schema every module, plugin and the host application itself use to describe captured data - entity state, components and events. It is not something you install or configure directly; it is what makes a module’s data and a plugin’s data land in HEAT Capture in the same shape. See ProtoLib’s message reference if you are building or reviewing an integration against that data.

What you do not need to build

The HEAT platform itself - identity, session storage, processing and analytics - is a separate product and out of scope for this documentation set. HEAT Capture is the client that talks to it; this site covers HEAT Capture’s side of that relationship (see HEAT Capture’s ICD for the exact interface), not the platform’s own internals.

Where to go next

• New to HEAT Capture entirely? Read Deployment models next, then follow Your first capture end to end.
• Installing HEAT Capture itself? Go straight to Install HEAT Capture.
• Looking for a specific module or plugin? Start at the module catalogue or the plugin catalogue.

HEAT Capture team. Last updated 2 October 2026.