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drawtonomy vs LaneMaker

LaneMaker

Section titled “LaneMaker”

LaneMaker is a free, lightweight 3D editor for creating road networks and running traffic simulation. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and is aimed at casual users and hobbyists.

What LaneMaker covers (per its homepage and GitHub repository):

  • A road-network editor with import and export of ASAM OpenDRIVE .xodr files. The README notes that exported files do not fully comply with the ASAM OpenDRIVE standard but can be opened in the OpenDRIVE online viewer.
  • Built-in large-scale traffic simulation, where vehicles spawn with assigned destinations and planned routes.
  • A 3D editing view for road geometry.
  • Desktop builds for Windows 10/11 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

For drawing a road network and watching traffic move on it without a paid license, LaneMaker is one of the freely available options.

Where drawtonomy might fit alongside it

Section titled “Where drawtonomy might fit alongside it”

drawtonomy is a browser tool for 2D top-down driving scenarios. It has no SUMO-style microscopic traffic simulation (spawning fleets with assigned routes) and no 3D view. It does, however, run authored OpenSCENARIO scenarios in the browser via esmini compiled to WebAssembly. Per its exporter documentation, its OpenDRIVE 1.8 / OpenSCENARIO 1.2 export covers a subset of the spec — lanes, traffic lights, crosswalks, basic objects — and does not yet emit junction primitives or traffic signs as <signal> entries.

A few things drawtonomy can add alongside LaneMaker:

  • A browser-only surface, with nothing to install, for a quick layout before opening a desktop editor.
  • Authoring an OpenSCENARIO scenario on the road and running it in the browser — actions, triggers, PASS / FAIL — without an esmini install. See the scenario editor.
  • A .drawtonomy.svg editable figure source for slides, papers, or documentation.

A reasonable pattern when both are available: LaneMaker for the road network and traffic, drawtonomy for the diagram of the scene.

In the same ASAM OpenDRIVE ecosystem

Section titled “In the same ASAM OpenDRIVE ecosystem”

LaneMaker and drawtonomy both read and write ASAM OpenDRIVE. The community around freely available OpenDRIVE tooling is a small one — LaneMaker, Truevision Designer, Blender DSC, scenariogeneration, and drawtonomy each cover a different part of it. Output from these tools can generally be checked in the OpenDRIVE online viewer or played back in esmini, so they sit in the same downstream pipeline even when they don’t directly share files. We work on different parts of the same ecosystem.

Section titled “Related reading”