>I think you will find that currently Ruud isnt actually looking for people
>to take the code away and add to it, its still a personal project from Ruud
>but one that we can join in by creating assets for it in the way of cars and
>tracks. Its a learning process for Ruud as it is for the other chaps
>developing sims in here, and I think ras is a nice place for them to trade
>thoughts and ideas, without giving up the fun they are having in creating
>their own sims.
I must say. Hope to get that RacerRank up one day. :)
But the fact is, most physics/programmer people here create their sim
for fun, to find it all out. And indeed, I'm not too keen on having
people develop large components in my source code. It may not be good
for the longer term, in most cases, IMHO.
There's another set of people though, who don't *want* to create an
entire sim or do radical stuff like that, but do want to write
external programs, like converters (although ZModeler has DOF (Racer's
3D file format) support at the moment, so converting between NFS or
whatever is quite easy already), or neat setting dialogs for example.
And more importantly at the moment is track and car designers (mainly
tracks though I think). I've just added vertex colored capabilities to
the tracks (still some bugs to iron out though) so it can looks quite
good by now.
I'm also looking very much into getting the Ferrari 312 from GPL into
Racer (well, the physics data) together with a Salisbury differential
to try and get very close to a GPL car to see where my physics are
different from GPL. Problem here is rollcenters for example. I know
they're low for todays cars, but I don't know exactly about the cars
back then. Weight ratio is known, I know a bit how the diff angles
work (getting a resulting torque bias ratio, which should work ok
except for a 'magic' factor which still has to be applied in the end).
The programmers here want to take care of their own babies, but if
you're a modeler or like to tweak cars in every which way, than Racer
has a very easy entry path and is by now quite worth taking a look at,
even if I say so myself. :)
Ruud
PS vi rules! ;-)
Ruud van Gaal
Free car sim : http://www.racesimcentral.net/
Pencil art : http://www.racesimcentral.net/