On Aug 6, 2007, at 7:46 PM, Curtis Olson wrote:
I'd like to do a quick informal poll here.
My day job involves maintaining and managing an advanced research
driving simulator:
http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/Facilities/index.html
There has been some vague discussions here in my lab about
launching a project to create some sort of open-source driving
simulator software targetted towards research applications (i.e.
open-ended, interfaceable, highly scriptable, highly adaptable.)
FlightGear seems like it could be a very logical starting point.
So I am wondering if anyone out there would have any particular
interest in adapting flightgear to accurate simulate surface
vehicles and perhaps develop a better infrastructure for
representing roadway environments, traffic, signs, signal lights,
etc. My mind goes to all the animation and scripting abilities we
already have with FlightGear, the ability to drive multiple
displays/monitors, our mutliplayer capability, our weather and time
of day effects, etc. We would need a more accurate vehicle
dynamics model (or extensions to existing models to model car
engines and transmissions.) We may (or may not) need to do some
work generating more rich and detailed roads and road
environments. Finally (and this is probably the hardest task by
far as I'm sure Durk could attest to) we would ultimately want a
very realistic "AI" traffic simulation ... cars that follow the
rules of the road, obey signal lights, avoid accidents, don't have
distracting behavior bugs, have tunable aggressiveness levels, have
realistic variations ... i.e. cars stopped at an intersection don't
all have exactly the same lane offset and gap spacing ... I could
go on and on ... merging behavior, round abouts, properly
interacting with pedestrian traffic, bicycles on the shoulder,
trains, etc. This gets really hard, really fast.
So I would be interested if there is anyone out there that would be
especially interested in adapting FlightGear for car/truck type
simulation, especially if your interest level (and available time)
might push you to the point of being willing to contribute to such
an effort.
Thanks,
Curt.
--
I have just played a bit with Racer (http://www.racer.nl/) but it
seems pretty nice. It is an open source, cross platform driving sim,
much like FG. It seems to use some pretty reasonable physics and
have the ability to use different cars, again, much like FG. So it
is something else that you might consider.
--Adam
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