merge

I merged my maintainance code with the latest torcs code. This does
not include any new features, but merely bugfixes of older ones and
slight improvements in mature modules, such as the grsound module.

Please do test, as this code changes interfaces/car.h and
modules/graphic/ssgraph/grmain.h - among other things.

The learning library is not touched. I think maybe I should move it to
the robottools directory, it seems nicer. My work on the
learning led to the development of a new learning technique, so I am
busy trying it out on some experiments and writing a paper
about it, though I have not tried it yet on TORCS. (still toy problems
like controlling an inverted pole and stuff).

However as far as TORCS is concerned, and with respect to learning, I
am not sure if it is good to combine learning with an already good,
but very constrained robot, or with a mediocre but quite adaptible
one - hey, maybe that's a good research topic.

--

-- 
Christos Dimitrakakis
IDIAP (http://www.idiap.ch/~dimitrak/main.html)

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Texttures and the internet

let say that your track uses road.rgb as a texture as defined in the .ac file.
the loader will search first in the track directory, then in the data/texture
directory, and if everything fails, you can read a parameter in your xml file
with the URL to search...
look in the code for the parameters retreiving, it's not so complicated 

BTW, I redirected the thread to the torcs-devel mailing list because other
people can be interested so please use "reply-all" in your mailer to have the
list in copy.

Eric.

Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> i'm not sure what you mean...Basically what I need to do is define somehow that the image on a bilboard has to
come from a url. Where do I do that? How do I bring together the xml and the ac file. Can you give me a sample of
how the xml file would look like? Can I write my own texture loader so that I can say this track segment has
texture test.mike and when i try to load mike i go on the web and grab the test texture? How would I define this
in the track.xml file?
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Espie [mailto:eric.espie <at> free.fr]
> Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 4:14 PM
> To: Mihnea Galeteanu
> Cc: 'torcs-users <at> lists.sourceforge.net'
> Subject: Re: [Torcs-users] Texttures and the internet
> 
> 
> Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> 
>>would i be able to define them in the xml definition of the track?

Re: [Torcs-users] Texttures and the internet

Too bad  it's the PLIB loader that is used for that.
well you'll have to add some additional parameters to the loader
in order to use your own image loader, check the ssgLoaderOptions
for that.

Eric.

Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> It seams that grutil is not invoked for textures loaded from the ac or acc file, but only for those defined in
the xml file.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Espie [mailto:eric.espie <at> free.fr]
> Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 4:08 PM
> To: Mihnea Galeteanu
> Cc: torcs-users <at> lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Torcs-users] Texttures and the internet
> 
> 
> Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> 
>>I want to add an extension to torcs that will allow me to demonstrate 
>>textures being downloaded from the web. Where would I start this 
>>endeavour? I'm new to torcs and from what I understand, textures are 
>>defined in the track's xml definition file. Am I wrong? What would I 
>>need to do to be able to put a url as the source of the texture? Thanks,
>>
>>Mihnea (Mike) Galeteanu
>>
>>

Re: Texttures and the internet

Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> what package is that in?

Check PLIB documentation on plib.sf.net
the ac loader is from the PLIB library.
the acc loader is in src/module/graphic/ssggraph/grloadac.cpp

Eric.

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Espie [mailto:eric.espie <at> free.fr]
> Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 4:33 PM
> To: Mihnea Galeteanu
> Cc: TORCS Devel List
> Subject: Re: [Torcs-users] Texttures and the internet
> 
> 
> Too bad  it's the PLIB loader that is used for that.
> well you'll have to add some additional parameters to the loader
> in order to use your own image loader, check the ssgLoaderOptions
> for that.
> 
> Eric.
> 
> Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> 
>>It seams that grutil is not invoked for textures loaded from the ac or acc file, but only for those defined
in the xml file.
>>

RE: Texttures and the internet

by loeader do you mean grutil.cpp? If in my ac file I define a texture texture1.test, I want to have a loader
that interprets that as download this texture from www.mike.com?texturename=texture1   That's what I'm
interested in doing: intercept the texture loading process for my own recognized extension

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Espie [mailto:eric.espie <at> free.fr]
Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 4:27 PM
To: Mihnea Galeteanu
Cc: TORCS Devel List
Subject: Texttures and the internet

let say that your track uses road.rgb as a texture as defined in the .ac file.
the loader will search first in the track directory, then in the data/texture
directory, and if everything fails, you can read a parameter in your xml file
with the URL to search...
look in the code for the parameters retreiving, it's not so complicated 

BTW, I redirected the thread to the torcs-devel mailing list because other
people can be interested so please use "reply-all" in your mailer to have the
list in copy.

Eric.

Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> i'm not sure what you mean...Basically what I need to do is define somehow that the image on a bilboard has to
come from a url. Where do I do that? How do I bring together the xml and the ac file. Can you give me a sample of
how the xml file would look like? Can I write my own texture loader so that I can say this track segment has
texture test.mike and when i try to load mike i go on the web and grab the test texture? How would I define this
in the track.xml file?
> 

RE: Texttures and the internet

Does anybody know if it is at all possible to put animation type files for textures? Basically what I need is
to look at a wall that has a texture on it and see it change. I don;t care what file format the texture needs to
be in to be animated as long as I can animate something. Any help would be greatly appreciated

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Espie [mailto:eric.espie <at> free.fr]
Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 4:43 PM
To: Mihnea Galeteanu
Cc: TORCS Devel List
Subject: Re: [Torcs-devel] Texttures and the internet

Mihnea Galeteanu wrote:
> what package is that in?

Check PLIB documentation on plib.sf.net
the ac loader is from the PLIB library.
the acc loader is in src/module/graphic/ssggraph/grloadac.cpp

Eric.

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Espie [mailto:eric.espie <at> free.fr]
> Sent: Sunday, October 17, 2004 4:33 PM
> To: Mihnea Galeteanu
> Cc: TORCS Devel List
> Subject: Re: [Torcs-users] Texttures and the internet
> 
> 
> Too bad  it's the PLIB loader that is used for that.

Re: Texttures and the internet

Hi Mihnea

> Does anybody know if it is at all possible to put animation type files for textures? Basically what I need is
to look at a wall that has a texture on it and see it change. I don;t care what file format the texture needs to
be in to be animated as long as I can animate something. Any help would be greatly appreciated

No, I'm quite sure that plib does not support that without further work. 
You have to implemnent it yourself.  Depending on your animation type 
you can:
- Put all pictures to textures or better into one big texture if 
possibe. Depending on your choice you can animate with changing the 
texture object or the texture coordinates. The latter choice is better 
(look for background information on several OpenGL 
sites/discussions/papers/newsgroups, opengl.org, nvidia.com, ati.com, ...).
- If your animation is large (e.g. a movie) you have to generate a 
texture object on the fly for every movie-frame. On PCI and AGP cards 
this is quite an expensive operation, I heard PCI-Express is better for 
such kind of operations (I have not touched such a card yet). The issues 
are the bus bandwith, latency and the texture caching of the card.

A partial example for what you are looking for is the rear mirror, you 
have just to get the texture not from the framebuffer (e.g. if you would 
like to implement a huge display for the spectators it would work like 
the rear mirror).

Bye, Bernhard.

--

-- 

visit my homepage http://www.berniw.org

force feedback

RE: force feedback

Hi Mihnea

>I was wondering if torcs supports force feedback. Thanks,

No. I think it would take 5 hours to build a prototype and up to 30 hours
for a nice implementation (menu for adjustments, effects, portability, etc.).
I think various people already implemented some kind of force feedback for
TORCS, but their code made it never to us (e.g. look at the link on the end
of the FAQ)

Bye, Bernhard.

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new track

I have made a new road track, which has some nice textures and a
rather large shadow file for environment mapping, should be in
torcs/data/tracks/road/ole-road-1

I probably need to smooth out the terrain's 3d data because the one
generated with trackgen from the elevation file tends to create
strange subdivisions.

--

-- 
Christos Dimitrakakis
IDIAP (http://www.idiap.ch/~dimitrak/main.html)

-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: IT Product Guide on ITManagersJournal
Use IT products in your business? Tell us what you think of them. Give us
Your Opinions, Get Free ThinkGeek Gift Certificates! Click to find out more
http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/guidepromo.tmpl