torcs-users Mailing List for TORCS - The Open Racing Car Simulator

Hi,

I thought I'd write a keyboard controller for torcs, but I eventually
preferred the lazy solution to buy a joystick this week-end. I played a
little with it trying (unsuccessfully) to beat K1999 and I got a few
problems controlling it well. I drove in the last F2 view (from inside
the car). One of the main problem I got is that I could not "sense" when
the car lands or takes off on bumps. I think it would be very nice to
have a view from inside the car with only the front wheels visible (no
car chassis). I once played with a Windows game (Viper Racing, maybe)
which had such a view. The visual feedback of the position of the wheels
(angle & suspension) was very helpful in controlling the car well.

Remi

Remi,

I tried The buggy... really impressive, very fun to watch.

Eric

Remi Coulom wrote:
> 
> http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/~coulom/K1999.tar.gz
> 
> I made a car for each category and ran into some problems:
>  - How can I have access to all car settings from the drive function ?
> For instance, I would like my driver to know what the wing settings are
> to adjust the speed in curves. I know I could hard-code it into the
> driver or read the .xml files but I think it would be much better if the
> driver function had access to it. This would make tuning car settings
> much easier.
>  - How can I know the time slice between calls the the driver function ?
> I guess it is 0.01 seconds according to what I read in the simulator's
> source, but it would be nice to have access to this variable too.
>  - Some car categories seem to have problems. One crashes because a file
> is missing (I do not remember its name, ev0-fwd maybe). Another seems to
> block the engine when it reaches 140 km/h or so (nascar-fwd if I
> remember well).
> 
> Note that I still have static variables in my code to handle ABS and
> other few things, so you should not use more than one of the K1999
> variants in the same race, or risk driving problems. I will fix this
> when I have time. It might not be a good idea to include this new
> version in the official distribution of torcs because it has so many
> problems.
> 
> The buggy is very spectacular on dirt and mixed tracks, especially
> dirt-2.
> 
> Remi
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Torcs-users mailing list
> Tor...@li...
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/torcs-users

Remi,

You can access the car's parameters with the following
handle: 

car->_carHandle

and use the functions described in:
http://torcs.free.fr/manual/api/params.cpp.html

to access the parameters.
The parameters names are described in the file:
interfaces/car.h

example: to know the front wing angle

angle = GfParmGetNum (car->_carHandle, SECT_FRNTWING, NULL, NULL,
	PRM_WINGANGLE, "deg", 0);

or

angle = GfParmGetNum (car->_carHandle, SECT_FRNTWING, NULL, NULL,
	PRM_WINGANGLE, NULL, 0);

to get the value in radian (the default unit).

The timeslice is given in situation->deltaTime
(in the version 0.0.20 the value is false it should be 0.02 instead of
0.01).

Eric.

Remi Coulom wrote:
> 
> http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/~coulom/K1999.tar.gz
> 
> I made a car for each category and ran into some problems:
>  - How can I have access to all car settings from the drive function ?
> For instance, I would like my driver to know what the wing settings are
> to adjust the speed in curves. I know I could hard-code it into the
> driver or read the .xml files but I think it would be much better if the
> driver function had access to it. This would make tuning car settings
> much easier.
>  - How can I know the time slice between calls the the driver function ?
> I guess it is 0.01 seconds according to what I read in the simulator's
> source, but it would be nice to have access to this variable too.
>  - Some car categories seem to have problems. One crashes because a file
> is missing (I do not remember its name, ev0-fwd maybe). Another seems to
> block the engine when it reaches 140 km/h or so (nascar-fwd if I
> remember well).
> 
> Note that I still have static variables in my code to handle ABS and
> other few things, so you should not use more than one of the K1999
> variants in the same race, or risk driving problems. I will fix this
> when I have time. It might not be a good idea to include this new
> version in the official distribution of torcs because it has so many
> problems.
> 
> The buggy is very spectacular on dirt and mixed tracks, especially
> dirt-2.
> 
> Remi
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Torcs-users mailing list
> Tor...@li...
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/torcs-users

http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/~coulom/K1999.tar.gz

I made a car for each category and ran into some problems:
 - How can I have access to all car settings from the drive function ?
For instance, I would like my driver to know what the wing settings are
to adjust the speed in curves. I know I could hard-code it into the
driver or read the .xml files but I think it would be much better if the
driver function had access to it. This would make tuning car settings
much easier.
 - How can I know the time slice between calls the the driver function ?
I guess it is 0.01 seconds according to what I read in the simulator's
source, but it would be nice to have access to this variable too.
 - Some car categories seem to have problems. One crashes because a file
is missing (I do not remember its name, ev0-fwd maybe). Another seems to
block the engine when it reaches 140 km/h or so (nascar-fwd if I
remember well).

Note that I still have static variables in my code to handle ABS and
other few things, so you should not use more than one of the K1999
variants in the same race, or risk driving problems. I will fix this
when I have time. It might not be a good idea to include this new
version in the official distribution of torcs because it has so many
problems.

The buggy is very spectacular on dirt and mixed tracks, especially
dirt-2.

Remi

Hi Eric,

On Fri, 5 May 2000, Eric Espie wrote:

> > I'm new to the list, so I'll just share some impressions with you.
> > Just to let you know that Torcs does work with freeglut on my system (3dfx
> 
> Did you have to change something to compile with freeglut ?

I had to make quite a few changes, and I forgot to documentate them. (:
Apart from changes on my system, I had to ./configure with the appropriate
paths for freeglut basedir, libraries and headers. And after running
./configure, I had to add "-lfreeglut-1.3" and "-lXxf86vm" to the EXT_LIBS
line on $BASE/src/Make-config. I believe that's  basically it, although I
remember making links on my system to make it believe that the freeglut
libraries and headers were actually glut ones...

That was with version 0.0.18, with version 0.0.19 that didn't seem to
work, but I got glut 3.7 working in the meantime, so I could compile it
anyway.

Miguel

P.S. Remi's idea of a keyboard driver is quite cool, as I find driving
with the joystick quite awkward...

Hi All,

Remi Coulom wrote:
> 
> Remi Coulom wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I adapted my K1999 RARS car to TORCS. If you would like to try it you
> > can download it from my web page:
> > http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/~coulom/K1999.tar.gz
> > unpack it in the torcs/src/driver directory. It should create a K1999
> > directory with all necessary files. Simply go into the K1999 directory
> > and type "make" to build and install it.
> >
> 
> I have just updated my driver. It now handles getting unstuck from
> crashes and controls skidding much better. It might be a little slower
> on some tracks, but it drives more safely. It is much better on dirt
> tracks and can even beat buggies with a little luck. I included a logo
> for pits, but it does not stop there yet.

Great.

> 
> I have a few problems with torcs 0.0.19. I suspect some of them might
> come from the poor OpenGL driver I use :
> - I noticed that a lot of memory is allocated each time a new race
> starts (when the debug messages say torcs is loading drivers and skins).
> It is not freed after the race is terminated. I have to quit torcs and
> restart it to free it.

well, in fact it is not the opengl driver, that's that some textures are
duplicated (environment mapping) and the textures are never released...
I planned to rework the graphical part to add scenery so I did not
do very clean.

> - When the game is in pause mode and I press F1 twice, it comes back to
> the game with the PAUSE message, but the game is running.

I saw that, and it will be corrected in the next release.

> - In the leader board display, some times are displayed with a '+'
> prefix and some with a '-' (when it is more than one minute). I guess
> they should be all '+' or all '-'.

??? On my screen I see a + even when the time is more than 1 minute.
This should be a problem of font display ??? depending on
the resolution you use.

> - When I capture a frame, I get weird colors. I guess the Red and Blue
> channels are swapped.

Well, I changed the red and blue channels after the Mesa 3.1.? version.
I don't remember well, but with Mesa 3.2 it is ok for me.
I suspect it is a Mesa problem with my voodoo 2.

To change that, just comment the line 216 of src/libs/tgf/img.cpp
containing:

png_set_bgr(png_ptr);

This one swap the blue and red.
Maybe I should try to detect it at configure time, but I have not enough
time for this problem.

> 
> I think I am going to write a keyboard driver. Has anybody started to
> write one ?

Well, it is not so easy, because I use GLUT to get the keys, (the key
parameter of the drive function doesn't work, I have even removed it
in the next version :-(
Some modifs have to be done in the race managers modules.

I don't know if it is possible to get the key values in parallel with
GLUT, may be it could be the way to do it.

> 
> bye,
> 
> Remi
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Torcs-users mailing list
> Tor...@li...
> http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/torcs-users

Hi there,

I'm new to the list, so I'll just share some impressions with you.
Just to let you know that Torcs does work with freeglut on my system (3dfx
III). I had some problems with the mouse (it was pointing about 20 pixels
above the pointer) and during the race I couldn't change from one driver
to the other with PgUp and PgDn; also joystick wasn't working (it kept
crashing). Gladly all those problems disapeared with version 0.0.19, good
work lads!

I do have the same F1/PAUSE problem that Remi mentioned, on v0.0.19 .

Miguel

Remi Coulom wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I adapted my K1999 RARS car to TORCS. If you would like to try it you
> can download it from my web page:
> http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/~coulom/K1999.tar.gz
> unpack it in the torcs/src/driver directory. It should create a K1999
> directory with all necessary files. Simply go into the K1999 directory
> and type "make" to build and install it.
> 

I have just updated my driver. It now handles getting unstuck from
crashes and controls skidding much better. It might be a little slower
on some tracks, but it drives more safely. It is much better on dirt
tracks and can even beat buggies with a little luck. I included a logo
for pits, but it does not stop there yet.

I have a few problems with torcs 0.0.19. I suspect some of them might
come from the poor OpenGL driver I use :
- I noticed that a lot of memory is allocated each time a new race
starts (when the debug messages say torcs is loading drivers and skins).
It is not freed after the race is terminated. I have to quit torcs and
restart it to free it.
- When the game is in pause mode and I press F1 twice, it comes back to
the game with the PAUSE message, but the game is running.
- In the leader board display, some times are displayed with a '+'
prefix and some with a '-' (when it is more than one minute). I guess
they should be all '+' or all '-'.
- When I capture a frame, I get weird colors. I guess the Red and Blue
channels are swapped.

I think I am going to write a keyboard driver. Has anybody started to
write one ?

bye,

Remi