Racer and external AI?

[reseter]

Hi everyone,

I am currently planning a neural network controller that will hopefully be able to drive a car. Racer seems to be just the environment I need. However, I have a few questions before I start. Firstly, is there a facility that would allow another application to drive, for instance by issuing key events via the operating system? Secondly, during a race, can I access information regarding the current state of the game, e.g. car speed and location, road curvature, etc. This is to enable me to record my driving and use it for supervised training of the neural net.

Thanks,
Miro

 

[MitchVL]

How far are you planning to go with this?
I'm one of the 2 programmers working on Racer.
This sounds very interesting.

Please mail with further information:
m.vanlooy <at> cruden <dot> com

 

[Ruud]

Note that the most important thing is which inputs you need. Not really a clearcut decision, see http://www.generation5.org/content/2001/hannan.asp for a talk about CMR2.0's AI, using a neural net.
Interesting indeed.

Racer's track don't really have a notion of curves and straights; it's one big spline (see for example data/tracks/carlswood_nt/spline.ini), so just a collection of directed road quads. There is an internal notion of 'amount of under/oversteer' though for example. A DLL approach would probably be best.