drawtonomy vs hand-written OpenSCENARIO XML
Hand-written OpenSCENARIO XML
Section titled “Hand-written OpenSCENARIO XML”Hand-writing OpenSCENARIO XML is a common workflow and for many use cases the right one.
When the XML is the appropriate path:
- The scenario is small and you want byte-level control.
- You’re generating XML programmatically from a DSL or codegen pipeline.
- You need spec features beyond what visual tools expose — conditional triggers, parameter sweeps, custom controllers, complex storyboards, traffic-flow models.
- You’re collaborating on scenarios via git and stable XML diffs matter.
For production scenario authoring, hand-written or codegen’d XML is the canonical approach.
What drawtonomy can express today
Section titled “What drawtonomy can express today”A subset of OpenSCENARIO 1.3, per the exporter docs:
- A 2D top-down road network — lanes, intersections, simple linestrings — exported as a partial OpenDRIVE 1.8
.xodr. - Static placement of vehicles, pedestrians, traffic lights, road markings as
<ScenarioObject>/<Pedestrian>entries. - Simple paths / trajectories emitted as
<FollowTrajectoryAction>.
The exported .xosc plays back simple scenes in esmini. It’s a starting point, not a finished scenario.
What drawtonomy does not express
Section titled “What drawtonomy does not express”Documented as roadmap items in the exporter docs:
- OpenDRIVE junction emission (
<junction>). - Traffic signs as
<signal>entries. - Acceleration / deceleration profiles, dwell / stop events, signal-aware paths, lane-change actions, multi-actor storyboards.
- Conditional triggers, parameter sweeps, custom or ML-driven controllers, dense traffic flows.
For any of these, you’ll write XML by hand or generate it from code.
A reasonable hybrid
Section titled “A reasonable hybrid”- Sketch the layout in drawtonomy to settle the lane network and participant placement.
- Export the esmini bundle and confirm the simple version plays back.
- Open the
.xoscin a text editor and add the parts drawtonomy doesn’t express. - Keep the drawtonomy source as the figure for the test plan / paper / slide.
drawtonomy is the sketch. The XML is the source of truth for any non-trivial scenario.
In the same OpenSCENARIO community
Section titled “In the same OpenSCENARIO community”Hand-written XML is the foundational authoring path for OpenSCENARIO — every other tool in the ecosystem ultimately produces it (or its DSL equivalent). drawtonomy’s exporter, scenariogeneration, Scenic, RoadRunner, Blender DSC, and the rest all emit the XML at some point. Reading and writing the XML directly is how the standard stays a standard, and tools that produce it benefit from the cross-tool interoperability the community has built around it.