It’s 2024 and I still don’t know how to write introduction for our quarterly update. So let’s jump right in, it’s going to be a short one.

OpenDRIVE

You can now export your OpenDRIVE assets into .xodr files, which is exactly the opposite as the import function. It becomes useful if you need the .xodr file for another application (e.g., esmini) and you don’t have the source file on hand.

Research projects

NEWMOB

The first half of the first experiment for this project is done and quite successful! The only major issue we had to deal with at the last minute was some nasty spikes related to nDisplay. We’ve tracked it down to TCP packet loss, and while we wait for new 10Gbps network adapters, our workaround is to lower the speed on the adapter from 1Gbps to 100Mbps, and to reduce the node count on the cluster. We’re still unsure as to why some packets get lost, but at least we don’t suffer the consequences as much.

With this first experiment production-ready, it means two things: first, goodbye UE4! This project was the last one still using the previous major Unreal version, so from now on all our project will be running on UE5, yay!

The second thing is that we can start working on the next experiment for this project, which will involve less driving and more riding. As I’m writing this words, a colleague is working on a kinda-Unreal-SDK for a Buttkicker, since the manufacturer doesn’t actually provide one. Expect to hear more on that soon!

Sérénité

I first talked about this project three months ago, and it’s already finished! It was quick but really fun, and I already wrote a deep-dive on it, which should be published next month. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with those numbered cars casually driving on a highway.

Prévision

One very interesting development coming from this project recently is the use of Unreal’s Replay System. In experimental research, the ability to record and replay data is critical. But we tend to have our own pipelines (e.g., LabStreamingLayer), that are more tailored to our requirements.

Unreal’s own replay system was really appealing from the start, for its own reasons:

• It gives engineers valuable data when analyzing an issue that occured during an experiment run
• It gives researches a very complete data stream about what was the full state of the world at each major step of the scenario
• It opens up a lot of new opportunities for innovative experiment designs, for example by recording and replaying the world at different times, from different point of views, to different participants, or with slight changes

For this project, we really wanted to explore that last point, so we took some time to play around with the system and see what was possible. I won’t go into much details since all of it is still very much a work in progress, but so far it seems that the replay system would indeed be a very valuable tool to use, and I can’t wait to see what we end up doing with it, and to share it with you.

What others have been up to

ASAM OpenDRIVE 1.8.0 was released. Cross paths look nice, pedestrian crossings have been quite problematic in OpenDRIVE for quite some time.

ASAM OpenSCENARIO is now split into OpenSCENARIO XML (formerly 1.x) and OpenSCENARIO DSL (formerly 2.x). Neither of those is really suited for our use case, so it doesn’t impact us.

Varjo released their new XR-4 series, which not only look impressive, but the standard edition also come with an impressive 60% price drop over the XR-3 (with perpetual licence). I’m definitely looking forward to using one.

Marketplace

While we’re talking about other people’s amazing work, let’s jump into new Marketplace releases.

Der Sky keeps on producing amazing content, this time with Road Essentials, which should contain everything to get you started with drawing roads. On our side we’ll keep using RoadRunner, but since it’s quite expensive, I’m guessing people out there are looking for alternatives.

wParallax, fake interior specialist, released two new retail pack (1, 2), which are just perfect to greatly enhance immersion at very low performance cost for dense urban scenes.

And finally, Richarme, that I mentioned for the first time in our previous report, released Glow Path, which reminded of something I tried doing, except their product looks infinitely better. I can’t wait to see more from this creator, because so far all of their products are must-have for me!