Research applications

Nothing? Other than beamng itself there's no R&D communication and sharing between both the projects?

 

How am I going to reconcile the fact that I love this game so much with the fact that the company itself stands against everything I love in real life?

 

It's probably the inevitable. BeamNG.Drive is successful, however it is a very niche game, and I'm not 100% sure that there will be the market for a BeamNG.Drive 2. However, from what I've read, BeamNG's technology has a very promising projected role in the physics software market, and it makes total sense to pursue that after the game. The game likely was a way to have income that allows BeamNG to get the software and technology produced. I can be very obsessive and particular about BeamNG.Drive, but that's mostly because I am almost certain that there will not be a second game, so I want this one to kick ass.

 

Well, it may be possible that one day, autonomous vehicle is so successful that we don't even have the right to drive vehicles, so drive, drive and drive when you have a chance.

 

But that's exactly the thing. I want to delay that day indefinitely - to go the exact opposite direction. If I could push a button and erase antilock brakes from history, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I know a lot of people like them, but I also know that switching to a car that doesn't have them will absolutely make you a better driver, and that's the important thing. It's like I said before in the post that got deleted - I don't want to just spend a few more years picking the bones of car culture past, wishing I'd been alive to see it in its prime. I want to push car culture until its strength and glamour equals or exceeds that of high points like 1960s America or 1990s Japan - and then keep it in that position permanently. That's the problem with robocars. There isn't even that much of a market for them, nor any reason they couldn't share the road indefinitely with real cars (rest assured than anything you hear about high-speed yielding or autonomous autobahns is at least 9/10ths pipe dreaming BS) - but just like with EVs, there are technocrats champing at the bit to ram them down everyone's throat.

So I still love this game, I still plan to become a modder at some point (I keep telling myself whenever a certain other game stops the "win free stuff by playing minigames you hate!" parade), I could even still see trying to use this technology for a video game myself in the future, but I also feel like, if I didn't already have the game, I'm not sure I'd be able to buy it with a clear conscience today, as I'd be funding the eventual death of car culture. That's what I meant when I asked that. How do I reconcile my desire to see car culture exceed its former glory with my appreciation for a game which funds the technology which will kill it?

 

Car culture is still very much existant, and it almost certainly will be for a very long time. I’d say we’re a solid 25 years out at the very earliest. Even if, or when, we achieve this level of refined autonomous technology, car culture would still exist, just maybe not in the same form it exists in today.

I’m not trying to turn this into an autonomous-car-good/autonomous-car-bad debate that goes nowhere, but autonomy does have its benefits. Our roads would almost certainly be a lot safer, one could make the argument that computers aren’t perfect, could malfunction, et cetera, but if you look at our roads in this day and age, there will likely be a point where I’d rather rely on a computer to not ram me off the road rather than some soccer mom in a Sienna yelling at an underpaid Kohl’s customer service employee on the phone.

I’ve lost family to car accidents. My cousin was in a car when the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The car drifted into oncoming traffic. Self driving cars don’t get tired. I’m certainly not 100% trusting of the tech we have today, but I imagine there will be a point in my lifetime where I’ll trust a computer driven car more than a human-driven one.

 

Something,something conspiracy theory.

 

There will always be racing. Always. As long as there are 2 people controlling 2 different vehicles, there will be a race. I see no reason car culture can't continue on tracks, as well as dedicated historic roads for human driven cars. being resistant to technological change is just alienating yourself from the future.

 

I'm not sure about the whole car culture thing TBH. I don't mean to get off topic, but I figured I should toss my perspective in while it's being discussed here. So I guess I do mean to get off topic...

Where I live strict emissions and inspection regulations plus high taxes/general cost of living and the whole "milenials are poor" thing have all combined to almost completely kill car culture here. There was a movie made not too long ago on my local track (https://riverheadnewsreview.timesre...m-the-last-race-spotlights-riverhead-raceway/). TLDR: we use to have a lot of race tracks around here, we are down to one (not counting Fire Station 1/8th mile tracks) and their schedule this past summer was lacking.

Across America Karen's are moving next to motorsport parks and then complaining that they didn't know that race cars are loud and forcing them to shut down; it's been a big worry around here with our one remaining track for awhile now.

 

Just like Colorado... they have 5 racetracks, two have been shut down permanently because some genius decided to build houses within earshot, and one of them was built specifically to replace one of those two.

But it's not even just about tracks. It's about being to just go out for a drive whenever, and enjoy it. Same reason I don't like bicycles, and to a large degree the same reason I don't like EVs.

 

I really want to agree with you on this, but you have to realize that the average driver in America today is not one who loves cars like you and I, but one who dislikes driving, consistently texts and drives, and is a major catalyst in auto accidents. That's why I'm fine with development of autonomous technology, despite me not ever wanting to own a car with said technology. The more distracted drivers we get off the roads, the more roads those of us who actually like driving will get to enjoy safely.

I feel like you would find this article interesting: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-fight-for-the-right-to-drive

 

Indeed I do. I want to like this guy - he sounds like an older, more cunning version of me. But I have misgivings about his assertion that the perfect car of the future would have any self-driving technology at all. I can accept things like stability control as long as they can be turned off - 100% off, not lying-to-you off (even the BRZ does this, apparently). Technologies which actively intervene such as braking assist and lane-keep assist are right out - and the article is definitely right about one thing, the current versions are far from ready for the big time (dangerously so, in some cases) even if we accept the basic premise that your car should be driving for you. As with electric cars, there's something quietly coercive about the entire project - people like the BeamNG crew might be satisfied with making the technology work just to prove they can or because they think there's money to be made, but there are other people out there who won't be satisfied with merely having robocars be an option which is available for those who want them.

Sadly, you do make a decent point about the texters and other non-drivers, but I don't think enabling those people at everyone's expense is the solution.

Roy makes an excellent point about how the debate so often gets hijacked by emotive, poorly-thought-out rhetoric in favor of robocars. This discussion, like so many involving cars or safety/the environment in general, tends to devolve very quickly into "The children! Do it for them! You don't hate children do you?" and, well, nothing productive is ever going to come of that. Giving in to that kind of rhetoric will put us in a live-action adaptation of 1984 or A Brave New World much more quickly than we seem to expect. Again, there's something quietly coercive about the whole thing.

What I hate to imagine is a scenario in which manual-car drivers become the future equivalent of bicyclists or animal-drawn cart/carriage drivers - the obnoxious mobile anachronism that holds the dominant mode of transportation back from its highest level of usability and enjoyability. The only way to avoid this is to ensure that the human-controlled automobile remains the dominant mode of transportation for as long as possible.

What I hate to imagine even more is the overall future AVs, and all of this safety and environmental "consciousness" in general, are leading us toward. Basically, put on your conspiracy hats here folks, the technocratic elites think they can, in essence, kill death, and they think they can do it in a secular way. What they will end up killing instead is life, or at least the joy thereof. The future they want to create is a monotonous, beige, micromanaged torment where nothing especially painful happens, but nothing especially good ever happens either - everything is just sort of "OK" and just drags on like that forever. To some people, I guess, that sounds like a good time. To me it sounds like suffering in its truest earthly form.

Roy makes an excellent point about how the debate so often gets hijacked by emotive, poorly-thought-out rhetoric in favor of robocars. This discussion, like so many involving cars or safety/the environment in general, tends to devolve very quickly into "The children! Do it for them! You don't hate children do you?" and, well, nothing productive is ever going to come of that. Giving in to that kind of rhetoric will put us in a live-action adaptation of 1984 or A Brave New World much more quickly than we seem to expect.

So this becomes car culture's River Volga, on the other side of which there is no land. If robocars get a foothold of any sort, there will be nothing to stop the technocrats from forcing manual driving, especially of the high-speed sort, completely off the road. It might take a little time - say, just long enough to make people think it won't happen until it's too late - but it will happen.

To bring it back on topic... I do still plain to remain in this community, and I do still plan to begin modding at some point... however that may mean using tdev as the final villain of a custom campaign at some point.

 

I mean, this same thing happened with horses too. I'm sure there were many people who figured cars were tools of the antichrist, supplanting horses as the freedom enabler. Maybe you are right, we should just have eschewed technology and kept shoveling horse crap because some people didn't trust/ like cars. Last I checked, People still raise, breed, ride, and race horses even though they have been supplanted in daily use. Human driven cars will be the same. The first mass market AVs will probably be used on dedicated highway lanes only, and expect a human driver for certain roads. You will always have a choice to off road an old manual car, or perhaps drive on dedicated historic roads set aside for this purpose, like old route 66. there will always be manually driven cars, if only driven by enthusiasts. Hostility to technology is rarely productive.

 

sorry fam, I get a little passionate sometimes. I'm personally really excited for LIDAR and RADAR implimentation in beam, since it means business money pouring in and it means you guys are getting more familiar with the engine in ways you may not have otherwise.
EDIT: AV discussion has been migrated to the off topic section

 

May I ask how the research project differs from the game project? I mean is the code of the research project more open or have it more api´s so that I could adjust it even more?
And a second question: Does "Free for non-commercial use" mean, that I (not a student) am allowed to apply without a specific project in mind, only for tinkering around?

 

"Free for non commercial use" simply means you can use it for free as long as you're not making money off whatever you're doing with it. If you intend to make money, you have to pay for a commercial license.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say no to it meaning that Beam will have laser scanned locations. There'd be a lot of hoops and expenses to go through for that. I'm in agreement that it's potentially useful for testing autonomous systems though.
As to it being used for AI, in the current form I'd also say no, but drop the amount of data points and focus on just the area in front of a vehicle it would cut down a lot on processing power.
--- Post updated ---

Well that's a load of...
For racing? I... maybe. I doubt it, but I haven't really driven an actual car without them. For daily driving? Hell no.

 

I actually have daily driven a car with no ABS. Driving a car with no ABS will make you a better driver in the same way being involuntarily tossed into the deep end of a pool will make you a better swimmer. Most people don't have to presence of mind to threshold/cadence brake when an accident is looming. ABS has saved countless lives and dollars. In fact, if we are eliminating ABS, why stop there? TCS and ESC? bin them. Ignore the fact that they help unskilled drivers not die in dangerous situations. Lets get rid of power steering too, since all drivers can appreciate the better road feel it gives, and are universally willing and able to deal with heavy steering. Synchronized clutches? Listen, if you can't double clutch, you don't even deserve a drivers license. Automatic transmissions must go too, since everyone wants and needs to shift their own gears, they just don't know it yet. Power brakes? More like power to the GARBAGE. The brakes can't lock up if there isn't enough brake force to stop the tires. Engine management? waste of weight. I mean who even lives anywhere where it gets cold or hot enough to make carburetors a bad idea? it's not like we need more fuel efficent cars anyway. We have enough oil to last for centuries, but the lizard people don't want us to know that.
My point is, LIDAR can (and has) saved lives, just like power brakes, ABS, seatbelts, TCS, ect. Technology exists for a reason. Are there implementations of tech that are inferior to the more simple solution? Absolutely, but when you consign yourself to holding practical tech in contempt because 'the old ways are better' you only serve to further alienate yourself from the world around you that is constantly moving. Change happens with or without you.

 

Bro you still think batteries are worth anything? Just go back to diesel only manual crank starters. Batteries are for people with no arm strength.