3D Engine for Driving Simulation

Question

Is there any open-source 3D graphics and physics engine specialized in driving simulation? Something like a configurable game engine targeted at games that involve driving, or something more specialized to urban traffic conditions and that would implement scriptable traffic rules. Also, car motor parts and dashboard presentation would be a plus. Something with pre-made 3D car models that I can use for scenes.

Answer 1

Try the game engine in Blender. It comes with Bullet, an OSS physics simulation which is probably pretty good since it was used in "2012" (the movie, not the year :-).

Answer 2

Take a look at the racing simulator VDrift or TORCS The Open Racing Car Simulator. I'm not sure how scriptable they are for simulating urban settings, but the car physics are good in both.

Answer 3

Try TORCS, The Open Racing Car Simulator. It is a highly portable multi platform (Windows, Mac OS, Linux, PlayStation) car racing simulation. The source code of TORCS is licensed under the GPL ("Open Source"). It has great well-commented 3D Engine!

TORCS features more than 50 different pre-made 3D car models, tens of tracks. Graphic features lighting, smoke, skidmarks and glowing brake disks. The simulation features a simple damage model, collisions, tire and wheel properties (springs, dampers, stiffness, ...), aerodynamics (ground effect, spoilers, ...) and much more.

You can very easy enhance general TORCS system engine, because it is highly modular.

The source code of TORCS has following directory structure:

.
|-- doc
|-- drivers
|   `-- human
|       `-- tracks
|           `-- dirt-2
|-- interfaces
|-- libs
|   |-- client
|   |-- confscreens
|   |-- learning
|   |-- math
|   |-- portability
|   |-- raceengineclient
|   |-- racescreens
|   |-- robottools
|   |-- tgf
|   |-- tgfclient
|   `-- txml
|       `-- gennmtab
|-- linux
|-- modules
|   |-- graphic
|   |   `-- ssggraph
|   |-- simu
|   |   `-- simuv2
|   |       `-- SOLID-2.0
|   |           |-- include
|   |           |   |-- 3D
|   |           |   `-- SOLID
|   |           `-- src
|   |-- telemetry
|   `-- track
|-- raceman
|-- tools
|   |-- accc
|   |-- nfs2ac
|   |-- nfsperf
|   |-- package
|   |   `-- specfiles
|   |-- texmapper
|   `-- trackgen
`-- windows
    |-- dll
    |-- include
    |   |-- AL
    |   |-- GL
    |   `-- plib
    `-- lib

as you can see, it has a lot of different projects inside, e.g. SOLID is library for collision detection, simuv2 contains all interesting physics-related things.

Just try TORCS!