Europilot: A toolkit for Euro Truck Simulator to develop self-driving algorithms

Another related thing that I wanted to check out is this: https://github.com/Microsoft/AirSim although that only gives you the sim and you have to do the machine learning part completely yourself.

It was also very interesting in the early days because you could see the agent getting much better day after day.

A self-driving sim, to be realistic, is also going to need realistic traffic simulation. I helped bring traffic modeling to the computer age, that is what my business did.

When asked for a quick description, I like to say that I built the greatest traffic simulator on the planet. Of course, I'm heavily biased. Eventually, we could even render some of that data into graphics.

Yeah, so it probably wasn't a thrilling simulator with broad appeal and it required a whole lot of compute power and huge data sets. Either way, it probably would have resulted in a good, albeit very large and computationally expensive, engine for a traffic simulating game.

I signed a non-compete that lasts for life. It may not actually be legally binding, but I feel ethically bound to it. But, a game would not be competing in that space - less so if it were FOSS.

What I'm trying to say is that I'd be interested in such a project, though I'd want to seek legal council. I can program a bit, but I eventually hired professionals to do that on my behalf. Let's just say that you probably don't want me submitting actual code, but I can almost certainly help with the math involved.

I'm just spitballing, really. If someone wants to do something like this, I'd be willing to take a peek and see if there were a way to contribute. I sold and retired, but I still hold great fondness for the art. Modeling traffic isn't easy, it's a chaotic system and you never really know the initial starting state.

So, if you decide to go FOSS, let me know. If it is in C, or C++, I might even remember enough to lend a hand coding, though that's probably a horrible idea. My entire code base was rewritten by actual competent people and programmers were different back then. They were quite comfortable expressing their frustrations with working on my existing code. They were, shall we say, very eager to share their knowledge - sometimes with various levels of vulgarity.

Anyhow, to model traffic at a high level of accuracy, even things like the reflectivity of lane markings will have a quantifiable impact on traffic. You can observe the effect by monitoring traffic before and after lane markings are painted. Traffic is even influenced by the fonts used in signage. Lots of seemingly small things can be accounted for and the models made more accurate.

I'd love to lend a hand, assuming it isn't going to get me sued.

You can show your support by giving that post a +1.

In terms of testing, the max fps is determined by the performance of the GPU and the complexity of the model. I couldn't find any definitive studies done on the matter, but anywhere from 10-30 fps seems to work OK.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07316

There might not be an API callable from outside the app, though...

Euro Truck Simulator was chosen because it runs on Windows/OS X/Linux, and because the game consists mainly of highway roads, which is an easier target than urban environments.

Also I just really like the game itself.