My AI Thesis

[joevenzon]

3. Is it possible for VDrift to run in text mode only, and thus simulating thousands of laps (with only the AI car) in an acceptable time frame, in order to train the neural net? This is a critical step.

I think you should start by looking at the car performance testing code. If you run VDrift with the option -cartest CARNAME (where CARNAME is XS or so on), game.cpp does this (in ParseArguments):

Code:

    if (!argmap["-cartest"].empty())
    {
        pathmanager.Init(info_output, error_output);
        PERFORMANCE_TESTING perftest;
        perftest.Test(pathmanager.GetCarPath(), argmap["-cartest"], info_output, error_output);
        continue_game = false;
    }

Then if you look at performance_testing.h and .cpp you'll see how a car is set up in an environment that's an infinite plane. You would need to add some code for setting up a track and replace SimulateFlatRoad with a function that does raycasts on the track to feed to the car. You can see how this is done by looking through all of the code called from AdvanceGameLogic in game.cpp.