VDrift is a cross-platform, open source driving simulation made with drift racing in mind. The driving physics engine was recently re-written from scratch but was inspired and owes much to the Vamos physics engine. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. It is currently available for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows.
This game is in the early stages of development but is already very playable. Currently the game features:
Contributed by: on Saturday, September 03 2011 @ 09:49 AM PDT · Views: 5,235
VDrift 2011-09-01 has been released for Linux, Windows, and OSX. It's considered a stable release, and has a number of improvements to physics and graphics since the 2010-06-30 release. Differences from the last development release are primarily bug fixes, although I did add auto-update functionality to cars to test the water and see how that works. As always, feel free to post any questions or feedback in the forums.
Contributed by: on Saturday, June 18 2011 @ 08:39 PM PDT · Views: 1,088
VDrift is moving to the git DVCS. The authoritative repository will be hosted on GitHub. The issue tracker is moving from google code to github, and the art repository is moving from vdrift.net's SVN to the sourceforge repository. There may be some short service interruptions, but feel free to ask on the forums if something has gone missing and you're not sure where to find it.
I've updated the downloads box on the front page to reflect "stable" versus "development" releases -- however note that often the development releases are less buggy than the "stable" releases, although the stable releases come with more cars and tracks.
Wednesday, December 08 2010 @ 09:40 AM PST
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Views: 3,735
This meeting was called to facilitate a real-time discussion of the VDrift community about several important issues related to the project. The goal of this meeting is to make some decisions as a group regarding how the project should operate in the future. Read on for details.
Contributed by: on Wednesday, July 14 2010 @ 08:04 PM PDT · Views: 13,242
VDrift 2010-06-30 has been released for Windows, Linux, and OSX. Download links are available on the main http://vdrift.net website. Despite the lack of news stories recently, the forum has been very active and development has been progressing at a fast pace. As a result this release is a snapshot during heavy development and so this release may be a little less stable than the previous in some areas. There's a full list of changes below the cut, but to summarize the most noticeable ones:
* rewritten physics engine that fixes many bugs, improves performance, and vastly improves simulation accuracy
* new deferred rendering engine that supports normal maps, true HDR rendering, screen-space ambient occlusion, and soft particles
* meshes for brake rotors, better wheel and tire meshes
* bugfixes and tweaks to control input management
* new sounds
Contributed by: on Saturday, August 22 2009 @ 04:23 PM PDT · Views: 7,597
VDrift user nomoo suggested that VDrift should have a cars database website similar to racer-xtreme.com. Great idea! The site will allow artists to upload their creations and users to download add-on cars for VDrift. Here is the website URL: http://cars.vdrift.net
For a while the website will be under heavy construction so expect some features to be disabled or require authorization until everything is up and running.
In the future I hope to also add the ability for artists to upload car skins, car parts, drivers, replays, car setups, and even tracks. One particularly cool idea is to add an online .car file generator!
At the moment accounts are not linked to your vdrift.net account, so you'll have to create a new account on here. Please use the same username across both websites.
Contributed by: on Wednesday, June 17 2009 @ 05:43 PM PDT · Views: 11,664
VDrift 2009-06-15 has been released for Windows and Linux (source) UPDATE: and OSX. Download links are available on the main http://vdrift.net website. There's a full list of changes below the cut, but to summarize the most noticeable ones:
* cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now
* AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider
* off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)
* support for H-gate shifters
* improved performance
* lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs
Contributed by: on Thursday, May 28 2009 @ 08:51 PM PDT · Views: 6,493
In SVN R2475, I added a command line utility called "modelconvert" in the VDrift/tools folder. At the moment, it allows conversion between OVA (a binary vertex array format I made that's not used by anything for anything), JOE (the vdrift model binary format), and OBJ (the common wavefront format supported by many, many 3d packages). Unfortunately, the blender OBJ importer can't import per-vertex normals correctly (it just ignores them), but it can export them.
Currently JOE files are only supported for reading, not writing. OBJ files can be read and written.
