Internship Title:
Level Designer
Software Used:
Unreal Engine
CARLA
RoadRunner
Time spent at Molotov:
5 months
Introduction
I joined Anotherbrain in early March 2020 for an internship that was first in sandwich course until June, then became full time until late July 2020. For this internship, I was a Level Designer on an autonomous vehicle simulator. I was working with Tao Li, AI Engineer, whose work was to produce algorithms able to count the human and vehicle traffic in that simulator. The entirety of my team were engineers and didn’t have Level/Game Design backgrounds.
Gained Experience
As I’ve signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, I won’t be able to include screenshots or documents of my work.
At the start of the project, my first task was to benchmark different existing autonomous vehicle simulators.
After a couple of weeks of research, we decided to keep CARLA, which was running on Unreal Engine 4. As I’ve never worked on any simulator before, and the COVID-19 pandemic causing me some technical difficulties due to my Internet connection and the laptop I’ve been given, it took me a bit of time to get into the project and start understanding how it was working.
Once the simulator was fully built in Unreal Engine, I started browsing the project and trying to understand how to easily create new maps and traffic scenarios. Several operations and commands needed me to use Python, which was a skill that I didn’t have at first. Although designing levels was rather accessible and easy for me, making them compatible with the algorithms and systems included in the simulator was definitely one of the hardest tasks to perform. As I was the only one in the company who had a past experience with Unreal Engine, I couldn’t ask for much help other than to my classmates or on online forums and Discord servers.
As my coworkers might need to design levels themselves too after I left the company, I’ve been asked to test the software MathLabs’ RoadRunner. Indeed, it was a simplified software to design simple road maps and export them into CARLA, but it also felt crafty and containing too many bugs to be as efficient and precise as I would have wished.
One of my final tasks was to implement new vehicles, for instance an electric kick scooter. This task implied technical art skills that I don’t, so I’ve managed to do as best as I could.
Even though I had space and time to discover and try things that I’ve never done before, which was my motivation at the start of the project, this internship felt a bit frustrating because of the different difficulties that I had to face on my own. The lack of a Level Design Lead made difficult for both Tao and myself to estimate my workload, but also distinguish what I was able to produce, to what was way out of scope. Also, the pandemic most definitely impacted everyone’s efficiency and communication on this project, and the hardware I had been lent wasn’t performant enough, which forced me to use my personal laptop. As for right now, Anotherbrain found clients that were interested in their product (the traffic counting algorithms), which they were able to showcase with my levels.
About Anotherbrain
AnotherBrain has created a new kind of artificial intelligence, called Organic AI, very close to the functioning of the human brain and much more powerful than existing AI technologies. A new generation of AI to widen limits of possible and applications.
Organic AI is self-learning, does not require big data for training, is very frugal in energy and therefore truly human-friendly.
Kindness and responsibility are at the heart of every person in our team to keep up with the challenges of AI today and tomorrow.
Vincent Dupont 