For several of its projects in the self-driving car nanodegree course, Udacity provides an Unity based simulator that is used for projects like lane detection and following waypoints on a track. It is a nice piece of software, but it also has some quirks when you use it often. E.g., each time you start the software, there is a configuration dialog:
(there might be a command line switch, that I did not find). In addition, for some of the exercises, you have to manually choose / start the simulation. To be prepared for Term 3, I decided to try to patch the term 3 simulator. Here are some necessary steps.
- Install Unity3D development environment. The simulator seems to work with Unity 2017.3
- Get the Term3 simulator sources. I only cloned the head commit, because I did not want the full sources: git clone –branch term3_collection –depth 1 https://github.com/udacity/self-driving-car-sim.git
- The setting for disabling the configuration screen can be found in the following submenus:
- The configuration for the export as a standalone program is not correct for the path planning project. With the configuration dialog in the File->Build Settings… menu, we can add the path planning scene and disable all other scenes. Note that the scene at the top is the one that is being used as initial scene. So if you want to simulator to start with a specific simulation (e.g. in term 2 we have different scenes), than but that to the top:
After the simulator has been built, you can now run it without the configuration dialog (and if you do the above steps with the git branch for the term 2 simulator, you can start with a specific simulation).
