Racer – car simulator project

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 forthe 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.

Website: www.racer.nl
Support:
Developer: Ruud van Gaal
License: Free but Proprietary license

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