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

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The Torcs CVS now features a modification of the throttle that should
allow for better/easier control of the car by human drivers.

In reality, the engine's torque does not simply linearly depend on the
throttle Rather, in low revs, the maximum output torque is achieved only
with a partial throttle. This means that, when no gear is engaged,
the throttle acts in effect as a control for the target rpm.

This makes it much easier to drive the car at a constant speed.

Please test and give me suggestions.

I am also including links to three figures that I hope are self-explanatory.

http://christos.dimitrakakis.googlepages.com/torque_ratio_vs_accel.pdf

http://christos.dimitrakakis.googlepages.com/torque_ratio_vs_rpm.pdf

http://christos.dimitrakakis.googlepages.com/torque_vs_rpm.pdf

The most interesting one is probably the last figure, showing the output
torque of a 1400cc engine versus rpm, for various values of throttle
(ignoring engine friction).
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The current main torcs CVS now has a much more stable simuv3 collision
code.  It turned out that, when the car was at extreme angles, sometimes
the wheel/suspension force calculation would overflow.  I still must
look into why this happens, but for now I am just checking for nans.
This is sufficient to make the code work OK.

The collision with the floor is also now handled gracefully, although
the simulation is still a bit rough. However, if your suspension is too
soft, prepare for problems :)

The changes are in the CVS, please test.
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Hi Stephen

> Both Luca and I have successfully compiled Torcs on Mac OS X 10.5.  All
> of the dependencies have been compiled as frameworks that can be
> included in the Torcs application bundle.  Luca has taken care of the
> Mac specific issues such as correctly saving preferences and ensuring
> that everything is properly compiled as universal binaries.  This means
> that Mac users will be able to run Torcs without compiling or
> configuring anything.

Great (I bought a MacBook 2 weeks ago) :-)

> At this stage, a Mac binary package that should run on any PPC or Intel
> OS X 10.5 sytem is ready (or nearly ready).  Because the package has
> reached a mature state and there are others interested, we would like to
> make the package available via Sourceforge for wider testing.  We would
> also like to make the XCode projects and source code changes available
> on Sourceforge.  This will give everyone an opportunity to incorporate
> the changes in the official code and to get started on version 1.3.1 for
> Mac.  This will probably also be useful for building torcs-ng.
> 
> How can we go about getting everything on sourceforge?

Can you put your packages somewhere where I can fetch it, I would put it then on
sf.net. It would be cool if you could make as well a diff to the actual TORCS
1.3.1 package, such that people can build the version by themselves. A little
README or something would help as well.

Thank you, best regards

Bernhard

Hi,

Both Luca and I have successfully compiled Torcs on Mac OS X 10.5.   
All of the dependencies have been compiled as frameworks that can be  
included in the Torcs application bundle.  Luca has taken care of the  
Mac specific issues such as correctly saving preferences and ensuring  
that everything is properly compiled as universal binaries.  This  
means that Mac users will be able to run Torcs without compiling or  
configuring anything.

At this stage, a Mac binary package that should run on any PPC or  
Intel OS X 10.5 sytem is ready (or nearly ready).  Because the  
package has reached a mature state and there are others interested,  
we would like to make the package available via Sourceforge for wider  
testing.  We would also like to make the XCode projects and source  
code changes available on Sourceforge.  This will give everyone an  
opportunity to incorporate the changes in the official code and to  
get started on version 1.3.1 for Mac.  This will probably also be  
useful for building torcs-ng.

How can we go about getting everything on sourceforge?

Cheers,

Steve

PS: As always, thanks go to Andrew for the original Mac build.


On 11-Feb-09, at 10:42 PM, Brent Burton wrote:

> I'm perhaps the least familiar with Torcs on this list, since I
> haven't had time to build it on OS X and play with it yet, but I think
> the Torcs system is very interesting, and your Virtual Darpa effort
> sounds like a good challenge (for both you and the developer-users).
>
> Comments below...
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Jean-Christophe Hoelt
> <jc...@gm...> wrote:
>> ...
>> The first stone of the simulator is Torcs. We are going to improve it
>> to give AI plugins access to "virtual cameras" and other sensors  
>> (like
>> GPS), which should be the only way those plugins can access the track
>> and cars positions.
>> ...
>
> Several years ago I did a little survey term paper of just this --
> "artificial vision" -- which was basically a vision system for an
> autonomous avatar. As the avatar moved about the world, the system
> would render a low-res image of whatever the avatar was looking at,
> and the avatar built a rough, voxel-based model of its world. This
> system wasn't for path planning or other aspects of autonomous robots,
> it just focused on building a map of the world through simulated
> vision.
>
> That said, "virtual cameras" would be interesting. Autonomous vehicles
> such as those used in the DARPA challenge use a mix of video and
> telemetry. The video is highly processed, either from cameras or from
> laser-range scanners. Sooo, mapping real-world data sources like this
> to a virtual world could mean supplying regular RGB images (as the
> artificial vision system I mentioned above did), or supplying other
> image types, such as the depth buffer of a scene rendered from the
> car's camera. For simulation and algorithm development, you can do a
> lot with just this: send only red channel, inject noise into the image
> to simulate a faulty camera, etc.
>
> Good luck with your project.
>
> -Brent
>
> p.s. Anybody know of a working OS X (10.5.x) build of Torcs? The ones
> I've tried so far don't work.
>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
------------------------------------
Stephen Hudson                                          Lab:      
(519) 661-2111 x85035
Department of Physics and Astronomy    Office:  (519) 661-2111 x86436
The University of Western Ontario            Web:    http:// 
publish.uwo.ca/~shudson2
London, ON, N6A 3K7                                Email:   
shu...@uw...
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------------------------------------

I'm perhaps the least familiar with Torcs on this list, since I
haven't had time to build it on OS X and play with it yet, but I think
the Torcs system is very interesting, and your Virtual Darpa effort
sounds like a good challenge (for both you and the developer-users).

Comments below...

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 5:07 AM, Jean-Christophe Hoelt
<jc...@gm...> wrote:
> ...
> The first stone of the simulator is Torcs. We are going to improve it
> to give AI plugins access to "virtual cameras" and other sensors (like
> GPS), which should be the only way those plugins can access the track
> and cars positions.
> ...

Several years ago I did a little survey term paper of just this --
"artificial vision" -- which was basically a vision system for an
autonomous avatar. As the avatar moved about the world, the system
would render a low-res image of whatever the avatar was looking at,
and the avatar built a rough, voxel-based model of its world. This
system wasn't for path planning or other aspects of autonomous robots,
it just focused on building a map of the world through simulated
vision.

That said, "virtual cameras" would be interesting. Autonomous vehicles
such as those used in the DARPA challenge use a mix of video and
telemetry. The video is highly processed, either from cameras or from
laser-range scanners. Sooo, mapping real-world data sources like this
to a virtual world could mean supplying regular RGB images (as the
artificial vision system I mentioned above did), or supplying other
image types, such as the depth buffer of a scene rendered from the
car's camera. For simulation and algorithm development, you can do a
lot with just this: send only red channel, inject noise into the image
to simulate a faulty camera, etc.

Good luck with your project.

-Brent

p.s. Anybody know of a working OS X (10.5.x) build of Torcs? The ones
I've tried so far don't work.

Hello everyone,


I'm new to this list so please let me introduce myself. I'm
Jean-Christophe Hoelt, French man living in Beirut, Lebanon. I
currently work (approximatively) full time for private founder which
tries to improve the open-source community efficiency, so it can rule
the world (basically). This man, Keith Curtis, wrote a book which
exposes its ideas: see
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/155845.asp for
an interview and http://www.lulu.com/content/4964815 to get the book.

So why is Torcs-NG involved? Because it's the base of the project.

Our long term goal is to develop smart AI which drives your cars. To
achieve this, we plan to organize a Virtual Grand Darpa Challenge (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge for the
"non-virtual" version), which should attract lot more competitors
because no hardware (i.e. expensively equipped cars) will be required,
just a racing simulator.

The first stone of the simulator is Torcs. We are going to improve it
to give AI plugins access to "virtual cameras" and other sensors (like
GPS), which should be the only way those plugins can access the track
and cars positions.


The important technical steps we've done so far:

- We've ported the code to a new generation platform: Mono / C#. For
now, we have a Race Manager, a Graphic Plugin and a Robot Plugin
written in C#. Torcs' C++ plugins are wrapped behind C# proxies
(automagically generated using SWIG for those of you who knows it).
- We've writen a renderer based upon Ogre3D, so realistic images are
provided to virtual cameras (and to the user) -- main improvements for
now are shadows and shader based materials.


So I'd like to ask if some of you are interested by any form of
collaboration (or eventually join the project if you like), so
Torcs-NG and OpenRacing car progress together (and why not become only
one project if I can include my code beside yours). The main tasks for
good collaboration will be:

- Let me port the changes I made to interfaces headers into your
repository so it can be analyzed correctly by SWIG. (*)
- For the data: it's good if we can share them. [1] Basically artists
should provide the 3D models into a less proprietary format. (**)
Create the models with more care. (***) I also need to improve
trackgen.
- Other stuffs that probably have to be discussed....


That's it. I'm now waiting for your thoughts about this: are you
enthusiastic or skeptical? Do you have any questions? Hopefully you
understood my opinion: collaboration is the key to better open-source
projects!


Best regards,


- Jean-Christophe "Jeko" Hoelt


(*) Those changes usually doesn't imply big modifications to other
sources, an example: "nested union" are not supported by SWIG, so when
I remove one it requires many little changes around the whole
repository.
(**) Ogre3D do not open .ac files, so I had to open 3D models with
AC3D, export to OBJ, import into blender and then fix the many
conversion bugs (I spent 1 day for 1 track, so this isn't a solution)
(***) Flip the 3D models faces (for correct stencil shadows we need
faces oriented toward the outside), use only closed shapes. Provide
normal-maps...