Ramblings - 2010/41

Whoa it has been quite some time since the last post... Long story short: I lacked computing power to run Speed Dreams in an enjoyable quality, could only get 4-5 fps max! on my laptop, detailed here. Now I've updated it to the latest Ubuntu version and using the community-driven radeon driver it is able to produce 25-30 fps in a race so I can enjoy SD again. Wohoo!

Speed Dreams is nearing a 2.0 state slowly, and I can tell you the wow! factor will be high once you try it. Many a things has changed since 1.4 and you can enjoy using it very much. There are new tracks, new cars, a lot of sim engine changes, user-friendly menus etc etc.
My code additions are not too many yet but still I've managed to display the pitting driver differently on the leaderboard and resolve some track name and info issues when loading a track.

I've dusted off my kilo2008 robot and started adapting it to SD. You can follow its evolution here, or on a dedicated wiki page in the SD Trac. It is now able to drive along any track quite safely following this logic: it measures how long a track is and how many degrees of turns are on the track. From these data it computes something we can call like 'curviosity', ie: curves vs length. Then it decides which setup to use for the track - slow, default or fast. Of course one can create track-specific setups, if anything like that exists in the appropriate directories then the robot will use that instead of the above procedure.
I've also made it able to drive 20 cars the same time (some code stolen from Andrew...). Now I'm trying to squeeze in some code to handle skilling - so you can set one driver better than the other, or globally the user can select how strong (skilled) robot opponents he/she wants to play against.

Tracks - the same state where I've left them. But that's going to change soon.

Too bad the TRB Champs this year was no-go, cancelled.