Porting to Scenic 3

As described in What’s New in Scenic, Scenic 2 programs are not compatible with Scenic 3 due to a few changes in syntax and semantics. See that page for a complete list of backwards-incompatibilities and explanations of how you can change your code. This page describes two tools that assist in the migration process: the Scenic 2-to-3 converter and 2D compatibility mode. The former converts a Scenic 2 program into a syntactically-valid Scenic 3 program; the latter is a compiler option that changes the semantics of several Scenic constructs so that they behave as in Scenic 2. The goal of these tools is that applying them together to a Scenic 2 program makes it possible to run the program under Scenic 3 and get largely the same behavior.

Note

2D compatibility mode does not exactly emulate the behavior of Scenic 2: for example, it does not disable fixes for bugs. It is intended as a temporary measure to help easily run old Scenic programs without fully porting them to 3D geometry. If it is essential for your application that you can reproduce the exact behavior of your Scenic 2 scenarios, you should not upgrade to Scenic 3: old releases of Scenic are always available on PyPI and in our GitHub repository. For most use cases, however, upgrading to Scenic 3 and using 2D mode until you can digest our documentation and port your scenarios will work just fine.

Scenic 2-to-3 Converter

This tool reads a Scenic 2 program and adjusts its syntax so that it parses under Scenic 3. It requires the Scenic 2 parser in order to work, so it is not included in Scenic 3: you must either use the tool before upgrading, or temporarily check out the 2.x branch of our repository to get the latest Scenic 2 release (you can switch back to the main branch afterward).

To run the tool and see the list of options it supports, run this command in the environment where you have Scenic installed:

$ python -m scenic.syntax.scenic2to3 --help

Note that due to the nature of Scenic 2 parsing, the tool must actually execute your Scenic 2 program, so you will have to ensure your program runs before you can convert it.

2D Compatibility Mode

Running the scenic command with the --2d option enables 2D compatibility mode. This mode changes several aspects of Scenic’s semantics in order to more closely match the historical behavior of Scenic 2. Specifically:

  • The baseOffset and contactTolerance properties of Object are zeroed, so that the specifier on region places the position of the object within the region, as it did in Scenic 2 (vs. the Scenic 3 behavior of placing the object above that position so that the base of the object lies on the region).

  • The requireVisible property of Object is true by default, as it was in Scenic 2.

  • The occluding property of Object is false by default, so that objects do not occlude each other for the purpose of visibility checks (as Scenic 2 did not account for occlusion).

  • The visible regions of Point, OrientedPoint, and Object are 2D regions as in Scenic 2 (either a CircularRegion or a SectorRegion).

  • Default values for heading in class definitions are replaced with default values for parentOrientation.

  • The specifier with heading X is replaced with facing X.

  • The visible and not visible will behave as they did in Scenic 2, requiring the center of the object to be visible rather than any part of the object. More precisely, visible will specify position to be uniformly random in the observing object’s visible region and not visible will specify position to be uniformly random in the difference of the workspace and the observing object’s visible region.

Note that despite these changes, Scenic will still use 3D geometry internally. For example, if you write ego = new Object at (1, 2) the value of ego.position will be the 3D vector (1, 2, 0).