new TODO

[msamples]

How many who would appreciate AI interfaces?

I'm new to vdrift (just got the svn version compiling earlier today after experiencing the bouncing car problem with gcc4), and I am looking at vdrift as a candidate for testing out some learning algorithms. I've also been looking (originally) at RARS, and more recently, TORCS and Racer.

RARS is out of the picture for a whole ton of reasons, but while TORCS does have good driver interfaces for some things, the graphics are not as pretty. Also, the usage of SDL makes it easier to do some computer vision manipulations, if that's the aim of the AI implementer. It seems that about the best you can do in TORCS is read the hardware buffer, which (as I've found) can be overwritten by other applications. I was running a few AI/ComputerVision tests with TORCS and found that the data I was collecting included images from other applications. I would think that using SDL as an intermediate layer would help this problem a lot... so vdrift might be in the running for designing AI robots still...

It seems that if there were good interfaces for getting driving instructions for a vehicle, it would be easier to develop all sorts of AI drivers: whether those drivers were Lua-script-based, or neural-net drivers, or whatever.