AI driving simulation in Zig

This project is a Zig reimplementation of aidrivers.c, as described in You might not need machine learning.

Some videos of the simulation in action (from the original blog post):

• https://nullprogram.com/video/?v=aidrivers
• https://nullprogram.com/video/?v=aidrivers2
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sg-GgoFCP0

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aidrivers produces interesting visual output and it's a self-contained C program, which made reimplementing it perfect for getting more familiar with Zig. Some features (e.g. most things that would be controlled via cmdline args) are absent or use hardcoded values.

I'm also using this project as a personal testbed for different aspects of zig language/toolchain/libraries. For example, aidrivers.c outputs raw PPM data to stdout. zig-aidrivers supports this too (src/stdout-ui.zig), but I've included another version that uses zgt (src/zgt-ui.zig) for the UI.

Maps

Input image format: road is black (000000), barriers are white (ffffff), cars start on the green pixel (00ff00) aimed at the blue (0000ff) pixel.

Building and running

Requires:

• zig compiler (developed using Zig 0.10.0-dev but should build on the stable 0.9.0 too)
• mogrify (part of imagemagick, at least on Ubuntu).

Converting included maps to PPM

mogrify -format ppm map.png
mogrify -format ppm loop.png

zig-aidrivers executables expect a PPM file with the map from stdin.

stdout version

Requires mpv or another video player that supports reading PPM from stdin.

$ zig build run-stdout <map.ppm |  mpv --no-correct-pts --fps=60 -

zgt version

$ zig build run-zgt <map.ppm

Next steps

• some kind of wasm output
• different UI libs - microui, Dear ImGui