Depicting a graphical demo of a car lapping a track

Question

I am planning to design an application which will provide a video of a car on a track (just like a demo of a game like RACE Pro), and depict its characteristics.

For example, if the user selects a poor handling car, then a graphical demo will be shown of that car completing a lap around a modelled track with the car's behaviour in relation to its characteristics (e.g. prone to skidding, understeer).

I know this is a fairly complex task, and I don't intend to code this straight away. What issues/topics does this requirement fall under? I have seen plenty of books on physics in programming and game engine/3d modelling and rendering engines. Are these relevant to this?

Answer 1

This is certainly a significant undertaking, but as a starting point you could take a look at the Racer project. It's a very detailed car racing simulation, highly customisable for different vehicle setups, and has publicly available source code for its engine (see the downloads page).

Answer 2

Physics and game programming books are absolutely relevant to this. Fortunately there are some great free and Open Source projects out there which could be a great help to you with this project. I've listed some below.

Physics:

• Open Dynamics Engine
• Tokamak
• Bullet

3D graphics:

• Ogre
• Crystal Space
• Crystal Entity Layer (CEL), which provides a game engine interface for Crystal Space.

You can tie any of the above together in whatever combination suits you.

You could also use Blender's built-in game engine, which includes the Bullet physics engine. I would recommend this as a starting point since it will give you a fully integrated interactive 3D simulation creation kit. The game engine is scriptable with Python (you can do all your script editing in Blender with its internal text editor).

In addition to the Racer project you could take a look at TORCS - The Open Racing Car Simulator, which is also Open Source as the name suggests.