User Manual @CIG2008
Contents
1. Linux and OS X First unpack the client package in a directory Than open a terminal in the directory where you unpacked the client and type make to compile it The compilation process should end without any error or warning and you should now have an executable named client in you directory Now in order to launch the client you have to type from the terminal client lt ip gt lt port gt lt id gt lt maxEpisodes gt lt maxSteps gt where lt ip gt is the IP address of the machine where TORCS with the server bot is running lt port gt is the port on which the server bot is listening you must use a value in the range 3001 3010 lt id gt is your bot ID you must use cig2008 lt maxEpisodes gt lt maxSteps gt are optional parameters to set respectively the maximum number of learning episodes to perform and the maximum number of control steps in each episode The value of the parameter lt port gt has to be selected in the range 3001 3010 depending which instance of cig2008server bot is listening cig2008server 1 listens on port 3001 cig2008server 2 listens on port 3002 and so on Windows First unpack the client package in a directory The package is provided with a DevC project http www bloodshed net devcpp html but of course you can use your preferred C development tool IDE To compile it under Windows just uncomment the first two line of client cpp according to the instruction in the source file In the package2. on the right 1 3 Mac OsX Unfortunately we are not currently able to provide a reasonable support to Mac users as the latest version of TORCS seems to have problems under OsX By the way all the client interfaces provided are fully working under Mac therefore it is possible for Mac users to develop their entries as long as they can set up a windows or linux machine either a virtual machine or a physical one with a working server 2 Sensors Effectors Interface In this section we describe the sensors end the effectors provided from our TORCS Competition Server 2 1 Sensors Definition The sensors give several information about your own car and in general the current game state Table 1 shows a detailed description of the available sensors 2 2 Effectors Definition Effectors represent what action the client bot can perform and therefore how it can affect the current game state Table 2 shows a detailed description of the effectors available While accel brake gear and steer effectors represents properly some control actions on the car The effector meta is used to affect the status of the game and was introduced to restart the current race 3 The client module 3 1 The C client The client is a stand alone console applications provided with C sources In this section we first explain how it can be compiled and used and then we give some details about extending it to develop your own bot 3 2 Compiling and using the client
3. gt lt attstr name name val TRACK NAME gt lt attstr name category val TRACK CAT gt lt section gt where you should i replace TRACK ROAD with the category of desired track i e road oval or dirt ii replace TRACK NAME with the name of desired track e g aalborg For a complete list of the installed tracks in TORCS you can see the list of all the directories organized under three main di rectories tracks road tracks oval and tracks dirt where TORCS is installed Under Win dows you find them in your main torcs directory under linux the tracks directories could be found in usr local share games torcs or in different places depending on your distribution Selecting bots To select bots you should modify the Drivers section inside the XML file In particular in this section you should be able to find a list of the following elements lt section name N gt lt attnum name idx val IDX gt lt attstr name module val NAME gt lt section gt where N means you are editing the Nth bots that will be in the race The IDX is the index of the instance of the bot you want to add for some bots provided with the game there are several instances e g bt bot has several instances bt 1 bt 2 when a bot has only one instance IDX should be set to 1 The NAME should be replaced with the name of bot you want to add without the index of the instance e g to add the bt 7 bot you should use as NAME simply
4. to four times the normal speed that is you can see 1 minute of race in 15s In the results only mode instead you will not see the race but only the lap times in Practice mode or the final result of the race in Quick Race mode However this mode allow you to run simulation much faster time speed can be accelerated up to 20 times or even more that is one minute of race can be simulated within 3 seconds Enabling results only mode for quick race By default the Results Only display mode is not available by default for the Quick Race this is what make Practice mode really different from Quick Race in TORCS This features cannot be turned on from the TORCS GUI but requires a modification to the configuration file quickrace xml as explained in a following section However the quickrace xml example provided already has this modification and therefore you simply need to copy this file in your configuration directory to enable the display mode control from the TORCS GUI 4 2 Configuring TORCS through Configuration Files All the race settings described above can be configured also editing directly a configuration file In TORCS each race type as its own XML configuration file The settings of Practice are stored in practice xml while the settings of Quick Race are in quickrace xml Selecting track To select the track find the Tracks section inside the XML file that will contain the following section lt section name 1
5. you find also the system library WS2_32 1ib necessary for using the WinSock functions You should be able to compile the client without any error or warning and build the client exe executable To launch the client open an MS DOS console and type client exe lt ip gt lt port gt lt id gt lt maxEpisodes gt lt maxSteps gt where lt ip gt is the IP address of the machine where TORCS with the server bot is running lt port gt is the port on which the server bot is listening you must use a value in the range 3001 3010 lt id gt is your bot ID you must use cig2008 lt maxEpisodes gt lt maxSteps gt are optional parameters to set respectively the maximum number of learning episodes to perform and the maximum number of control steps in each episode The value of the parameter lt port gt has to be selected in the range 3001 3010 depending which instance of cig2008server bot is listening cig2008server 1 listens on port 3001 cig2008server 2 listens on port 3002 and so on 3 3 Extending the client with your driver To develop your own bot you have to implement a C class that extends the BaseDriver class provided In particular it is necessary to implement three functions e string drive string sensors where the input parameter sensors is a string representing the current state of the game perceived by your agent and the function has to return a string with the controls representation e void onShu
6. Car Racing Competition CIG2008 Software Manual TORCS is car racing simulator designed to let users develop and run their own programmed driver bots This is usually done by i developing a C bot module following some TORCS guidelines and ii compiling and installing it The Car Racing Competition software extends TORCS and simplifies the development of bots by providing C and JAVA API easy to use for developing your own bot under your preferred OS To this purpose the competition software provides a client server architecture that separates the development of the car controller from TORCS Therefore competitors just work on the client side using their preferred programming language and do not need any understanding of TORCS itself The competition software consists of two main modules a server bot module and a client module The server bot is a module for TORCS that provides the communication to the remote client controller and implements the models for the car sensors and the controller actions models It does not have any intelligence The client module provides to the competitors a representation of the current game status received by the server bot and an easy to use interface to control the server bot actions This document is organized as follows Section 1 explains how to install the server bot module Section 2 provides a detailed description of the sensors and actions available to the controller which you can use when developin
7. ace will last e you might want to select the desired display mode In TORCS all the above options are stored in a set of XML configuration files one for each race mode Under Linux configuration files are created after the game is launched for the first time and are located in the following directory HOME torcs config raceman where HOME is your home directory Under Windows instead the configuration files are located in the config raceman directory located under the directory where you installed TORCS We provide two standards XML files for the Practice practice xml and Quick Race quickrace xml modes To use them you simply have to copy them into your configuration directory as explained above However you might want to change this configurations according to your needs and this can be done in two two ways through the graphical user interface GUI of the game or editing directly the XML configuration files 4 1 Configuring TORCS through GUI The easiest way to configure the race options is using the TORCS GUI Each race mode can be fully configured selecting from the main menu of TORCS Race Quick Race or Practice Configure Race Once you change the configurations of a particular race mode all the changes are stored automatically by TORCS the corresponding configuration file Selecting track In the first screen you can select any of the track available in the games and then click on Accept to move to the next scree
8. bt and 7 as IDX A list of available drivers can be found in the drivers directory located in the same place where you have the tracks directory introduced before Setting race length and display mode To change race length and display mode you have to modify the Quick Race or Practice section depending on which race type you want to setup In particular you should change the following lines lt attnum name distance unit km val DIST gt lt attnum name laps val LAPS gt lt attstr name display mode val MODE gt where DIST should be either the desired race length in km or 0 if the number of laps is used as race length Accordingly LAPS should be either the desired number of laps or 0 if the distance is used as race length Finally MODE is either normal or results only Enabling results only mode for quick race In order to enable results only mode on Quick Race you need to do add following lines under the section Options inside the section Configuration lt section name 2 gt lt attstr name type val display mode gt lt section gt 4 3 Start to Race Once you configured properly TORCS you are ready to run your own bot From the main menu of TORCS select Race Quick Race or Practice New Race You should see that TORCS screen should stop reporting the line Initializing Driver cig2008 1 and the OS terminal should report Waiting for request on port 3001 This m
9. ded before where you prefer To compile and install it you need to have TORCS installed and you have to set properly the environment variables TORCS_BASE and MAKE_DEFAULT export TORCS_BASE path to your torcs base directory export MAKE_DEFAULT TORCS_BASE Make default mk Then go in the directory where you unpacked the server bot compile and install it as follows make make install you might need to be root to run this command To check if the server bot is properly installed just run torcs and from the menu select Race Quick Race Configure Race Accept If everything is installed correctly you should find 10 instances of the cig2008server bot in the list of Not Selected Player on the right 1 2 Windows binaries 1 2 1 Installing TORCS Download binary version of TORCS for Windows from here and install it 1 2 2 Patching TORCS For Windows we provide binaries containing both the changes to TORCS engine and the server bot Download the windows server package from competition website and copy it in your TORCS directory i e where you installed the game Unpack it in that directory it should ask for overwriting some files in that directory answer always yes To check wether everything is properly installed just run wtorcs and from the menu select Race Quick Race Configure Race Accept You should be able to find the 10 instances of cig2008server bot in the list of Not Selected Player
10. eans that the server bot cig2008server is waiting for your client to start the race After the race is started it can be interrupted from the user by pressing ESC and then by selecting Abort Race from the menu The end of the race is notified to the client either if interrupted by user or if ended because the distance lap limit is reached Please notice that choosing Quit Game instead of Abort Race to end race will not result in a correct notification of the end of the race to the client and therefore the client will not be able to perform a clean shutdown as expected 4 4 Running TORCS in text mode It is possible to run TORCS without graphics i e without any GUI to launch the race This run mode could be useful when you plan to run some experiment or a series of experiments in a batch mode and you do not need to use the GUI to setup the experiment To run TORCS in text mode version it is enough to add the T command line option to TORCS executable C gt wtorcs exe T on Windows torcs T on linux In text mode TORCS runs automatically a Quick Race using the XML configuration file as explained in a previous section to setup the race Therefore you would configure properly your experiment through the quickrace xml file either using the GUI or directly editing it Please notice that in the current version it is not possible to specify a configuration to be used from TORCS for the race setup Accordingly to perform a batch ser
11. en configure compile and install TORCS following the instructions in the README provided with the TORCS source package Additional information are available at http www berniw org TORCS Installation from left bar KNOWN ISSUE depending on the distribution you are using it could be necessary to run configure x libraries path to your X11 lib e g on OpenSUSE x libraries usr X11R6 1lib 1 1 2 Patching TORCS To add some features to our client server interface e g the possibility of restarting the race directly from the client you need to slightly modify the TORCS sources To this purpose copy the cig2008patch tgz package just downloaded in your base TORCS directory i e where you run configure This will create a new directory called cig2008patch Enter the cig2008patch directory and run the do_patch sh run do unpatch sh to revert the modifications You should be able to apply the patch with the following commands cp cig2008patch tgz path to your torcs base directory cd path to your torcs base directory tar xfz cig2008patch tgz cd cig2008patch sh do_patch sh or do_unpatch sh to revert changes Then rebuild torcs and re install it make make install as root if necessary 1 1 3 Installing server bot Now you need to install one or both of the server bots provided that are TORCS bots that would act as a server for your competition entry Copy the Linux Server package cig2008server tgz downloa
12. evelop the bots the cig2008server bots provided have a timeout of 10 seconds However notice that the final evaluation will be performed with the strict constraints i e 10ms More information about evaluation and tools for self evaluation of the solutions will be provided to competitor before the competition deadline 3 5 The JAVA client Details of the JAVA implementation of the client can be found in the JAVA package available here on the competition webpage 4 Using and Configuring the Competition Server Once you have installed TORCS and the server bot provided either Windows or Linux version you can start to develop your own bot extending one of the provided client modules When you want to run your own bot you have to launch TORCS and start a race then you have to launch the client extended with your own programmed bot and finally your driver bot will start to run in the race In TORCS there are several race modes available however the client server modules supports only two modes e the Practice mode that allows a single bot at once to race e the Quick Race modes that allows multiple bots to race against However before starting a race with TORCS you need to configure the following things e you have to select the track on which you want to run the race e you need to add the cig2008server 1 bot to race participants and eventually other bots you want as opponents e you have to define how many laps or how many kilometers that r
13. g your own bot Section 3 explains how sensors and actions can be used by the client module i e what you need in practice to develop your entry to the competition Finally Section 4 explains how to configure TORCS to run your own bot once you developed it 1 Installing the server bot module To provide a very accessible interface to TORCS we developed two modules to run TORCS in a client server architecture The server has been developed by providing a specific bot driver called cig2008server that instead of having its own intelligence sends the game state to a client module and wait for a reply i e an action to be performed by the controller So to begin the competition we first need to install TORCS and the competition server package provided in this bundle 1 1 Linux from sources To setup your linux machine for the competition you first need to install the TORCS version 1 3 0 from sources and then you need to install the Linux server from the competition webpage download the TORCS Server for linux cig2008linux_v01beta tgz package and unpack it into on your machine This should create two archives e cig2008patch tgz the patch for TORCS engine e cig2008server tgz the serverbot for the competition Thus follow the instructions in the rest of this section to setup properly your system for the competition 1 1 1 Compiling TORCS Download the all in one Source Package for Linux and FreeBSD version 1 3 0 here Th
14. ies of different experiments you have to overwrite the configuration file between an experiment and the next one Range unit Angle between the car direction and the direction of the track angle 7 7 rad axis Current damage of the car the higher is the value the higher damage is the damage distFromStart Distance of the car from the start line along the track line z E Distance covered by the car from the beginning of the race 0 1 Current fuel level 1 0 1 6 a gear 1 is reverse 0 is neutral and the gear from 1 to lastLapTime Time to complete the last lap Vector of 18 sensors that detects the opponent distance in me ppon nts 0 100 m ters range is 0 100 within a specific 10 degrees sector each sensor covers 10 degrees from 7 2 to 7 2 in front of the car Vector of 19 range finder sensors each sensors represents the distance between the track edge and the car Sensors are ori tack 0 100 m w every 10 degrees from Ha and 7 2 in front of the car istance are in meters within a range of 100 meters When the car is outside of the track i e pos is less than 1 or greater than 1 these values are not reliable Distance between the car and the track axis The value is normalized w r t to the track width it is 0 when car is on the trackPos axis 1 when the car is on the right edge of the track and 1 when it is on the left edge of the car Values greater than 1 or smaller than 1 mean
15. n Selecting bots The second screen allows the selections of bot that will participate to the race Notice that in the Practice mode only one bot is allowed therefore in order to add a bot you have first to deselect the currently selected one if any First of all you have to make sure that the server bot cig2008server is within the selected drivers otherwise your own bot will not be in the race Then in the Quick Race mode only you can add other drivers to the race from the list on the right representing all the bot drivers provided with the game When adding bots pay attention to the car model they use there are several types of car in TORCS with different features and you might want to be sure that only drivers with the same cars will race against Notice that cig2008server uses a Mercedes CLK DTM and the others bot using the same car are e bt7 bts e olethros 7 e berniw two 8 e inferno 4 When you have selected all the drivers that will be in the race you can click on Accept and move to the next screen Setting race length and display mode In the final configuration screen you can set the race length either as the distance to cover in km or as the number of laps to complete Finally you can choose between two display modes option normal or results only The normal mode allows you to see the race either from the point of view of one bot driver or as an external spectator In this display mode the time speed can be accelerated up
16. s that the car is outside of the track wheelSpinVel 0 rad s Vector of 4 sensors representing the rotation speed of wheels Table 1 Description of available sensors Range is reported with the corresponding unit measure where it is possible Symbol means that range is not limited Steering value 1 and 1 means respectively full right and left that corresponds to an angle of 0 785398 rad meta 0 1 This is meta control command 0 do nothing 1 ask competition server to restart the race steering 1 1 Table 2 Description of available effectors
17. tdown this function is called at the end of the experiment i e at the end of the race before the client terminates e void onRestart this function is called when the race is restarted upon client request this function could be used to free memory close files saving solutions etc You are provided with an example of a very simple programmed controller the SimpleDriver The SimpleDriver is used by default to build the client executable Therefore in order to build a client executable to run your own driver e on Windows uncomment the first lines of client cpp and set properly the __DRIVER_CLASS__ and __DRIVER_INCLUDE__ to respectively the name of your implementation of the driver class and to the header file of your driver class e on Linux and OS X In the Makefile set properly the DRIVER_CLASS and DRIVER_INCLUDE variables to respectively the name of your implementation of the driver class and to the header file of your driver class 3 4 Time Constraints In the development of your driver keep in mind that the server has a timeout when calling the drive function to make it possible running the race in real time your bot should be able to send back the action in 10ms in order to keep in syne with the server If your bot is slower you would probably loose the sync with the server and so it is up to you to find out how to avoid that this will happen In order to allow the application of computationally intensive techniques to d
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