Re: [Torcs-devel] System stability and changing gears in TORCS.

[Bernhard W. <be...@bl...>]

Hi Jim

Ah, ok, the "name" thing is because the "owner" of this is TORCS, so it 
does release the memory at some point, so if you do not "strdup" it 
tries to free "wrong" memory.

situation->currentTime is the current simulation time, yes.

Regarding your "often restart" use case, you should stay with 1.3.4, 
becuase I fixed many (possibly all) remaining memory leaks (see 
changelog), so if you restart very often this can get significant.

I do not know what kind of work you are doing, but there is as well a 
command line mode (e.g. if you want to evolve some AI without watching 
it, see the FAQ, section for researchers) or the blind practice mode 
from the TORCS menu.

Best regards

Bernhard

On 11/25/2012 05:57 AM, James Ihrig wrote:
> Thank you, I was able to solve both the gear changing problem as well as
> the crash on driver selection.
>
> As a note, I think the crash on driver selection may have been related
> to my random crashes during runs when I issued a restart. Once I changed
> my name and description from:
>
>
>      modInfo->name    = "MyBot";        /* name of the module (short) */
>      modInfo->desc    = "";    /* description of the module (can be long) */
>
> to
>
>      modInfo->name    = strdup("MyBot");        /* name of the module
> (short) */
>      modInfo->desc    = strdup("");    /* description of the module (can
> be long) */
>
> I no longer have an issue with that. I hadn't followed the other driver
> format exactly since I am not ever allowing multiple cars in my tests.
>
> I still don't know why my earlier attempts at gear changing didn't work,
> but your example code seemed to work. I will look at it more closely on
> Monday.
>
> As for the time, I am currently using situation->currentTime, my bot
> isn't timing some things correctly but at this point I'm still assuming
> the mistake is on my end. (30 second timer seems to take 2 minutes to end.)
>
> Am I correct in assuming that situation->currentTime is the current
> simulation time I should be using? Am I also OK to assume that this is
> measured in seconds?
>
> I have not yet attempted to speed up the simulation again as I'm still
> doing stability testing at real-time first.  (450+ race restarts with up
> to 2 min runs each and not a single program crash so it's looking
> fantastic so far.)
>
> Thank you again for your help,
>
> Jim Ihrig
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 10:40 AM, Bernhard Wymann <be...@bl...
> <mailto:be...@bl...>> wrote:
>
>     Hi James
>
>
>      > I've been running Torcs-1.3.3 and have had a couple problems. First,
>
>         when running my bot at a faster speed than real-time, my bot will
>         sometimes float straight up, then off to the side of the track
>         and the
>         race will end. (This issue seems like a bug, but I'm reluctant
>         to say so
>         since I've modified the TORCS code.) Second, I am having trouble
>         with
>
>
>     I guess this must have something to do with your changes, I have
>     never seen/heard of a problem like this before. The problem "makes
>     no sense" if you look at how TORCS works: It simulates basically in
>     simulation time, just when you have a "watching mode" selected it
>     synchronizes real and simulation time to spit out frames, that is
>     it. So I doubt that there can be something wrong. I hope you do not
>     rely on the real time clock in your robot, only use the simulation time.
>
>
>         I have tried to copy/paste this into my drive() fuction (from other
>         drivers code) but all I see is the gear bouncing between 1st and 2nd
>         gear, so I feel I must be missing something. I didn't understand
>         what
>         the code was doing so I tried a bunch of variations with _gear and
>         _gearCmd and and even tried manipulating the clutch. Is there any
>         documentation on how gear changing is supposed to work?
>
>
>     No, but it is trivial, the gearbox switches to the gear you choose.
>     How you do the decision is then your business;-) But one example is
>     explained in the robot tutorial:
>     http://www.berniw.org/torcs/__robot/ch3/gears.html
>     <http://www.berniw.org/torcs/robot/ch3/gears.html>
>
>     This method just works if the gearbox ratios differ and have the
>     correct order, so if you sabotage the gearbox you can make this
>     method fail, but for any halfway "real" gearbox it works.
>
>
>         I have tried upgrading to TORCS-1.3.4 to see if my issue with
>         the bot
>         leaving the course would be fixed, but it crashes once I select
>         a track
>         when configuring the race. (It seems to be crashing sometime
>         after the
>         constructor is called for my bot, but before any other function
>         in that
>         class.) Is there anything I need to know to move my bot to the newer
>         version?
>
>
>     Maybe, have a loot at this, this is the only adoption regarding
>     drivers in 1.3.4, all the other bots are unchanged (if I remember
>     correct):
>     http://torcs.cvs.sourceforge.__net/viewvc/torcs/torcs/torcs/__src/drivers/human/human.cpp?__r1=1.45.2.9&r2=1.45.2.10&__pathrev=r1-3-1
>     <http://torcs.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/torcs/torcs/torcs/src/drivers/human/human.cpp?r1=1.45.2.9&r2=1.45.2.10&pathrev=r1-3-1>
>
>     If you took bt/beriw/etc. robots as base it should work then I
>     guess. I recommend just comparing what you do with the existing
>     robots or running the debugger, then you will see.
>
>
>         I'd also like to note that none of the links in the FAQ seem to be
>         working right now.
>
>
>     I recognized that some days ago, but I did not yet have time to look
>     into this, I upgraded the CMS recently, and it could be the result
>     of a cross site scripting fix which has done there, but I have to
>     look into this.
>
>     Best regards
>
>     Bernhard
>
>