Racer uses 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. OpenGL is used for rendering.
- It’s totally free (for
non-commercial use)
- Available for multiple platforms; Windows
2000/XP (95/98/ME may work but have some trouble with fonts), Linux
and Mac OS X.
- 6 DOF chassis movement (the car can move around freely);
around 15 DOFs in a total car (wheels/engine/clutch etc).
- 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 (but mostly untested, and some problems with
hardcoded differentials for example may exist (v0.5.0)).
- Not much 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 &
tracks are freely available on this site (though some external utilities
like 3D Studio Max are recommended for best results).
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