Question about disabling visualizer building

[wladekpal]

Hello,
I'm using genesis for RL training. One of the major problems I've had is running genesis on headless clusters, due to EGL errors (even though I had show_viewer option set to False I still got errors from offscreen renderer). I tried various fixes, including changing the PYOPENGL_PLATFORM environmental variable and using singularity containers, but none seemed to work. Because I'm running my experiments on a cluster where I don't have root privileges, I couldn't install additional egl libraries.
Finally I was able to get it to work by simply commenting out this line. Without building the visualizer I'm able to get the RL training to work as normal, and I have no issues with EGL.

I wanted to ask if there is some unexpected behaviour that I could see because of that, when only using genesis for headless computation ? If it is in fact a safe workaround, I think it could be a nice option to have in scene configuration, perhaps alongside show_viewer.

[duburcqa]

The only (arguably major) downside is everything related to rendering being broken, which includes cameras but also all rendering-based sensors. They will be merged into the main branch soon (LIDAR, RGB, depth map). Allowing not initialising the rendering backend would break part of the features of genesis (i.e. some methods will not be available), which is something we would like to avoid for now. But if your code does not raise any exception on your side, I think your workaround is safe and the way to go for now.

And yes, you need root permission to install EGL driver on a machine.

[wladekpal]

I see, thanks for a quick response, and for creating Genesis.