Car brains is a toy game where you train cars to drive around a track using neural networks and genetic algorithms. Right now, it only works on Windows. It's not very useful, but can be pretty fun to watch.

When you first start it, the game creates a configuration file under

C:\Users\{YourName}\Documents\CarBrains\config\default-config.json

Copy that file and edit it to your delight. The config contains settings controlling how the neural networks are constructed and how the genetic algorithm operates. Please do not edit the default config, as any changes will get lost after the game is restarted.

Once you are satisfied with your config, click Refresh and generate a population of cars from it. Next create some track for them to drive around, and then proceed to the training window. There, you can watch your cars fail to finish a simple track for countless hours.

The neural networks and genetic algorithm are written in Rust and reside in the brains folder. After compiling, move the DLL into game/Assets/Plugins to make it available in Unity. This requires a restart of the engine.

The Rust code interacts with the Unity frontend via a manually written C API. Because I am too lazy to replicate structs from Rust in C#, I use JSON files to pass around information wherever performance is of no concern.