Welcome to Speed Dreams, an Open Motorsport Sim !

Speed Dreams is a fork of the famous open racing car simulator TORCS, aiming to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.

In other words, Speed Dreams is the place:

where developers can try their ideas and have every chance to get them released to the end-users (democracy is the main principle ruling the dev team),
where end-users can enjoy the completion of these ideas and give their opinion about it, and/or make new suggestions.

So, if you find your or some people's Torcs patch proposals don't integrate the official release as quickly as you would have loved, you have reached the right place !

How to contribute

You can contribute to Speed Dreams as an "end-user" and / or as a "developer":

as an end-user (check the Download page on SF.net for how to get source / binary releases and our Wiki (under construction) to get more information on the project):
- help the dev team to test pre-releases
- suggest improvements, express your support or disgust about changes
- ask questions about compilation / build from source problems
- ...
all through our users mailing list: speed-dreams-users@lists.sourceforge.net or our bug / feature tracker

users chat room on JabberFr

as a developer (see the Code menu in SF.net for how to get the source tree from the Subversion repository):
- as guest contributor, you may propose your adds / improvements as patches (patch files built via diff -Naur or equivalent) against the latest source tree, and send them to us as attached files through our devel mailing list speed-dreams-devel@lists.sourceforge.net or our bug / feature tracker; feel also free to join the dev. team daily discussions and monthly meetings in our developers char room on JabberFr; you don't have write access yet to the SVN repository, but it's up to you to prove us your skills and innovation ability as a programmer, a software architect, an artist, ... as well as your self-discipline in testing ;-) ... and that way, you may enter step by step in the dev. team ...
- as a registered developer, you now have write access to the SVN repository and can simply commit your adds / improvements ; that way, they can be easily tested and reviewed by anyone updating his working copy of the source tree; but be responsible, never forget that democracy is the main rule in the dev. team, so, before committing and even begining to work on, explain first the details of your project, ask everyone's opinion ... enjoy each other skills and thoughts to improve your work ! And you're likely to endorse some particular development mission or become the recognized expert of the team on some subject ...

Your contribution to Speed Dreams may take place in many domains :

The core code itself, and its numerous subjects : user interface, physics engine, 3D graphics engine, race managment, input device related code, file formats, ... to enhance, optimize, make more up-to-date, fix bugs, port to another platform ...
the robot(s) code (AI racing)
the cars design or tuning
the tracks design
the documentation
... feel free to suggest ...

Speed Dreams release process

Speed Dreams won't follow Torcs release stream : we plan to adopt a pace of 1 or 2 releases a year, and to simply integrate all interesting changes / fixes that Torcs would have released meanwhile.

As already said, the content of each release will be democratically decided inside the dev team. Stability and bug freeness is not our first purpose, but it's just the second one: modifications that are not really completed, well tested or that may degrade the simulation realism, some other essential feature or performance, or the end-user gaming experience, ... won't be released (unless they are of great interest and can be completely switched off through some menu button or keyboard shortcut).

For the moment, the supported platforms are Linux (x86, x86_64) and 32 bit Windows XP and Vista ; the Mac OS X port is 95% finished, but volunteers are welcome for any other ...

Next release (try the beta1 now ! Final 1.4.0 in early 2010) will include at least :

visually reworked menus by Brian Gavin, Andrew Sumner and Jean-Philippe Meuret,
3 amazing fine tuned and balanced new car sets by Andrew Sumner and Haruna Say : Super Cars, 36 GP and LS-GT1,
an updated TRB1 car set (well balanced, more realistic behaviour),
3 exciting new tracks and many visually improved ones,
smashing liveries for all these cars, by Eckhard M. Jager and Haruna Say,
2 new TRB first-class robot for the Supercars, 36 GP and TRB1 car sets :
USR by Andrew Sumner and Simplix by Wolf-Dieter Beelitz (at last real AI opponents !),
animated driver by Andrew Sumner on 36GP cars, 3D wheels for all cars by Eric Espie,
2 new leader-board modes by Gabor Kmetyko, smoke on spinning tires by Andrew Sumner,
brand new gauges by Eckhard M. Jager, and many many other small visual improvements,
experimental Simu V3 physics engine by Christos Dimitrakakis,
many menu improvements (support for grid shifting, optimized track select load time,
category filter when selecting driver, more infos in results and standings boards),
and more ...

And with the following release (1.5, next year, CMake built), you will :

enjoy network racing : race against your friends over the internet,
feel the cars in your hands with force feedback,
race at night under the stars, or in full midday sunlights, as you'll be able to choose the hour of the day,
enjoy your favorite tracks under heavy clouds or even true falling rain
run a real racer life-time career,
... and more !

Links & Lists

Torcs : The Open Racing Car Simulator and its project page at SF.net