Wishlist for v0.8

[mattuntergassmair]

As I was working with AutoViz over the last few weeks I ran into a few limitations and started working on a new (forked) branch that is more flexible and supports my needs better. As discussed with @MaximeBouton we could do a major overhaul of AutoViz to create version 0.8. Opening this issue so we can collect some improvement ideas. There is also a new branch v0.8 to which we can merge such changes, which could eventually be merged into master.

Current shortcomings include:

• Vehicles are either basic or fancy. Customizations in how vehicles are drawn are not straightforward. Rendering depends a lot on convert(Renderable, obj) function which cannot easily be changed.
• Interfaces for rendering different objects (vehicles, overlays, etc.) are different and cannot be extended.
• overlays can only be "over" the scene (not under vehicles for example)
• codebase is difficult to navigate (soooo many render functions, all in different packages)

[mattuntergassmair]

I think we should also try to close issues #6, #8, #9 with v0.8, some of them are already fixed on my fork

[MaximeBouton]

Here is a checklist, feel free to edit and add stuff:

• [x] remove _rendermode
• [x] improve default for render #34
• [ ] documentation #8
• [x] improve camera interface #34
• [x] update tutorials
• [x] scene follow camera in new interface #9
• [x] unify interfaces for drawing any kind of renderable (roadway, scene, vehicle, overlay)
• [x] re-introduce tests for target follow camera (problems with multiple dispatch)
• [x] fix font issue on Linux #35
• [x] fix travis testing errors #41
• [x] change write_to_svg and write_to_png to simply Base.write and let the function figure out the format based on suffix #42
• [ ] get rid of warnings about redefining constant _canvas_type etc. (maybe coming from Interact.jl? or WebIO?)
• [x] fix incameraframe (it does the opposite of what the name says) #41

[MaximeBouton]

@mattuntergassmair Do you have any idea for #8?

[MaximeBouton]

@mattuntergassmair how do you feel about the current state of things? Should we document and merge #43 ?

Should we remove the tutorial notebook? The main limitation for now is that it also serves as test, I guess we could copy over all the code to the test suite but maybe we should keep that for a future PR.

[mattuntergassmair]

Sounds good. In terms of notebook would be nice to do the same as we did in ADM, i.e. move the notebook over to the docs and find a better way to run the tests. Agree with you that this could happen later.

[mattuntergassmair]

As for documentation, the state of things is not worse than pre-v0.8, so I don't think we lose anything by merging. Better docs are always better, we should try to break the task down into more concrete todo-items and go from there.

[MaximeBouton]

PR has been merged, release tagged and registered.

I would still wait before closing this one that we add documentation.