We know, you were probably very anxious after almost two months without receiving a new CARLA release. But here we are, and, as you probably deduced from the title, CARLA now has bikes and motorbikes!
Check out the CARLA 0.8.3 promotional video created by our film artist, Francisco Pérez:
Main Features
Bicycles and Motorbikes
The list of new bike models is vast and includes Harley Davidsons, Yamahas, Ninja Kawasakis, Scooters, road bicycles and more! And, as everything else in CARLA, they are free to download, change and redistribute. We would like to thank all the amazing work of our 3D artists for the past months on designing and animating these models.
Speed Up
To follow our compromise in always speeding up CARLA. We also present another major improvement on the FPS due to optimizations on CARLA’s assets. We improved the terrain, houses, vehicles, vegetation and more. With this, we got an upgrade of about 10% on CARLA’s FPS and also improved the general visual quality. We developed our own standards for assets creation. Now the 3D model workflow considers a modular design and uses simpler textures and materials. On the figure below we show an example of the proposed improvements:
The top part shows the old CARLA building asset style. We can see the use of complex texturization as a way to obtain realism. The bottom part shows the new assets, with a higher number of details but simpler components. This increases realism and also improves the rendering speed.
Docker for CARLA
If you thought that was all, we still have one more big feature. At this moment, CARLA is able to run with Docker, so there are no more annoying specific system requirements for running CARLA. You can just go into your server and execute CARLA on a selected GPU, all that using the dark magic of Docker. To run CARLA inside Docker you just need two commands:
docker pull carlasim/carla:0.8.3
docker run -p 2000-2002:2000-2002 --runtime=nvidia -e NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 carla:latest
Full Changelist
- Added two-wheeled vehicles, 3 bicycles and 4 motorbikes
- Several art optimizations (CARLA is now about 10% faster)
- Improved the performance of vegetation assets, adjusted LOD and culling distance, set billboards where possible
- Drastically reduced the number of polygons of the landscape while keeping the original shape
- Removed some high-cost unnecessary assets
- Remodelled Mustang and NissanMicra, now with less polygons and materials, better textures and LOD
- Remodelled building SM_TerracedHouse_01, now with more polygons but less materials and better textures
- CARLA releases include now a Dockerfile for building docker images
- Change in HUD: replace “FPS” by “Simulation Step”
- The current map name is now included in the scene description message sent to the client
- Adapted “manual_control.py” and “view_start_positions.py” to use the map name sent by the simulator
- Improved the vehicle spawning algorithm, now it tries to spawn as much cars as possible even if there are not enough spawn points
- “Setup.sh” is now faster and accepts an argument to run multiple jobs in parallel
- Fixed foliage distance culling using wrong distance in “Low Mode”
- Fixed NissanMicra slightly turning left when driving straight