[Torcs-ng-devel] Summary meeting Sat Jul 11

[Mart K. <ma...@ke...>]

Hi all,

The logs of the meeting can be found at [1]. If have tried to make a summary, 
but for details you can look in the logs.

Op Thursday 09 July 2009 18:11:11 schreef u:
> Hi All,
>
> Day order of this Meeting:
>
> - Release schedule for trunk (how many beta's, when do we branch, what
> must be done before a release)

We first talked about simuv3. We concluded that simuv3 will be released, but 
will be the experimental simulation engine for 1.4.0. We discussed the 
document Jean-Philippe made. We discussed wether it was neccesairy to release 
alpha versions. Depending on the time it takes to solve the issues left, we 
will not release an alpha version.

After that, we looked to car names. We want to remove all the non-fictional 
brands. We also want to remove model names which have a clear link to a 
trademark, such as "996". As new names, we want to create fictional brands 
and put simular cars under the same branch. For example, if there is a car X 
in the Supercars class and an car Y in the TRB class and they look on each 
other, then we make a brand name, say "Z". We call car X now "Z SC" and car 
Y "Z TRB". Of course, the brands have better names the Z.

Jean-Philippe will coordinate the renaming and will make a proposal for new 
names. The cars will be renamed before the release, but the exact brands may 
be defined after the release.

More things have to be done. We need to remove all the "Torcs" signs around 
the track, for the same reason as why we cannot use other Open Source 
projects names.

> - Robot features (the feature list for robots I added to sdl-port).

In the sdl-port branch, I added some features which are only activated when 
all the robots have implemented it. Penalties is one of them: if one robot in 
a race didn't implement penalties, then noone in the race will get penalties. 
The same goes for timed sessions: without modification of the robots, they 
will run out of fuel. So, timed sessions are disabled if any robot don't have 
that feature. This means in particular that penalties for pro-users are 
deactivated if they drive in a race with a robot who doesn't have penalties 
implemented.

We are going to look if we add penalties, pitstop and strategy to the 
racemanager. This way, it becomes easier for new robot developers to design 
robots. Of course, they still can implement their own implementation if they 
want.

> - Sound management in Torcs-NG.

Jean-Philippe explained was he was doing with the sound code.

> - Career mode: which robot to use, other choices now defined in the
> xml-file which needs optimization.

I explained what kind of things we can set in the careers xml-file. For 
example which robot to race against. I noted that both simplix and hymie are 
fast enough. So, the choise should be based on things like driving with human 
drivers (they do not drive into human drivers) and things like that. 
Wolf-Dieter remarked that simplix learning algoritme can makes things more 
difficult.

Wolf-Dieter also asked about team strategies in the career-mode. The humans 
cannot communicate with their teammate, so robot strategy isn't always fair.

> - A general question round

Wolf-Dieter noticed some bugs in the trunk version. First of all a crash when 
pressing the '+' key twice fast after each other. I said I will look at that. 
Besides that, camera positions also aren't always right, such as the F3 
camera.

For now, the next meeting is planned at 8 or 9 august in the afternoon.

Regards,

Mart

[1] 
http://chat.jabberfr.org/logs/torcs-ng-dev%40chat.jabberfr.org/2009-07-11.txt