Racer

Racer is a free car simulation project, using real car physics to get a realistic feeling. Cars, tracks, scenes and such can be created with relative simplicity in mind (compared to other driving simulations). The 3D and other file formats are, or should be, documented. Editors and support programs are also available to get a very flexible and expandable simulator. It uses OpenGL for rendering. It attempts to do well at the physics section, trying to create life-like cars to emphasize car control and does not cut back on realism in the interest of fun. If you have played Grand Prix Legends from Papyrus, you will know what I am talking about.

- 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, skid marks, 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.
- 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).
- Some used algorithms are explained on this site, so this site can be interesting to learn from if you create your own car simulation software. Also, links and references are available.
- At least 15 degrees of freedom for a regular car (6 DOF for the car body, 1 for each wheels vertical motion and 1 for each wheel spinning, and 1 for the engine, several more for the drive line). Depending actually on how many wheels you put on the car.
- Real-time internal clock; no physical dependency on frame rate. Controller updates are also done independently of the frame rate.