OpenDrive

[Lecrapouille]

Hi! I've not yet tested your project which sounds great. Do you plan to load opendrive files? I give a link to a C++ project rendering opendrive roads and load openscenarios https://github.com/esmini/esmini they also gave links to opendrive norm.

[TheDuckCow]

Hey @Lecrapouille sorry for the delayed reply, I'm not actually aware of this project, but looks interesting!

Can you share in which way you would expect such files to work with a project like this? Would be curious to hear about your use case and expected workflows. That could help me better understand how and if these would work well together.

Based on my cursory reading, it seems like one of the primary goals would be to do road setup in that other software, but then port it into Godot for interactive usage. Curious how you'd expect to interact with it thereafter.

Edit: the Unreal example plugin is probably a good example of what to expect and what might be possible.

[Lecrapouille]

@TheDuckCow

• OpenDrive is a standard defining shape of real roads (Google Maps or OpenStreet maps does not give real road shapes).
• OpenScenario is a standard for defining scenarios for autonomous vehicles (driving on roads defined with OpenDrive standard).
• The esmini, is a C++ 3D/OpenGL renderer of OpenDrive roads and implements basic vehicle controllers to be applied from Openscenario.
• There are:
  • 2D/3D tools such as Matlab https://fr.mathworks.com/help/driving/ref/drivingscenariodesigner-app.html
  • 3D such as Carla https://github.com/carla-simulator/carla,
  • Video mocks on autonomous cars https://github.com/qiaoxu123/Self-Driving-Cars,
  • I'm also implementing my C++/SFML/2D simulator on my free time. I'm was also thinking to make gdextension over my lib.
  • Nvidia has made its ROS fork https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac/sim

Having open-source road generators is definitively something people want, since creating manually is tedious. I think Godot could be used in robotics if some robotics Godot plugins were more developed. It was just an idea of improvements to attract more users :) I know your plugin is made in pure gdscripts which can be more complex than with native languages. OpenDrive is not a simple ready-to-go standard. Here is there documentation https://publications.pages.asam.net/standards/ASAM_OpenDRIVE/ASAM_OpenDRIVE_Specification/latest/specification/08_coordinate_systems/08_01_introduction.html

[TheDuckCow]

Thanks for all the details! I'm especially curious if it provides out of the box (at least top down) topology. Being able to load or translate streetmap data and the likes would of course be very valuable.

There's a few major steps to get through before this proposal could truly be considered, for instance tackling actual procedural intersections. I'm hoping to put a band-aide solution on that so we can close the Godot 3.5 support (ie parallel feature releasing with godot 4), and then once only supporting Godot 4 for new features we can rethink more of the core structures which could alleviate getting closer to supporting this.

Big agree that we want open source resources for people to make roads and traffic, and I'm definitely hoping to bring in more contributors to make that a reality! there's always a balance to making overly generalized solutions that make it tricky to use in one use case or another, but there's enough overlap here where it seems like it's certainly worth exploring more seriously, even if it takes some time.

So, keep me in the loop and if you ever end up poking around with the existing repo here, let me know your thoughts.

[Lecrapouille]

I'm not sure to understand your top down methodology. Opendrive does not define graph structure where you have to implement polygon intersections like explained here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V_C7L7zelz8 but roads are set of lanes with their neighbours. Therefore, consider road junctions are already split when reading the file. All hard job us already done.

[TheDuckCow]

Ok, thanks for the extra info and context. I'll be transparent and say that without additional help, this is unlikely something that I'd be working on in the near future, but like I said, I'm definitely open to collaborating and helping orient to the codebase if it's an area you'd be interested in contributing to. Just let me know - in the meantime, I'll leave the issue open.

[Lecrapouille]

Do not worry, it was just an informal talk, no task requested. I'm currently making my car/city simulator but in C++/SFML I have to prototype first, which can take several months ;(