Creating competitive race car driving agents was hard. Very hard. But a good lesson in life is that such heroic hard work on the truly important parts of a project are often overshadowed by flashy marketing nonsense. In 2013 I knew that if I wasn’t going to have the fastest car, I was defininitely going to have the coolest looking one. And I did! This was very fun to watch in the videos the organizers created.
For 2015, I decided to take my car’s artwork to a completely different level. Unfortunately, the organizers did not create videos this time. I’ve been sitting on this for a while now, obviously, but I have been recently digging through my SCR work and I wanted to show off some of the cool stuff I did that never got released.
Here is my 2015 car’s paint job.
I chose this shot because it shows several subtle interesting things. First you can see the rear brake is glowing orange (but not the front!) because the car is diving into a corner. Also the car is pitched forward a bit, low over the front wheel and lifting up in the back. The tires are leaving skids but are still rotating (at visibly different ω no less) thanks to my heavily optimized anti-lock code. Noticing these details helps you get an idea of what a superb high-fidelity simulator TORCS is. I read a lot of its source code to figure out how it calculated vehicle dynamics and it is insanely detailed.
Although this paint job didn’t make it into any public exhibition it turned out to be quite useful. I actually had 10 different skins of all different bright distinct colors. Each was numbered for the port it listened to. This was a huge help in testing. But this gold car was always fun to watch. Which was important since I spent hundreds of hours watching it race!