AI driver

[rookie1]

* Why do some tracks work and others don't? Lots of the cars seem to work alright. I haven't tried them all yet.

Probably due to the roads.trk and starting position of the tracks. Starting position of some tracks are in the pit lane, and there is no proper traced road leading to the main track. AI can only follow the bezier patch 1 by 1 on the traced road. I propose we should set the starting position at the starting line, not the pit lane.

* I get segfaults when doing pause -> restart game, pause -> leave game, pause -> quit.

No segfault when i do pause -> quit. No segfault at pause -> leave game either, but I do get 'NaN in origin vector' quite frequently in this case. Haven't found out why yet.

I do have segfault at pause -> restart game. From back trace, it seems after restart, somehow the AI car's drivetrain pointer is invalid (probably been deleted during restart). Couldn't figure out why though.
<edit>segfault fixed in r1372

* Will this system be able to accept other robot modules? Is it compatible with TORCS robots API?

The AI code is base on Berniw's TORCS robot tutorial. However, it's not using TORCS API. Bascially, there are 4 functions in the AI module,

updateGasBrake()
updateGear()
updateClutch()
updateSteer()

Each function handles 1 particular aspect of the input, and pass the input similar to a player controlled car, via Vamos_Body::Car::gas(), Vamos_Body::Car::brake(), etc.

There is no shared library/DLL support built in. So some more work is needed if we want to be able to add robot modules dynamically.


I'm not familiar with the collision code. But do note that the AI currently does not have the capability to avoid colliding with other cars. It also lacks the ability to return back on track once it's off.