LG Mothballed Its Unity AV Simulator in 2022

What it does

SVL Simulator is a Unity HDRP-based multi-robot simulator for autonomous vehicle developers. It offers out-of-the-box integrations with Baidu Apollo and Autoware.auto, generates HD maps, and targets teams who want to test autonomous vehicle algorithms without custom integration work. The project runs as a standalone executable on Windows and Linux, though the README concedes Windows currently delivers better performance.

The interesting bit

The project is now a frozen artifact. LG halted all development, bugfixes, and pull-request reviews on January 1, 2022. The final 2021.3 release is tethered to LG’s WISE cloud service for asset downloads and simulation orchestration; the README says stripping out that dependency would require a fork and a manual Unity build, and LG has no plans to open-source the WISE backend.

Key highlights

• Repo description labels it a ROS/ROS2 multi-robot simulator for autonomous vehicles
• Pre-integrated with Apollo and Autoware.auto platforms
• Generates HD maps for full-system validation
• Licensed to permit non-commercial derivative works and community forks
• Over 500 public forks already exist

Caveats

• The 2021.3 release depends on the WISE cloud service, which LG only committed to maintaining through June 30, 2022; the WISE source will not be released
• LG explicitly states there are no plans for new releases, bugfixes, or merging community contributions
• Requires a high-end desktop: LG recommends a 4 GHz quad-core CPU and an Nvidia GTX 1080 with 8 GB of VRAM

Verdict

Worth a look for researchers or hobbyists who want a frozen but functional Unity AV simulator to fork for non-commercial experiments. If you need active maintenance, living documentation, or a cloud-independent binary, this is explicitly not it.