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Is the benefit of making it a separate tool related to making better/more APIs or avoiding graphical shortcuts made in video games? Or other benefits?

I realize that Microsoft wouldn't have access to GTA5 source code, but Microsoft Studios could have other games, that have already made substantial work in terms of graphical representation and performance, thus saving time for more API work, if the platform could be reused.

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One of our major focus is to use AI in real world. A lot has been done in applying AI to video games but we are still taking baby steps in applying it in real world. The question that we want to answer is this: can we train and test algorithms in simulated world and then use them in real world? This is known as transfer learning problem and its a huge area of research where people are investigating, for example, how can we use 80% simulated data and 20% real world data? The games typically found on commercial market are created for entertainment purposes. For example, game creator might decide to cheat on physics to optimize performance and may configure things so its easy but not too easy. Our focus was rather to pursue good physics, sensor models, vehicle dynamics, hardware-in-loop and so on. Also, we wanted to make this project as open source. Most commercial products typically involve complex chain of 3rd party licenses that almost make it impossible for them to be open source.

This is a plugin for the Unreal Engine.

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