Work in progress ... soon the complete version
Welcome to Torcs-NG, the Torcs laboratory !
Torcs-NG is a fork of The famous Open Racing Car Simulator "Torcs", but it does not any pretend to replace it. It's main goal is simply to host experimental developpements inside Torcs, while trying to follow as closely as possible its release and evolution stream ...
In other words, Torcs-NG is the place :
where developpers can try their ideas and have efery 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 Torcs-NG as an "end-user" or/and as a "developper" :
as an end-user (check the Download page in SF.net for how to get source / binary releases) :
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 the user mailing list : torcs-ng-users@lists.sourceforge.net
as a developper (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 the devel mailing list (torcs-ng-devel@lists.sourceforge.net) or the tracker ; 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 developper, you now have write access to the SVN repository ; but the preferred way for submitting adds/improvements is still the patch, as it can be easily tested and reviewed by anyone whatever the status of its working copy of the source tree ; once the dev. team, through discussions, peer reviews and tests, has democratically decided to integrate the patch, you can at last commit your changes to the repository !
Your contribution to Torcs-NG 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,
the web site (there's still some work ;-),
... feel free to suggest ...
Torcs-NG release process
Torcs-NG will generally follow Torcs release stream : a new release, with the same identifier (ex: 1.3.1), will normally be published in the weeks after each Torcs release. It will contain the whole Torcs release, plus the whole bunch of adds we maintain. But other intermediate releases could also be published if improvements commited to the trunk since last one would justify it, and of course if Torcs wouldn't have issued a new release 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 completly switched off through some run-time user action).
For the moment, the supported platforms are Linux (x86, x86_64) and 32 bit Windows XP, but any volunteer is welcome for any other ... as Torcs is known to work on Linux PPC, FreeBSD, MacOSX and Windows Vista.
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