[anindha]

There is quite a lot of interest in a self driving car simulator. I wonder if we could use Kickstarter to raise some money to get the game maker to add simulated radar, lidar, and cameras. You should be able to customize the position of these sensors.

[KGIII]

A self-driving car simulator would be interesting and maybe there's some chance at making it open source?

A self-driving sim, to be realistic, is also going to need realistic traffic simulation. I helped bring traffic modeling to the computer age, that is what my business did.

When asked for a quick description, I like to say that I built the greatest traffic simulator on the planet. Of course, I'm heavily biased. Eventually, we could even render some of that data into graphics.

Yeah, so it probably wasn't a thrilling simulator with broad appeal and it required a whole lot of compute power and huge data sets. Either way, it probably would have resulted in a good, albeit very large and computationally expensive, engine for a traffic simulating game.

I signed a non-compete that lasts for life. It may not actually be legally binding, but I feel ethically bound to it. But, a game would not be competing in that space - less so if it were FOSS.

What I'm trying to say is that I'd be interested in such a project, though I'd want to seek legal council. I can program a bit, but I eventually hired professionals to do that on my behalf. Let's just say that you probably don't want me submitting actual code, but I can almost certainly help with the math involved.

I'm just spitballing, really. If someone wants to do something like this, I'd be willing to take a peek and see if there were a way to contribute. I sold and retired, but I still hold great fondness for the art. Modeling traffic isn't easy, it's a chaotic system and you never really know the initial starting state.

So, if you decide to go FOSS, let me know. If it is in C, or C++, I might even remember enough to lend a hand coding, though that's probably a horrible idea. My entire code base was rewritten by actual competent people and programmers were different back then. They were quite comfortable expressing their frustrations with working on my existing code. They were, shall we say, very eager to share their knowledge - sometimes with various levels of vulgarity.

Anyhow, to model traffic at a high level of accuracy, even things like the reflectivity of lane markings will have a quantifiable impact on traffic. You can observe the effect by monitoring traffic before and after lane markings are painted. Traffic is even influenced by the fonts used in signage. Lots of seemingly small things can be accounted for and the models made more accurate.

I'd love to lend a hand, assuming it isn't going to get me sued.

[JoeDaDude]

So, which was the traffic simulator you worked on? I've always been fascinated by traffic and traffic modelling, read books [1], seen articles where they use cellular automata, psychology, discrete events, etc etc.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307...

[KGIII]

I'd prefer to not disclose the specific names for reasons of a modicum of privacy. It's long since sold, anyhow.

But, yes! It's absolutely amazing what goes into modeling traffic as accurately as possible. When we expanded to model pedestrian traffic as well, we even went so far as to build a mock store.

It's fascinating to see how small changes can influence traffic and alter the throughput. Simple things, like frequency of signage has a large impact. There are also regional differences where whole regions will, as an average, drive very differently.

You can run all the models, collect all the data, and someone will still get drunk and reverse the wrong way on a one way street. You'll never get perfect predictions and so there are constant changes being made. That kept it interesting.

What I worked on was all proprietary. It'd be interesting to see an open source project in this arena.

[anindha]

How realistic are traffic simulations in games compared to what you had worked on?

[KGIII]

I don't actually know what current games are like. I played some sim transport games back 15 to 20 years ago, and they were pretty bad. I don't play any games really, but I'd make time for a good traffic sim. I have played a few games, here and there, that included traffic but they weren't very good. Like Need For Speed and GTA? Those aren't very realistic.

I should probably try something current that runs on Linux. Got any suggestions?

[frik]

Play/try out Grand Theft Auto IV (or V).

(The GTA4 is more realistic simulation.)

[KGIII]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. My friend's kid has a nice setup. I'm not much of a gamer. I'll buy the game for him and make him let me play it.

I'll try to add a comment the next time this subject comes up. He's got things like a seat and steering wheel/pedals set up.

[rsp1984]

On Feb 17th I posted this request to their forum: https://forum.scssoft.com/viewtopic.php?f=137&t=229146

You can show your support by giving that post a +1.

[anindha]

Thanks for pointing me to this. You request is well written. I imagine they would want to be paid to build that. Did you ever ask the team to give you a quote?

Say for example they open source a plugin that outputs everything you requested but didn't disclose any IP related to the game.

[rsp1984]

I didn't ask for a quote but if they just built it and sold it as a product I think they could make a whole bunch of money.