Racer
Racer is a free cross-platform car simulation project using
professional car physics to achieve a realistic feeling and an
excellent render engine for graphical realism.
Cars, tracks and such can be created relatively easy (compared
to other, more closed, driving simulations). The 3D, physics and other
file formats are documented. Editors and support programs are also
available to get a very customizable and expandable simulator.
The focus on realism makes
Racer suited for hardcore simfans, automotive engineers, 3D modelers
and tweakers.
OpenGL is used
for rendering.
Features include:
- Uses motion formulae from actual engineering documents from
SAE for example
- Incredible flexibility; almost everything is customizable
through ASCII files.
- Commercial-quality rendering engine (with smoke, skidmarks,
sparks, sun, flares, vertex-color lit tracks)
- Support for Matlab (log files can be converted into Matlab
format for further analysis & processing)
- Support for Matrox' Surround Gaming. See the corresponding
page on Matrox' site
- Lots of addon cars and tracks available on the web (over
100 tracks & cars)
- Easy integration of your own cars and tracks that you
create in ZModeler, 3D Studio Max(tm), Maya etc
- At least 15 degrees of freedom for a regular car (6 DOF for
the car body, 1 for each wheel's vertical motion and 1 for each wheel
spinning, and 1 for the engine, several more for the driveline).
Depending actually on how many wheels you put on the car
- Real-time internal clock; no physical dependency on
framerate. Controller updates are also done independently of the
framerate
- Not limited to 4 wheels; anything from 2 to 8 wheel
vehicles are currently supported
- Not many constraints on the track data; surface info is
taken from polygon data (VRML tracks), and splines are used to smooth
out the track surface (polygons are too harsh for driving on just like
that)
- Tools to modify the cars and tracks are freely
available
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Last Updated Tuesday, September 16 2008 @ 02:37 PM EDT
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