kilo - SD - TORCS

printf("RIP Dennis Ritchie :( \n");

2011-10-14T10:13:00.001+02:00

There aren't many computer-related books on my shelf. But the white one* is there, and I guess it will be there as long as I have a shelf.

Thank you, Dennis. RIP.

* The C Programming Language, B.Kernighan, D.Ritchie

git and nomad life

2011-09-06T09:18:00.000+02:00

This entry is like a note to myself, just to help remember setting this thing up again if needed...

So I have my track creations in a public git repo at repo.or.cz.
So far I've only been using it to publish my ideas to the world, but now my time schedule has changed and I wanted to gain full access from another computer, too.
I had no problems using git clone to clone the project on the new computer. Then I've set up some tracking branch with 'git branch -t track_name origin/track_name', fetched it with 'git fetch origin' and began working on it after the merge: 'git merge origin/track_name'.
But then after some changes I wanted to push them to the repo, so I could continue work on the other computer. However I could not get it working unless adding a new user at repo.or.cz/reguser.cgi. It also meant generating a new SSH key with ssh-keygen, and copying the public key to the appropriate edit field on the register page.
Then I've edited the file .git/config and added a new line in the section '[remote "origin"]' a new line, right after the fetch URL line:
pushurl = ssh://newusername@repo.or.cz/srv/git/kilo_torcs_tracks.git

Now I can fetch the whole thing issuing 'git fetch origin track_name' and push to it 'git push origin track_name'. The server asks for the SSH passphrase and voila it works.
Right, it may be obvious for some, but I am happy now and wanted to share it :D

Note #1: you may ask why did I not use my existing pubkey to register. Simple: forgot where my USB stick with my pubkey was, and did not want to wait 3 more days with the whole procedure when I got back to the same situation... yes I know, I am lazeeeeehhhh.

Note #2: remember, don't git pull, rather git fetch and then git merge... Details here and here.

Knockhill dilemma solved

2011-08-28T00:08:00.000+02:00

Thanks to everyone who has expressed his/her opinion about my planned track.

The results are:
Realistic: 5
Easy: 2

manfariel has even produced side-by-side videos with a real-life on-board lap on the left and himself driving around the track in Speed Dreams, on the right, synchronised. Wow!

So the more realistic option wins, even without my own vote. Thanks again for sharing your views.

Knockhill dilemma

2011-08-14T01:34:00.002+02:00

HELP NEEDED!

I've been working on a track for some time now, Knockhill in Scotland.

It is a 2 km long (or better, short), fast track with very interesting corners, turns and altitude changes. What gives me headaches is the latter one. The information available of the track says that it is "varying by around 200 feet (60m) from highest to lowest point." I've mapped the track outline, tried to get the altitude and banking changes right, but I have a burning un-certain feeling in my soul about it.

At first try I've made it so that the Z-size, ie the difference between the lowest and highest point on track was 200ft. Man, was that track hard to drive? Sure it was. It had some drops that you would even think about going down there by bike, not even a racecar... Robots behaved very different in the drops and climbs, some were flying out straight ahead like an F-14 catapults from a carrier ship, others slowed down and managed to follow the track more safe. In short, the track looked and behaved too dangerous.

Now, I haven't been to the track IRL. I only know it from photos and BTCC races available on Youtube. So I've never walked down there on those slopes to get a real feeling of them. There may be this kind of sharp changes in altitude, or there may be not.

My next idea was to halve the altitude changes of the track. It was easy to do, only had to change the 'grade' and 'profile end tangent' values of each segment in the track XML file. After generating the track, I was eager to see how it feels to drive around. And - I liked it more than the original! It seems the robots like it more, too. It simply feels more natural.

So I have this track that feels great to drive, and another one that is more hi-fi in regards of data. Which one is better? I cannot decide, so please help me! The two versions are available here (safe one) and here (tricky one). Please download and test them and share you views either in the comments or via e-mail.

Remember, I need your help

or this track won't be finished ever and all the great resources used for creating it will be lost forever to humanity :D

NB the tracks are unfinished - they don't have a pitlane, textures are basic, etc. But they are drivable. I've driven them in Speed Dreams, but I guess they also work in TORCS. To install them, just copy the contents of the archives to the track/road location, in a folder named 'knock'.

Install Speed Dreams on Ubuntu

2011-06-30T00:44:00.000+02:00

Following up of my TORCS install howto, today I'll tell you what I had to do to get Speed-Dreams up and working on a brand new, clean Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narval) install.
NB: I usually work on the trunk branch of Speed Dreams, using git-svn, but I think the download packages should work the same.

So this is what I've started with:

sudo apt-get install cmake libsdl1.2-dev libjpeg8-dev libxmu-dev

then made some links:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib/libGL.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libGLU.so.1 /usr/lib/libGLU.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXi.so.6 /usr/lib/libXi.so

(idea from here)

then downloaded and installed Plib the usual way (later I learned there is a plib-dev package in Ubuntu now...):

Visit the PLib download page.
Download the 1.8.5 version, then do as told: tar xzf plib-1.8.5.tar.gz
cd plib-1.8.5
./configure
make
sudo make install

and then onto adding some more dev libs:

sudo apt-get install libopenal-dev libenet1-dev

At this point "cmake ." still wasn't happy, whining about some plib thingies. Quick googling led me to our own forum (khm) and launching cmake in interactive mode (cmake -i .) I was able to set the correct location of the PLib includes.
This was so satisfying that cmake agreed to complete 100%.

Now in the make phase I quickly faced the first problem, at about 9% of compiling. It missed some libplib*.so files in the /usr/lib directory. Noproblemo, linking is our friend (every other day):

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplibul.so.1 /usr/lib/libplibul.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplibsg.so.1 /usr/lib/libplibsg.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplibsl.so.1 /usr/lib/libplibsl.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplibjs.so.1 /usr/lib/libplibjs.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplibssg.so.1 /usr/lib/libplibssg.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libplibssgaux.so.1 /usr/lib/libplibssgaux.so

And so it compiled at last...
Now I'm busy racing :)

git <-> svn

2011-01-10T00:17:00.000+01:00

You may guess now I like working with git. I am always amazed how easily I can match the abilities of this software with the several, often changing needs that arise during my work or hobbies. Oh right, it cannot help in skating faster...
And then there is Subversion. I should not say I hate it but I think it is a slow dinosaur, ugly, fat and slow-moving. But still, many projects use it so if you want to participate in them, you've got to follow the flow.
And there comes git-svn to the rescue. It enables you to use your beloved git in a subversion-based project easily. This is how I've set up my workplace for Speed Dreams development, using git for effective feature branching, mergeing, rebasing and such git candy:

mkdir sd

git svn init https://speed-dreams.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/speed-dreams/trunk

git svn fetch -r3096 (of course you can choose another SVN revision)

git svn rebase

and voila you have a nice and shiney git repository that mimics the SVN repo.
Anytime you want to update your repo (like doing 'svn up'), just issue

git svn rebase

The above process is explained in more detail here (thanks, Flavio), along another entry here.

Now onto feature branching:

I quite like the Story branch pattern, so basically what I do is:

1) Find a ticket to work on in the Speed Dreams Trac system, let's say it is ticket #100.

2) git co -b 100_ticket_short_title this creates and switched to a new git branch that I will use for this ticket only

3) hack this & that

4) git add -p

5) git ci -m 'Commit message that really tells something. Re #100' - so I always try to include the ticket number in the commit message, good for Trac coverage.

reiterate 3-4-5 until ticket is finished

6) git diff --cached (review all the work done)

7) git rebase -i HEAD^8 (or so, view last 8 commits and squash them together if needed - this to get rid of the side effects of very frequent git commits)

Now before committing to SVN let's make sure it won't cause any conflicts:

8) git svn fetch && git svn rebase (OK maybe git svn fetch isn't needed)

If still 'green', then commit to SVN:

9) git svn dcommit

Now switch back to the master branch and update it, too:

git co master

git svn rebase

Set the ticket status fixed and delete the branch, if you like. I prefer to keep it around for some weeks in case the ticket is reopened after the initial tests, but you can get rid of it or create a new branch then - really just a question of taste.

The only thing you should really take note is: you cannot do a git svn rebase if you have any uncommitted changes. Fabio's blog says he uses git stash to put away his changes, does the rebase, then does git stash apply to get his changes back. I prefer to commit my changes instead, do the rebase and then work on the usual way. Which one you choose is up to your taste - both approaches work fine.

This is the real git magic - you can choose the way you work!

Ramblings - 2010/43

2010-10-29T11:20:00.001+02:00

Remember last time I wrote that I can run Speed Dreams again with decent FPS? Well, that seems to get worse now, the driver fails quite often and SD exits then. Another Linux bug, got to check the reports :(

Yet I've managed to develop the robot some more. Now it can handle skill settings, so you can set it up to be hmmm 'less than perfect'. The setting affects the braking (it starts breaking for a turn earlier), accelerating (it accelerates slower) and the width of the track is uses, so it isn't so brave using the full width of the track and sometimes even more, remains on the 'safe side' of driving. Whether this skilling is consistent or not, ie when skill is lower by 10% the lap times get worse also by 10% is subject to further testing.
Now I am in the process of setting up the LS-GT1 carset for the robot, the first car (the Archer R9s) is kinda ready with two fictional drivers. Check the process details here.
In the meanwhile I am trying to adapt the coding style of the whole robot codebase to match that of Google's advised C++ coding style. While in some moments it seems to be too narrow-minded pedantric there is quite some thought in it and in the end it may help improve code quality. One of the changes was to use full path in includes, #include "src/drivers/kilo2008/pit.h" instead of #include "pit.h". Kristof reported it caused problems when building the code but I think it is rightful to be sure the compiler uses the correct header files in situation like ours when there are several robots in the source tree with a pit header. Later Kristof said it only caused problems when using a separate build directory so not in normal cases. Another suggestion was to use "using ::std::string;" instead of "using namespace std;" so not to pollute the global namespace, something I've never ever thought of but can see the reason behind. cpplint.py is a great tool helping this process (nah in reality is a nasty little !*@#**^%& but we love it, right?)

Track-wise I am fighting a pitlane issue of too wide a pit lane and matching the correct texture for it. Just look at sat pictures of the St. Petersburg GP and you'll see my problem. Oh damn, I've so many track ideas... and Knockhill is next on the door.

The other day I've ticked off a ticket about incorrect number of laps displayed in the board1 area that was caused by such a trivial error I didn't notice it for an hour or so... passing the address of a char array to a function, then checking it's size is snprintf, the size if not the array size but the size of the pointer hahaha (4 vs 255). Trivial but painful :)

Haruna has shot a nice video of the current state of Speed Dreams, it is on Youtube, check it out:

That's all that comes to my mind today, Halloweeeen is right here \o/

Ramblings - 2010/41

2010-10-15T13:27:00.000+02:00

Whoa it has been quite some time since the last post... Long story short: I lacked computing power to run Speed Dreams in an enjoyable quality, could only get 4-5 fps max! on my laptop, detailed here. Now I've updated it to the latest Ubuntu version and using the community-driven radeon driver it is able to produce 25-30 fps in a race so I can enjoy SD again. Wohoo!

Speed Dreams is nearing a 2.0 state slowly, and I can tell you the wow! factor will be high once you try it. Many a things has changed since 1.4 and you can enjoy using it very much. There are new tracks, new cars, a lot of sim engine changes, user-friendly menus etc etc.
My code additions are not too many yet but still I've managed to display the pitting driver differently on the leaderboard and resolve some track name and info issues when loading a track.

I've dusted off my kilo2008 robot and started adapting it to SD. You can follow its evolution here, or on a dedicated wiki page in the SD Trac. It is now able to drive along any track quite safely following this logic: it measures how long a track is and how many degrees of turns are on the track. From these data it computes something we can call like 'curviosity', ie: curves vs length. Then it decides which setup to use for the track - slow, default or fast. Of course one can create track-specific setups, if anything like that exists in the appropriate directories then the robot will use that instead of the above procedure.
I've also made it able to drive 20 cars the same time (some code stolen from Andrew...). Now I'm trying to squeeze in some code to handle skilling - so you can set one driver better than the other, or globally the user can select how strong (skilled) robot opponents he/she wants to play against.

Tracks - the same state where I've left them. But that's going to change soon.

Too bad the TRB Champs this year was no-go, cancelled.

Ramblings - 2010/10

2010-03-08T14:29:00.000+01:00

Emmm I'm bit late with the "periodical" ramblings but I've been busy busy busy...

So with Speed Dreams we had a quite successful beta out, about 80k downloads from sf.net alone. Most of the tickets are closed or moved to the next version, so what you can download now is the version we call RC but if no serious flaws are found, it will be identical to the Release 1.4.0.

We are already planning the features for 2.0 - it is a huge mess now but it will take shape in the upcoming weeks. We decided to stick to a quite strict release policy so the feature list will be freezed by the end of March, that means the 2.0 will be out when all the features we voted for are complete. Each feature will get a responsible sub-team and a leader, and we push for documentation and testing more than before. If you like SD and feel an urge for a feature, or would like to join us developing it, feel free to post your idea on the Wiki pages *now*. Be quick or be dead :)

I'm slowly moving forward track-wise, fiddling textures quite a bit but I'm sure the tracks will be released sooner or later...

BTW Kennet has put together a nice but very difficult track and sprintea86 has also published one - this one makes me dizzy though turning turning and turning.

Stuck with SVN

2010-02-18T12:46:00.000+01:00

We have a SVN server at the office and 2 project repos on it. The other day my co-worker invented he would like to see the commit message informations ordered a bit differently than previously, so in GMail we could see the rev (as subject) and the log message first, for clearer view.

So I've made some lite changes to SVN's commit-mail.pl (I don't really like Perl but can get around in it fairly easy) but then I was stuck - I did not know how to make SVN to send out all commit message emails again.

So I had to make a 'for' loop in Bash and invoke the post-commit script from within, several thousand times... which of course took a lot of time and also left me with bad feelings about this 'solution'. If anyone knows how to make SVN send out all the message emails again, please tell me.

Ramblings - 2010/04

2010-01-28T12:54:00.001+01:00

It seems there are a lot of work to do for the Speed Dreams project members, as there is so low activity on the project in the moment. There are about a dozen bugs to fix until we can release 1.4.0 but I don't really find one that I can fix, most of them involve graphics knowledge I lack for sure.

So for the moment I spend my spare time doing tracks: St Petersburg, Knockhill and 2 30's-era tracks (secret secret!). I'm also preparing my robot to be included in the next version and to clean up code a bit before starting this year's TRB championships.
I've some new ideas for Speed Dreams like displaying 'pit' on the leaderboard if the driver is currently in the pits, better name handling on the scrolling leaderboard and some minor fixes etc

It is cold outside and winter sleep is so sweet :)

10 years gone

2010-01-20T14:31:00.000+01:00

I haven't been able to boot into my good ol' Win2K lately - I've used it only for running the invoicing software for at least 4 years now. But invoices cannot wait too much, so I had to do something about it.

The partition/opsys was listed nicely in the Grub2 menu but when choosing it I met with an ugly message:

error: invalid signature

Nothing more. Not too long, right? :)

Of course I tried googling it and have found quite some references, but most of them were pointing to this forum thread of Ubuntu Forums. I've read that thoroughly and tried every tip included there, but without any luck. So I decided to install a new(er) Windows (ugghhhh) and the invoicing software.

First I saved the MBR with

dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin -bs=512 -count=1

then installed WinXP easily, then I restored the MBR using 'dd' again (read in more detail here). All that was left was issuing

grub-update

and I was ready.

Windows 2000 - we have spent 10 years together, farewell thee...

Ramblings - 2010/01

2010-01-04T00:44:00.000+01:00

Speed Dreams: Well our beta is out and we have reached over 11.000 downloads until now. I am quite happy with that. Eckhard re-surfaced and improved a lot of graphics, on the other hand both Andrew and Wolf-Dieter has disappeared a bit, but they have advised it beforehand.

Holiday season made the project life a bit hectic but I suspect we will be back on path soon in January. Release is due very soon as you can see it in release roadmap.

BTW I've added a lot of stuff to the wiki, then Eckhard deleted the main page by mistake so it had to be rebuilt... todo: backup regularly... :)

I've used the lazy days for some re-organization of my own project directories & files, and again was amazed how easy it is to merge separate Git repositories into one. Also found this blog for useful hints.

Ramblings - 2009/52

2009-12-24T00:42:00.000+01:00

I am always amazed by how flexible Git is. For every aspect it has a proper answer, a way to do it and those are not hacks but built-in features. Simply amazing.

I've recently found an article by Ryan Tomayko about handling tangled working copies with Git - and it struck me that Ive been following this technique myself for quite some time, only difference I use git-stash often, too. Ah and another article, by Ariejan de Vroom about Git patches, the most clear explanation I've seen so far.

We have a beta out for Speed Dreams 1.4.0! Check it out here - it is really so heart-warming to see so many work materialize. Well there is some things to do till the final release, expected about late January or early February, but nothing really serious we know of. Of course beta testing can help any still unknown problem to appear so we are looking forward to this period.

Ramblings - 2009/51

2009-12-14T09:54:00.009+01:00

I decided to write some random rambling one per week, to collect my thoughts on TORCS/SD development-related issues, like ideas, what-are-you-doings, recent happenings, milestones, any new information I've come around. I plan to name them with the week number - of course there will be weeks when I skip this so don't rely on it very heavily :)

With Speed Dreams (hosted at SourceForge.net) we use Subversion as versioning system. Now 'svn ignore' - kills me, I think it is so damn un-intuitive. However recently I've stumbled upon a blog 'BogoJoker' where Joseph Pecoraro discussed it so nice and clear that it immediately made me understand how it works (but I still think it is un-intuitive...) Here is the link if you need advice.

I'm getting close to make public a new track, Knockhill. As usual, it would be v0.4 as there is no 3D editing done at all yet. Quite a lot to do track-wise: learn Blender through Salty, pretty Longday a bit, then Petit, then Knockhill. And there are lot more tracks in my head to do...

Speed Dreams is approaching a beta release - there will be a meeting on Saturday to discuss the details. We fought a lot with track selection previews - now the game displays a preview background image and superimposes a track map over it (done by JP and Brian). Wolf-Dieter has finished a lot of Simplix setups, while Xavier added more weather-related stuff to sdl-port-branch. Haruna made sure there are no more TORCS-related textures, and JP has also polished the menu system while Brian added more code to the networking part.

I plan to merge the most recent Kilo robots into Speed Dreams' next release. Todo: make it not crash when there is no setup for a track, simple fuel strategy, prepare for timed sessions.

Track releases - Salty, petit

2009-12-03T13:51:00.006+01:00

I've released the next version of Salzburgring, named v0.4. It includes quite a lot of eye candy already but expect to see more coming...

I've also uploaded a new track, named 'petit' that renders a very famous track in Braselton, GA, USA. It is also v0.4 but has much less 3D stuff in it, but sure it will be the next target of my Blender fun.

You can download them here. Install them the usual way (they should work with both TORCS or Speed Dreams). Please tell me what you think, in the comments or via email.

BTW I have lots of plans for tracks, enough to fill my next 2 years or so :)

TORCS Championships 2009 - Street-1

2009-11-30T13:42:00.012+01:00

The TRB caravan revisited Street-1 in sunny Australia this year (sadly without the Green Monsters Team not showing up) and I have to tell I've had many joyful and many not-so-joyful moments this time.

Compared to my last race here, my robots were quicker about 1 second in the qualifiers and 1.5 seconds during the race. They remained in/near the main field for most of the race and were lapped only 2 (or 3) times by the leader cars. They were in shooting range from the JDIs and Dummies for quite long into the race, in a race that was very close, intense and very exciting.

However they were not smart enough to hold on to their position when overlapping someone and let others behind gain significant time on them in those moments. That was the main issue why they did not finish in the top 10 in the end, this is definitely something I got to work on during the season break.

Here are the results and the screenshots...

JDIs bad qualy

First lap turmoil

Turn right, no straight...

Zhora advancing

No big differences in the field

Poor Berniw...

and poor EJ :)

Kilo here, Kilo there

If only we could see Berniw driver's face in this moment...

Yeah we practice this a lot at home with the Dotties

Jumpety jumpety jump jump

Way up high, to the sky...

Viewing a fierce battle from close

Jumpety #2

Ey mate what ye doin in there?

"Fuzzy ye in P5" "Roger......Woooot ye said P5???"

Let's come together right now...

Dummy loosing position

Wow lotsa stickers on this one

Jumpety #3

Fuzzy dropping down

and down

This grey one should use headlights,
makes me nervous when it appears suddenly behind

Ski slopes in Adelaide

Jumpety #4

Things kept on just happening and happening

Fastest guy in town? Kilo 2 \o/

Trac + random + GNUe

2009-11-20T10:19:00.007+01:00

The Speed Dreams dev team is testing Trac these days, as provided by Sourceforge.net. Mart has imported trunk's TODO to TracWiki and JP set up some tickets based on the TODO. That is, if we close those tickets we are quite ready to release Speed Dreams 1.4.0 for beta. Should happen soon, but there are time-consuming tickets on the list, too - like setups for cars.

Mart has discovered that Sf.net's version of Trac does not provide the feature to update tickets based on commit comments, it's a pity. It should work and make life easier.

I've been working a lot these days on the Salty track 3D model. I am getting the taste of Blender now I think but I have so many future track plans... hard to list even. Keep an eye on what's coming.

Oh and I have a report for the G-track-2 race in TRB in the works... soon... got to run the next race, too... busy busy busy :)

Although it is not TORCS/SD related but the GNUenterprise.org project (gnue for short) I've worked for quite some time seems to be alive again, Reinhard has committed lots of stuff recently. Got to check it and update translations at least!

Corkscrew project ends

2009-11-09T13:41:00.005+01:00

I've created the Corkscrew track for TORCS quite some time ago. It all started with Kennet requesting the track at 16 November 2007. Yes, that's right, it was 2007...

I've published the first version in January 2008 and then 2 more updates followed from me. My job stopped just short of creating anything 3D-related. The track was there, it was fun to drive, track & nearside textures OK, pits, turnmarks etc all done. But I really stopped there, not knowing 3D editors well enough to do any serious prettying.

It was recommended by Bernhard on the main TORCS website and had quite some downloads since then. After some time it got imported in the (then TORCS-NG) Speed Dreams project and it already got enhanced by the advanced graphics engine used there.

And then on a dull September morning I saw a complete new version submitted by Andrew Sumner to SD trunk (rev 1449). It was like - BANG WHOOAAA. It was wonderful!!! It has the lake, the hills, the buildings, the bridges - everything. Andrew has really gone out again and produced a real living track, a great job as usual from him. Thank you very much!

So you can find the latest version in Speed Dream's repositories - and that means my work with that project has officially ended. It is a good feeling though to know that I've added my share of work for a nice track I know many many sim drivers will love.

Have fun driving around!

Debug displays

2009-11-09T12:07:00.003+01:00

I've just committed a change in Speed Dreams' sdl-port branch. It enables the debug mode display (controlled by key '5' when in race screen mode) to show some more detailed information besides the FPS value it used to display. Now you can also see the sector name, the distance from the starting line and the actual camera's name.

So now the debug display has 3 view modes. First is: no show :) Second mode is showing only the FPS while the third mode displays all the information discussed above.

See r1802 for the changes.

Scrolling leaderboard fixed

2009-10-18T01:09:00.004+02:00

Jean Philippe wanted to include the scrolling leaderboard in the first release of Speed Dreams, so I've revisited the (obviously buggy) code.

I've simplified it quite a bit, every time the string is scrolled out of the screen it is regenerated on the basis of the last lap's results. It has no obscure logic anymore (for me at least).

I also made it generate 3-letter abbreviatons of the driver names, so the string to scroll would not be too long. This generation works on the idea of finding the first non-matching character in the driver names, so if there are 2 totally identically named drivers it cannot do any magic at all. I plan to introduce a new attribute to drivers (in the XML file) where we can clearly tell SD what abbrev to use, so one driver will be shown by that name each and every time, like RAI is always Raikonnen in F1. But I think that would come only after the release.

You can see the changes in SVN rev 1511, 1512, 1526, 1597, 1602 and 1603 (with some clean-up work included, too).

TORCS Championships 2009 - Alpine-1

2009-10-14T01:02:00.001+02:00

Alpine 1 is a fine track, I was happy to see it on the race list of the TORCS championships. It has 3 quite different sections and so this is what makes it hard to setup a robot perfectly for this track. One must decide if he prefers the twisty uphill section, the curvy but fast downhill midsection or the last, sweeping, fast downhill one. The hairpins uphill provide some ground for overtaking while it is much harder to do in the downhill parts as speed difference is usually not big enough.

I wanted my robots to do the uphill section perfect and get rid of their sliding technique in the turns, so I've chosen big-degree spoilers and accepted the slower top speed on the downhill section. This proved quite OK as they were not overtaken any time in action, they always managed to make up some advantage uphill that opponents could not gain back downhill. The only time they lost position was when refuelling so the opponent behind could do a faster lap and gain 1 second before his own refuel. Just like in real-world racing, wow :)

The race itself started fine, but one of the Wolverines got lost in the last hairpin in the first lap, and while it did not cause big conflicts on that lap, the next lap saw real destruction derby - Wolverine 1 has wandered backwards(!) to the previous hairpin and met the field there.

Half of the field got stuck there while Dummies, Lobos, a JDI, both the Kilos and the Dots were lucky enough to escape \o/ The Berniew team lost both his cars in that corner and it made a top 10 roster much of my taste :)

The Dummies grabbed 1st & 2nd and didn't quite let go of it for the rest of the race. The Lobos were matching the Dummies' speed but after some unlucky overlapping one of them received some damage and so they couldn't use slipstreaming any more.

The race went on quite uneventful for my drivers, driving in pos #6-9. At around lap 45 or so EJr09 John stopped in the last hairpin uphill and spent some laps parking there until removed from the track - I don't really know what was wrong, he tried to escape the corner backwards, straight into the barrier. Most of the cars could handle it but some crashed a bit into him or produced crazy sliding turns.

From lap 35 Wolverine 2 began to slowly creep up the ladder, overtaking the Dots with clever refuel tactics and in lap 71 he even overtook Kilo1 while it was in the pits.

So after 79 laps (more than 2 1/2 hours) Dummies claimed the victory and both Team Alba and Team Dots had the best result so far during the season, finishing at position 6, 8, 9 and 10. I know the initial crash must have been a reason for this result but I am still very happy :) Oh yes, and I did not forget to send the results this time...

PS: Must tell that EJs act very nice letting overlapping cars get by, while I couldn't see that gallantry from many drivers...
PS2: Sadly enough only Daniel's race results seem to match my own, it seems other players had quite different a race then we two. So the sum-up of the results sent can be found here.

Go Andrew, go!

2009-10-02T11:02:00.003+02:00

Andrew has decided to publish a step-by-step guide to produce pretty tracks for TORCS/Speed Dreams. A nice move and I can only hope I will be able to understand most of it :)

Anyway, here's the link (and I've put it on the left, in the 'Related Blogs' section, too).

TORCS Championships 2009 - Aalborg

2009-09-25T10:40:00.008+02:00

Next stage in the TORCS championship was Aalborg - a slow, twisty, narrow track that makes an endurance race quite a long one.

As I had some issues on the other PC, I've decided to run the race on my 'old' laptop. I've set it up to use low texture sizes but still it was damn low FPS sometimes.

The race itself was - boring. Sorry to say that but watching my own robots mainly I did not see any big fights, after the Wolverines left Kilos behind. One of the Greenies was dropped behind as they were not playing safe and received quite a lot of damage, resulting in many pitstops. The main pack must have had some interesting things happen that I missed, and we saw a nice performance from team Nexus Six Racing (owner dz_duck).

After the finish I wanted to commit the results immediately - but I've found I was 1 day late :(( Aaargh I've put a wrong date in my calendar. But as I've checked the results it turned out they were quite similar to my own race results. Kilos finished at #11-12, about the same pos where they've started (overtaking a Wolverine damaged while pitting and a Greenie). Dotties advanced over the EJ team and finished at #14-15.

Some pics - low quality, I know...

I'm slow...

Hey boys, where is the starting line?

Wolverine, it was a green lamp!

Robots, bah...

Twist & turn

Damnez, he can go past...

Hey, you... get off of my car

Traffic

Flames...

I lap, you overtake, I'm getting lapped - and you?

Lads lads lads... ye in ains team!

Flying high, through the sky, high high through the sky...

There's many a laps I've traveled, a hundred miles and more

U spin me right round baby

Party where?

Let the Dummies show, too

Stealth fighter

Just outside top ten

Almost 4 hours...

Install TORCS on Ubuntu

2009-09-21T11:12:00.006+02:00

I've got hold of a clean install Xubuntu 9.04 aka Jaunty Jackalope so I've decided to write down step-by-step what is needed to be able to build the latest TORCS version. I've done it many times now but never took time to note everything properly until now.

I hope you find the instructions below useful.

Method used

Brute force trial and error :) That is, you try to run TORCS's configure script and look at what it is complaining about. Then with the clever use of apt-cache search and dpkg -l and of course our good ol' friend grep you pick what is needed for real and you install that.

Below all the commands you must type in the mighty Terminal are in italics and follow the Ubuntu lifestyle of sudo-ing a lot.

Basics

sudo apt-get install build-essential g++

Dependencies

libpng: sudo apt-get install libpng12-dev
the above also installs zlib1g-dev so zlib: OK
OpenAL: sudo apt-get install libopenal-dev
FreeGlut: sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev - this pulls a lot of dependencies, too.
X thingies: sudo apt-get install libxxf86vm-dev libxrender-dev libxrandr-dev
ALUT: sudo apt-get install libalut-dev
PLib: suxx, as Ubuntu Jaunty has only the 1.8.4c2 in the repo, so have to do some manual work here:

sudo apt-get install libxmu-dev libxi-dev
Visit the PLib download page.
Download the 1.8.5 version, then do as told: tar xzf plib-1.8.5.tar.gz
cd plib-1.8.5
./configure
make
sudo make install

Now you have a working PLib1.8.5 so can go ahead. (If you accidentally get lost the FlightGear Wiki is a good place to look for help.)

TORCS

Download torcs-1.3.1.tar.bz2 (the all-in-one package, about 200MB).
Unpack it: tar xfvj torcs-1.3.1.tar.bz2
cd torcs-1.3.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --x-libraries=/usr/lib
make
sudo make install
sudo make datainstall

Finished!

You can play TORCS now by typing /usr/local/bin/torcs

Have fun! ;)

Project name

2009-09-18T00:39:00.004+02:00

Side note: I'm testing Chromium with this blog entry. I've managed to install it using this guide and look forward to how it behaves. First impressions are 'wow' and 'whoooah'...

The TORCS-NG team decided to rename the project before first release, for practical reasons. Dunno, I like the old name too... After some exhausting voting it was decided 'Speed Dreams' was best to describe the project. I know democratic rules can bear results like this, but if I compare the former and the recent project name, I'd still go with the old one.

Hmmm... we will see what other think of it. For me it sounds like a Chinese-made cheap plastic toy.

OK, rumbling over, now let's get back to coding and show the world it is not a cheap toy :)

TORCS Championships 2009 - E-track-1

2009-09-02T14:28:00.006+02:00

Aaaargh. Another race that I've messed up :(

Following Ruudskogen, we raced on E-track-1 this time. The track is nice, fast & rolling but has a tricky part, a bus-stop like chicane. If you do it right, you a) don't hit the wall b) don't crack your suspension c) carry enough momentum to have a decent finish-straight top speed.

Well, I've posted a version of my robots where the code that makes them negotiate the chicane was just missing. Result? Car enters the chicane too fast, hits a curb, flies a bit in the air and crashes against the wall, then spends 5 seconds finding the way out of the bus-stop. Then after 5 laps, the car is damaged enough to visit the pit for a 50-sec repair. Hillarious, right? Only time they did the maneuveres right were when they were about to overtake or let overlap someone.

After watching the same happen about 5 times I got quite angry and did not shoot any more screenshots until the race finished, sorry. So you can just see the start, some spins, dangerous Greens, fast JDIs, solid Dummies, evolving EJs, newbie grey Nexus (good performance!) and fighting but again loosing Wdbees.

What is missing? Right: no USR or Hymie in the race. Andrew decided to pull off his robot from the racing scene as he cannot spend enough time tuning them. Personally I don't agree with that and am very sad, but it is his decision so we must accept it. But...
Andrew, if you hear it - come back soon or... or... yarrrrr!!!

Results here, screenshots below without comments this time:

TORCS Championships 2009 - Ruudskogen

2009-08-28T12:32:00.005+02:00

In the middle of the summer the TORCS Endurance Champs herd moved to Ruudskogen.
But - it was held during my holiday time. So the night before we set off for the offline vacation, I've downloaded all the robots filed by fellow racers and closed the laptop. Then my offline weeks started, but one evening I started the race, knowing beforehand that the laptop doesn't quite have the CPU/GPU power (thanks ATI for forgetting about 'old' videocards...) to serve a race with 22 cars.
In fact, it could handle the task better than I've expected. It averaged about 5 FPS, but at moments it even reached 10!
Kilo 1&2 behaved very 'interesting', spinning out often on a fast left/right sweeper. Strange, I haven't seen them do that during the tests. So they were not going to win this race at all :)
The Dots were much better, I guess it was the American powercar sound that helped them :) No, seriously, they drove the same setup, only difference was in the code that at last handled the track camber and changed target speed according to that. Anyway, they were driving around in position 9-12 or so, but at one point they pitted the same time and that obviously resulted one of them get out of the race :( So Fuzzy was left alone but finished #10, the best result so far for them IIRC.
Kilos finished #17-18.
Being offline I couldn't send my own results so they are not taken into account, but you can see the results list here.
Sorry, no screenshots this time (due to ATI again) :(

TORCS Championships 2009 - Dirt-3

2009-07-22T13:24:00.011+02:00

10-second interview with myself:

- Like this track?
- No.
- Tactics?
- Tiptoe around without crashing out.
- Succeeded?
- Mainly yes, lost Dotty, finished 9-11th.
- Most dreadful moment?
- Lap93 crushing out 1/4th of the field, but we survived.
- Proud?
- No.
- Had fun?
- Yes.
- Want to return to this track?
- Definitely no.

Qualifiers

Start

Jump!

Uphill battles

USR wheel locked to the right

EJ's SUV

Traffic on bridge

Erm, exactly what did that car cost?

No parking on a bridge!

EJ, what are those buoyes for?

Crosstown traffic

I saw a sheep there, let's go and get it!

Even wdbee looking the wrong way?

Just a test pile-up still

Synchro jump from Hymies

Loosing Dotteh

Levitate

UFOs Down Under

The turn that decided that race

Gone is the other Hymie, too

JDI DQ-d for lap time limit

Warriors asleep underneath the mountains

SUV in reverse gear

Dust everywhere

Special pit entry

Still looking for that sheep...

And an avid follower

EJ and the buoys

Los Lobos victorious

A quite late pitstop...

Best finish for Kilos so far :)

TORCS Championships 2009 - E-track-4

2009-07-02T14:29:00.009+02:00

E-track-4 mmmmmmmmmmm

I love this track in TORCS. The curves are challenging to negotiate right, the long straights are speedy but the bumps won't let you fall asleep. I was quite happy to see it on the event list of the TORCS Racing Board Championship. The qualification saw wdbee's Los Lobos rocket time of 1:33.03. Even the USRs were half a second slower, while Kilos could just hardly get under 1:35. Interestingly the Dummies were not that fast this time at all.

The start also saw a newcomer, EJ and his dandy black trb-5 cars. After the start the Kilos and the Dots held on to their positions in a fierce battle with EJ and after the straights even fought dummy 2 who has dropped down significantly due to some clashes of which I saw only the skidmarks. Kilo 1 managed to overtake and was riding the same laptimes as the JDIs and Hymies.
In lap 10 R.Giskaard took a spin after the backstraight and dropped back to #13. Dotty got the first lap from Los Lobos while Kilo 1 was #8, Kilo 2 #11, in a battle with the JDIs and Dummy 2.
Then in L19 Dummy 1 spinning out, Kilo 1 found himself in position 6... The JDIs, Dummies and Kilos were about the same speed, only difference between them were seen when overtaking or lapping an opponent. Too bad my robots lost places during those maneuvers. Meanwhile Lupo and Lobo were drafting in the lead with R. Daneel following them a little bit behind. The Hymies were a bit more back but running nice & smooth.
Some people reported strange behaviour of the JeDIs but I haven't noticed that - until now. Looking more closely at the screenshots you can see their front suspension quite high - maybe that was the reason for their strange dance :)
In L32 Los Lobos lost the race. While trying to overtake a berniw-jdi-kilo triplet Lobo Malo had a spin and suffered some damage. While it was recovering quickly the USR hunter grabbed its prey and found the weak point. Later Lobo spent 26 seconds in the pit doing repairs and was never able to get back to the leading group. Something must have bugged their logic as from then on they simply performed bad (in their own content), constantly loosing time against R.Daneel. Or maybe Daneel was only more lucky with overlapping?
In L44 Kilo1 was knocking on the fuel meter with his index finger, then knocking some more but it was no gauge misfunction - fuel was out for real. So it was a slow ride back to the pits, loosing position 7 - until his own teammate Kilo 2 arrived from the back and smashed straight into the rear, KO for Kilo 1 and about 4000 damage for Kilo 2...
Then nothing really happened to my robots until the end of the race, except for a spin performed by Fuzzy, in lap 54. USR, Hymies, Lobos, JDIs, Dummies shared the leaderboard in peace, my robots in #11-13. I will show a screenshot of a nice sliding turn though:
The last laps Lobo Malo almost ruined Kilo 2 but the strategic decision was to go on and not repair the damages - it was a good decision. Interestingly both Hymies had to stop for fuel in the last-1 lap. Lobo Malo finished #10 after all the hard times he had been through, Kilo 2 #11 with 0.1l fuel left, while Dotty and Fuzzy followed.

The race was fine, results are here. Had there been no accident between the Kilos it would be a quite good result but the silver lining is that they could fight JDIs and Dummies and produce similar laptimes. Dummies were slower than usual for some unknown reason.
On the other hand, I think I will give up experiencies with low fuel laps. It is a valid tactic with cars like those in F1, where the car is 600kg and fuel can add 100-120kg, about 20% of the weight of the car. But it seems the TRB1 class with its 1150kg car weight and maximum 94kg fuel is not producing such big difference in lap times with maximum and minimum fuel load that would make it worth doing more pitstops.

Leaderboard changes

2009-06-25T23:31:00.005+02:00

I've added some more functionality to the TORCS-NG leaderboard display lately. For clarificaion, the leaderboard is displayed in the lower left area, showing 10 (by default) drivers and their times.

First improvement I've developed was to have a 'rolling' leaderboard, so if there are more cars in the race than the leaderboard can hold, it can be switched to scroll the roster upwards. After reaching the last racer, it shows an empty line and then starts again from the first one. Each driver name is shown using his/her own colours, defined in the XML file of that driver (or robot). See SVN rev 970.

Then I started working on a horizontally scrolling leaderboard, the ones you often see in TV broadcasts. I've committed it in rev 1007 although it still has some glitches to be sorted out. It hasn't been thoroughly tested with very few cars, a short track, a very long track, many cars, etc... the extremes you may say. Then it is a little bit annoying that the roster to be displayed is generated at the moment the leader crosses the start/finish line in each lap. And this newly generated roster is scrolled horizontally through the screen, so it can happen that you see a car in position eg #8 and the roster says it is #13... Need more time to clear these issues.

Well and as Xavier has put the Kilo robot in the repo I've also committed some maintenance work on that, making it work on the tracks it has been set up with. Next TODO is make it able to drive around any track, then handle skills, like the 'big boys' USR and Simplix does.

Plenty of plans...

TORCS Championships 2009 - Forza

2009-06-10T12:02:00.008+02:00

Gentlemen, start your engines! The TORCS Racing Board Championship 2009 racing has started at last, on the fast Forza track. As I have issues with my laptop, I had to borrow a PC to run the race, but it meant it was a clean setup for sure :)

Kilo 1 & 2 qualified as #11 and #12, then came Dotty and Fuzzy. In the first lap both Kilos were involved in a small crash with one of the JDIs and by lap 10 Fuzzy was 10th, while Dotty, Kilo 1 and Kilo 2 were running 14th and further back.

On lap 14 Dotty Doe and Lobo Malo were heavily damaged in an accident and both spent about a minute in the pits - too bad Dotty smashed into the horrid wall 4 laps later, together with Bender 09.
Fuzzy Foe was driving smoothly in poisiton 7, then 6, then after pitting it came back as #9.

On lap 27 Kilo 1 called it a day and joined Dotty resting in the wall.
On lap 32 Berniw 1 & 2 both ran out of fuel and drove slowly midlane, Fuzzy was stuck behind both quite a bit, Wolverine 1, 2, JDI 1,2 passed him easily and that left him in pos #10. Then in lap 37 R.Giskard passed Fuzzy as he wanted to let Lobo Malo & Lupo Bianco lap him. This is something that happens quite often to my robots :(

Lap 55 almost made my heart stop, Fuzzy (#11) wanted to overtake Giskard and slammed into the wall, but escaped it luckily - phew. Meanwhile Kilo 2 was running as 12th, a lap behind Fuzzy.
In lap 78 Kilo 2 wanted to take a lap back from Fuzzy, causing Fuzzy to go into the wall again, but this time he was able to recover quickly. Then Kilo 2 had a pit stop, so Fuzzy lapped him again, and they almost repeated the previous scene in lap 85, but Fuzzy missed the wall by inches this time. Slow learner :D
As a closing act, Kilo 2 set his own best lap in the last lap of the race while Lupo Bianco snatched the silver medal from Dummy.

So that means Kilo 1 and Dotty was lost due to the wall, Fuzzy Foe finished #11 and Kilo 2 #12. It was a fun race to watch, Wdbee's, USR and dummy robots seem very strong, while JDI is reaching up to their level soon. Team Polimi's Wolverinnes can be caught if my teams don't do all these silly strategical errors. As both Hymies slammed into the wall, I can not decide what they are able to do yet. Check the results here.

Main issues to deal with: get back on road from the wall, take over very slow cars more easily, handle situations when being overlapped a little bit smarter.

Committed patch & SVN access

2009-06-08T10:31:00.003+02:00

Jean-Philippe liked my recent patch and granted SVN access to the TORCS-NG project. So I could commit it myself.
I feel kinda proud to have been included in the team. After years with TORCS now I can do something for the project for real, not 'only' creating some tracks, as my limited graphic talent keeps me from producing quality tracks with nice surroundings.

And I've also commited a small patch that won't let GfCreateDir() change the parameter path, as it is now declared as const char *.

Happy team member \o/

Patch - code review @ race results

2009-06-05T10:03:00.003+02:00

My previous patch was committed \o/

My editor still had the file raceresults.cpp open and I found some ways to make it more simple & robust:

ReUpdateStandings() is used to read the existing results, update them with the most recent race's standings and write the updated results back. So basically you look for a driver, if he/she has previous results then add the points from the last race; if he/she does not have and previous results, create a record of it and put it between the results.
The original code went through the list of the recent race's results and sorted the array based on points with a bubble sort after each update. Now that it is luxury, sorting can be done after the updates have finished. That means we sort 1 time, not eg 20 times.
Then I thought - hey we are in the 21st century, let's not sort with a hand-written bubble sort when we have complete libraries for that. So I took a big breath and changed the array to a STL vector, then used STL sort() to handle sorting and find() to search for drivers. Result is: much simpler code. Oh and while I was there I changed the char* things to C++ strings, too.

I've sent the patch to Jean-Philippe, we'll see if he likes it or not. The patch can be applied to both trunk or sdl-port as the file is the same in both.

Patch - results not saved

2009-05-26T13:49:00.006+02:00

I've sent a patch to Jean-Philippe, it fixes TORCS-NG's faulty behaviour not saving the results file if the directory structure to hold it was not created yet. I made the patch against the sdl-port branch, AFAIK the trunk is expected to be released soon.

The cause is plain simple, saving the XML file (GfParmWriteFile) uses fopen() and fopen isn't expected to create the directories. However I think the directory path should have been created when first running the program...
Well the patch fixes the fault explicitly creating the directories in the path if they do not exist. I've tested it under Linux but can't test it under Windows.

Scanning the TODO file a similar error is still there, not saving screenshots when the directories are not created yet. I'll look at it, this may be the same problem.

Set for this year

2009-05-26T00:14:00.007+02:00

Phew, I've been able to set up TORCS and my robot today.
I was really worried I would not get there in time.

I've created a development user environment, for testing the robot. Then I've created a separate user only for running the races. The latter one will get clean a TORCS install right before each race, so nothing can be left over and harm the results. At least I hope so :D

The only remaining issue is - my laptop's ATI Mobility Radeon X200 and Ubuntu 9.04 do not like eachother. I guess you know the story - Ubuntu moved to the new X server, ATI dropped support for 'legacy' cards, so their fglrx does not like the X200 now. That leaves me with the free radeon driver, that is ... khm ... not so strong when we speak about 3D. Framerates can drop to 1-2/s :( I guess I'll have to wait a bit and hope someone comes up with a solution for decent 3D. Or should I downgrade to 8.10 where all was fine yet?

2009 season preview

2009-05-20T14:13:00.004+02:00

The TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 season start is almost here.

I don't particularly like the tracks selected for this year - I like Forza, E-track 4 and Street 1, but really hate Dirt-3, E-Track-1 or Aalborg. I miss Brondehach, Wheel-2, E-track-6 or Corkscrew. But well, maybe my robots have a different opinion :D

I have some issues with my laptop so cannot run TORCS and test the robots at the moment. I expect them to be on the skill level of last December, while many code enhancements were committed, mainly in the raceline section. But none of these changes has been tested against the 1.3.1 release so I only expect the robots to drive as good as they have did near the close of last year's championships.

First race is due on 4th of June, so - from coder's viewpoint - almost an eternity to get everything going.

TORCS Championships 2008 - Corkscrew

2008-11-28T12:43:00.001+01:00

The TORCS robots moved across the US, from Michigan to sunny California this time. Testing their skills at the dreaded Corkscrew complex, on a newrunner track (erm created by... me?). It was a fun race, one that I enjoyed the most so far I guess, and not because it was on 'my' track.

Ah right, forgot to write about Michigan... oval racing, going round and round lotsa times. My robots did quite well, being speedy, but their technique in the corners would need some more work. Ah and at one point they tend to miss a pit visit so can run out of fuel. That was solved with a temporary hack for Corkscrew, telling them to start thinking about pitting when they still have fuel enough for 3 laps :)

So came qualifiers and the kilo bots finished #13-14 while the dotty ones #17-18 (by design). In fact the Dots were some hundredths faster on test runs than the Kilos but I preferred the Kilos to gain points, so made the qualy setting of Dots a little bit slower. That is a programmer, playing God :D
Start went fine and the first hairpin was solved without any big amounts of damage, but Turn 3, a sweeping right-hander prooved fatal for some top teams. USR lost R.Giskard who though he should pit each and every lap after the accident, a JDI was thrown back and Bea Benz had to fight her way back to the top 10, too.

Kilo 2 and Fuzzy Foe got in top 10 somehow while the other halves of my teams had to jog a bit in the second half of the field. The track prooved to be quite entertaining, there was always something happening somewhere, there were not many boring empty minutes.

Like here: Kilo 1 (blue+yellow) overlaps the orange R.Giskard, Dotty laps them both, while they were all lapped by the wdbee team (on the far left):

Team Inferno's aggressive driving style caused them to spend quite some time in the pits, obviously loosing too many places, also with the (not so occasional) spins:

The Corkscrew turn complex produced some hot moments:

As I've said before, the race was full of action, takeovers, overlapping, taking a lap back, it was hard sometimes to decide who fights who, the pit was crowded, entering cars caused some trouble, too:

All in all it was an exciting race - too bad the scenery is dull, it definitely needs some Blender work.

TORCS Championships 2008 - Alpine-2

2008-10-15T11:36:00.000+02:00

Winter. Snow. Slippery roads. 20 mad pilots.
That was the Alpine-2 race of the TRB championships. As the track is quite slow (and narrow), I've expected the race to be well over 3 hours and indeed I was right.

Kilo robots finished at #17-18 while Dots were #15-16 after the qualifications. They made a good start, fighting with the JDIs, when those 2 decided to wreck eachother so we could take them over and go after the Kiwis.

But then disaster came (as usual) and all 4 of my robots collided with eachother when Dotty tried to fight the Kiwis' Arina:
So - time to get working hard and find our way back. This is the scheme I seem to follow this year it seems :D
Kilo 2 seemed to be in best position, with less damage than the others. Dotty made a pass over Arina however - too bad it had to pit the same lap to refuel.

I was testing a refuel strategy code with my robots, making fast pit and frequent pit stops, refuelling every 10-15 laps to make more speed. I am still undecided whether it worked or not.
Berniw robots were slow and - unusually - very hard to overlap, this resulted in quite interesting moments and some damage to the leading robots, too.

Well about 30-40 laps into the race it seemed Kilo 2 can catch a Kiwi (Ohiana), and all others would follow the JDI Porsches. Not a good result but... well...
A big pile-up determined Kilo 1's race, due to heavy damage, also ending one Berniw robot's race:
Fuzzy Foe made an interesting pit stop, not caring about Dotty being there already, so he had to quit the race shamefully:
Then we lost dummy's 2nd driver the same way:
At the middle of the race Ohiana made a spin and had a hard time to recover and that proved lethal for his position, Kilo 2 had a target and from then on slowly beat poor Kiwi, with short refuels and fast, un-disturbed laps (yes, that part is true luck):
A JDI spinned at the entrance of the tunnel and was completely destroyed by the arriving USR bot:
As a result of these events, the positions were like this: #11 Kilo2, #12 Ohiana, #13 JDI2, #14 Kilo1, #15 Dotty, and in fact it didn't change until the finish. During the closing phases Kilo 2 was quite faster than Arina, the other Kiwi, too bad there was 2 laps' distance between them...

All in all I've enjoyed the race, Kilo 2 moved from start position #18 to finish at place 11. We lost Fuzzy due to a silly error (I must investigate that). Kilo 1's race was simply unlucky, with 2 big crashes and a lot of time spent in the pits.
As for what happened at the top... I don't really know, I was concentrating on the middle section. Sorry Andrew, Wolf-Dieter and Eric, it is too boring to see you win all the races :D :P

TORCS Championships 2008 - Brondehach

2008-07-23T09:50:00.001+02:00

The TRB Championships saw another interesting race this weekend.

The track is known for its tricky, off-camber turns and short straights. I've decided to split the team and used a high-downforce setup for car #1 and a high-speed one for car #2. Looking back at results, the first choice proved to be more effective.

The qualification yielded "nothing new" - my cars were in the middle, USR/wdbee/Simplix teams at top. USR showed off a lightning-fast 1:07.02, so a quick maths gave me a race result of finishing 5 laps behind...

Green lights! And they're off for 128 laps... Kilo 1 drives nice at position 10 while Kilo 2 was blocked at the start by a JDI Porsche parking across the start lane... It took about half a lap time to get clear of that :( Anyway for the first 30-40 laps the Kilos were in the middle of the field, driving quite smooth and nice. I noticed however my robots were more elegant than others when letting one overlap them, and it caused quite some time loss. Then something went simply wrong - every overlapping put my robots back a long way, they even lost positions that way. Overlapping cars (especially the USR team) caused damage, opponents smashed into them, then they drove a bit glued together in 4th gear not overlapping/waiting to be overlapped (something wrong with team tactics decision code). Then around lap 90 Kilo 1 drove straight into the pit wall and spent 3 minutes there recovering :( That pretty much ruined all the race for him, until then it would have been capable of finishing #10, afterwards I was happy to see them finish 13th-14th.

Well as it is a fun game, I don't want to use words like 'catastrophe' but - it was one :( Nevertheless if I look at the race from an outside view, it was a nice, crowded race with a lot happening all around.

TORCS Championships 2008 - Adelaide

2008-07-08T12:56:00.000+02:00

It was the second race on this year's schedule of the TORCS Championships, held on a track very very similar to the late Adelaide street circuit.

There were 18 robots starting, installation went without any trouble. The qualifiers went OK again, my robots came mid-field, at position 9 and 12, separated only by some 6 hundreths. Then the race...

As it could be expected, the first corners were frantic and there was a huge crash involving 6-7 cars, only the first half of the cars survived it. So that and the following pit visits mixed up the order quite a bit, causing early overlappings and big fun to watch. My robots were set up using a low-downforce, highspeed setup, which made them suffer very much in the 90-degree corners, but they gained back quite a bit of time each lap on the straigth sections. In fact, they were quite hard to overtake, being speedy (3rd-4th in top speed competition). If one missed his chance in the corners, my robots were out of reach for him on the other parts of the track.
"As usual", the USR, wdbee and Simplix robots were fighting for top positions, closely followed by the Dummy team. Team Kiwi was fast again, but one of its robots did not stop to pit with no fuel left, so that meant the end for him, while his own teammate smashed into the small queue that formed behind his mate just slowing down.
My robots had a nice clash with the Inferno team and gained a shared 11th and a 13th position in the end. It could have been better even, if my better robot, Kilo 2 hadn't spin about 10 laps to go, as it was closing in on Inferno-C quite fast and could have overtaken him - but well, this is racing :)
Team JDI had improved quite a bit, better watch out for those blue-green Porsches next time. Too bad Berniw didn't have time to imrpove the robot code obviously, so his robots weren't competetive this time.

So it was an eventful race, and clearly showed the areas where I should improve the robot behaviour: smarter overtaking, faster recovery, working together as a team.

TORCS Championships 2008 - Monza

2008-06-25T13:12:00.000+02:00

The first round of the TORCS Championships was held on a furiously fast track resembling the old Monza circuit, without that awful first chicane.
All in all 16 robot cars showed up, it was quite easy to set the race up and compile the robots. As it turned out later, I should have double checked if they copied all their setup files to the appropriate places, but as I did not see any error messages during the 'make && make install' phase I thought everything went OK.

I've started the race truely enthusiatic, Péter was in control of the views despite I've warned him several times it can last for 2+ hours, he was eager to see it happen. Qualification went quite nice, my robots finished 7th & 8th, few hundreths apart only. I was quite happy to see them positioned in the middle of the pack.

Then the race started and my robots quickly moved lower on the list, driving around places 12-15 or so after the first few laps. I saw one of JDI's Porsches fall out quickly, not finishing the first lap even. Then real disaster followed, when my robot 'Kilo 2' smashed into the wall right after Variante della Roggia, in lap 4. I did not see exactly what happened as we were looking at some other cars at that moment. But obviously while it only damaged itself to about 50% it just couldn;t evade the wall and spent the next 10 minutes reversing only 1 meter and then hitting the wall again. So it was stuck there until pulled from the race :( Damn...
The race went on, the USR robots of Andrew vrooming around and some nice movements in the pack behind, and then... in lap 15 my other robot, 'Kilo 1' joined his teammate at the wall and shared its fate, too. So it was a double out :(((
From then on, we had a nice race to watch like on TV, no robots to worry about :) We've seen some duels and USR's R.Giskard run out of fuel.

All in all, it was quite some fun, too bad my robots missed most of the action :) Bummer... I've got to work on the recovery code, and also try and make them a little bit faster - their lap time was around 1:22 and there were 4 robots slower than them, however they did finish the race :)

TORCS Championship 2008 - Rehearsals

2008-05-27T10:25:00.000+02:00

This year I've decided to take part in the TORCS robot endurance championships. I like driving in TORCS and - being a software developer - programming a robot shouldn't be that difficult.
At least that's what I've thought first. I've been looking at / modifying the tutorial robot for quite a while but some months ago Andrew released his 'locus' robot code. Trying it I saw immediately that it was so much superior than the tutorial one I really should spend my time with that code instead. So I finally entered a team (called Alba) based on his code and I'll try my best - to finish the races and collect some race experiment.
The guys involved voted to have some preliminary racing before starting the real championship events, just for testing the racing environments and setups, etc. I was late to enter the first 2 test races but managed to race the third (last) one. And it was sheer fun :)
The race itself was run on the CG-1 track, a short (2km) and not too difficult track - being an endurance race, a ~2km track yielded 244 rounds, which provided many possibilities for overtaking, overlapping, pits and such. My robots qualified #9-10 (out of 12) and kept that position until the finish line - luckily Miguel's robots (the Kiwi team) had some setup issue and they continuosly understeered in the double lefthander turn. Otherwise my robots could have been the filler-ups only :)
Péter was watching the race (about 2 1/2 hours) and enjoyed it too - but was urging me to make my robots quicker. Like if I didn't also want to do exactly that... :)
First real race will be early June - a lot to improve until then.