Orbital Salvage Vibes

Back up the truck*

Back up the truck*

*and trailer

Reversing with a trailer is easy, but making it go where you want it to go is very counter-intuitive. There are lots of tricks people use (steer from the bottom of the wheel, or never get into a situation where you need to reverse) but committing it to muscle memory takes some rewiring of your mental models. Or maybe it’s just me.

Hey Chat, is this real?

How to practice without renting a trailer (and installing a hitch)? I decided I wanted to do this Gauntlet style: top-down and blocky. I asked Chat GPT 4o how it’d approach the problem, and showoff that it is, it produced a MVP in response. It was janky as anything, but showed enough promise that I decided to ask it to iterate.

Try it out here.

It needs another couple of rounds of revisions to get the driving to feel right, but not bad for maybe an hour of back and forth?

The background was created using Midjourney and Photoshop, with Adobe Illustrator used to create the collision map because it’s just a little faster at this sort of thing (the purist in me wanted it to be an SVG, but 4o had trouble working with it so it’s now a PNG).

Low colour, 1990s era computer game graphics style top-down view of a seaside parking lot with central boat launch.
Original background for the simulation, created using MidJourney using the very basic prompt “top-down view of parking lot and boat launch ramp into water. video game. EGA Graphics. parking spots are 30px wide. –no trees –ar 4:3 –v 7”
1990s computer game graphics style. Top-down view. Seaside parking lot with central boat launch and long parking spots for vehicles with trailers, in diagonal and perpendicular orientations.
Cleaned up in Photoshop to remove unnecessary objects and to create perpendicular and diagonal spaces for vehicles with trailers.
Collision map is white where it is ok to drive and red where there is a natural barrier like a curb or vehicle. This corresponds to the layout of the background image used in the simulation.
Collision map, quickly thrown together in Illustrator.

Tyler

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