The CARLA team is excited to announce the release of CARLA version 0.10.0. The biggest news is that this version delivers a monumental leap forward in visual fidelity through a migration from Unreal Engine 4.26 to Unreal Engine 5.5. CARLA 0.10.0 introduces the incredible Lumen and Nanite technologies into CARLA’s core rendering engine, enhancing realism and detail. This engine upgrade brings vastly improved visual fidelity for camera sensors through UE 5.5’s enhanced rendering technology.
To exploit the new capabilities delivered by the engine upgrade, 0.10.0 comes with upgraded environments and assets with an upgraded Town 10 and beautifully remodeled vehicles along with a spectacular off-road open-cast mine map generously provided by CARLA’s sponsor and consortium member Synkrotron.
As if that wasn’t enough, version 0.10.0 also brings state-of-the-art generative AI traffic simulation through a new integration with Inverted AI, native ROS integration, improved Python compatibility and more!
Improved camera fidelity
UE 5.5 significantly enhances CARLA’s capability to render highly detailed geometry with stunningly realistic lighting and reflections. The new Nanite virtualized geometry system dynamically scales the number of polygons used to render assets, ensuring efficient performance when viewing objects from a distance while retaining incredible detail up close. This means CARLA maps and assets now have an almost unlimited geometry budget, permitting the use of highly detailed 3D assets without sacrificing performance. Lumen brings a new level of realism to simulating scene lighting and reflections by more accurately modeling complex light behavior such as diffuse interreflections and specular highlights. This results more natural looking scenes that dynamically adapt to lighting changes in a realistic way. Altogether, UE 5.5 enhances CARLA’s visual fidelity with amazing results.
Stunning new environments and assets
Upgraded Town 10
The enhanced geometry handling system underpinning CARLA opens the door to rendering environments with much higher polygon counts and more realistic lighting. To fully exploit this, this version of CARLA presents a upgraded Town 10 map with brand new buildings, pavements, roads and vegetation all organized around the same familiar road network.
The newly remodeled town includes impressive new towerblocks with dazzling reflective glass, including meticulously detailed retail units on the lowest floors. The extra detail permitted by the new geometry system really shows in the magnificent classically styled buildings found in several locations across the map.
Additionally, the upgraded Town 10 introduces some new construction assets, giving the impression of an evolving cityscape.
Enhanced road topology
The enhancements in detail in Town 10 extend right down to the road surface itself. Town 10’s roads now have a realistic camber and sporadic road surface variations such as potholes and speed bumps which impact not only the appearance, but also vehicle dynamics and sensors, further enhancing simulation realism.
Upgraded vehicle roster
On top of Town 10’s makeover, version 0.10.0 comes with a roster of 11 beautifully remodeled vehicles, exploiting the higher geometry budget available and improved lighting to capture every detail with enhanced definition.
UE 5.5 also introduces the new Chaos physics engine with additional options for vehicle dynamics modeling. All vehicles included in CARLA 0.10.0 use the new physics engine, bringing more realistic modeling of suspension behavior.
New off-road mine map from Synkrotron
With release 0.10.0, CARLA goes off-road with a spectacular open-cast mine map, provided by CARLA consortium member and sponsor Synkrotron. The map includes a parking area connected to the mining area through a small network of access roads.
Included with the mine map is an incredible giant mining earth mover to populate the map with heavy industry traffic.
Inverted AI traffic simulation
Inverted AI provides state-of-the-art traffic simulation technology based on generative artificial intelligence trained using an extensive database of real world traffic data. Inverted AI’s traffic simulation delivers reactive, realistic, human-like behavior for NPCs into your CARLA simulations, facilitating development of autonomous agents capable of safely navigating the unpredictable behavior of human road users. All delivered through a convenient web-based Python API, using Inverted AI’s technology with CARLA is straightforward. An example script is provided to get you started using realistic and behaviorally diverse traffic.
ROS2 native interface
Release 0.10.0 officially introduces CARLA’s new native ROS2 interface. This means that ROS connectivity is now built right into the CARLA server, negating the need for an intermediate bridge process, resulting in lower latencies and simplified AD stack setup. You can enable ROS2 connectivity right out of the box with a command line flag:
./CarlaUnreal.sh --ros2
SCENIC 3 integration
CARLA 0.10.0 now fully supports SCENIC version 3. CARLA users can exploit the SCENIC 3 scenario definition language to define and execute scenarios in CARLA 0.10.0. SCENIC allows CARLA users to define traffic scenarios in a straightforward way with an intuitive programming language. SCENIC is a probabilistic language, meaning that multiple, diverse instances of the same scenario can emerge from a single scenario definition. Check out the SCENIC 3 documentation to learn more.
We provide support for SCENIC 3 with CARLA 0.10.0 through a CARLA fork of the SCENIC repository, which has examples and behaviors modified to accommodate the new Town 10 map layout. To use the new examples, clone the CARLA fork here and find them in the examples folder. The new examples and behaviors do not require modification of the core SCENIC codebase, therefore you may continue using SCENIC as installed through PyPi. The examples can also be found in the Scenario Runner repository.
Updated Python compatibility
The latest version of CARLA now brings improved compatibility with support for newer versions of Python. CARLA 0.10.0 provides support for the following Python versions in both Ubuntu and Windows:
- 3.8
- 3.9
- 3.10
- 3.11
- 3.12
Support for Python versions 3.7 and lower is now dropped from 0.10.0 and future releases.
Documentation
We anticipate that the UE 4.26 and UE 5.5 versions of CARLA will coexist for the foreseeable future, since some users may want to exploit the improved rendering technology of UE 5.5, while others may rely on functionality or assets existing in the UE 4.26 version that have not yet been migrated. Therefore, the documentation for the Unreal Engine 5.5 version of CARLA is now hosted on a new URL to distinguish it clearly from the Unreal Engine 4.26 version of CARLA:
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The CARLA UE 5.5 documentation is hosted on its own URL here: carla-ue5.readthedocs.io
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Documentation for CARLA UE 4.26 remains in the same place as always: carla.readthedocs.io
Differences between CARLA 0.9.15 and 0.10.0
CARLA version 0.10.0 boasts incredible new functionality, as such the CARLA team has worked hard to transfer as much functionality as possible from previous versions to the new version, however, it is still a work in progress and some functionality and content is yet to be migrated. The following is an overview of functionality that is modified, work in progress, missing or untested in version 0.10.0:
- Performance: current peak frame rates recorded in internal tests are around 24/25 FPS, we have identified a number of avenues to improve peformance, please see the note about performance on GitHub
- Hardware requirements: GPUs with less than 12 Gb of VRAM may not be capable of loading the default map (Town 10). We recommend a minimum of 16 Gb of VRAM for version 0.10.0
- Weather is fixed to daylight setting. Clouds, rain, fog and sun position cannot be modified
- Maps: CARLA Towns 1-9, 11, 12, 13 and 15 have not been upgraded and are not included, Town 10 has been upgraded. Many of the assets from older towns are still available in the content library.
- Map layers API is not supported
- Large maps are not supported
- OpenDrive import is not supported
- Digital twins pipeline is not supported
- Import asset pipeline is not supported
- Vehicles: 11 vehicles have been updated and included in version 0.10.0: * Lincoln MKZ * Nissan patrol * Dodge Charger * Dodge Charger Police * Firetruck * Ford Crown taxi * Mini Cooper * CarlaCola truck * Ford Ambulance * Mercedes Sprinter van * Mitsubishi Fusorosa bus * Mining earth mover (from Synkrotron) All other vehicles have been removed from 0.10.0’s blueprint library
- Vehicle lights can be modified, but the intensity and color has not been extensively tuned
- Props: the majority of props are still available
- OpenStreetMap import is not supported
- Cosimulations are disabled or untested: SUMO, Chrono, PTV Vissim
- V2X is not supported
- Gbuffers is not supported
- Apply texture API only works for objects that have a blueprint
- Motion blur is disabled for resolutions below 1080p to avoid artefacts
- The LightManager and related classes have been removed from 0.10.0
Other changes, fixes and upgrades
- Semantic segmentation and instance segmentation rendering pipeline reworked for improved stability and performance
- Semantic segmentation can now be viewed through the editor for debugging
- The build system has been reworked to use Cmake
- New Python example scripts