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

 I read a research paper which listed the variables available in TORCS
which can be used to control the car.

I am listing a few below which are special interest to me.



.....

racePos: 1, 2, ... current rank of car in race

damage: point total dame incurred to car

Si: dist. to track boundary measured by 19 sensors.

Oi: distance to opponents measured by 18 sensors.

.....



Now I can imagine that in real life, each car actually have sensors (could
be lidar/radar etc) which are measuring Si and Oi.

What I do not quite see is how would the racePos value be available to a
car in real life.


So my first question is: how is racePos generated by TORCS? I can imagine
this to be very easy - since the simulator has to know the position of each
car in the race. So is it just that or is TORCS

generating the value from other sensors like Si and Oi.



Second question is: how does TORCS estimate or derive the value of the
damage variable? I can imagine this being generated from the Oi sensors
(e.g. how fast the distance is reducing between the two cars

could be used to estimate the extent of an impact on collision).



Thanks.


-- 
Subhrajit Bhattacharya, PhD
Professor, Department of CSE
Nitte Meenakshi Institute of Technology