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 Wednesday, July 14 2010 @ 08:04 PM PDT · Views: 1,983
VDrift 2010-06-30 has been released for Windows and Linux (source). 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: 3,755
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: 6,334
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: 1,876
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.
Contributed by: on Monday, March 23 2009 @ 07:18 PM PDT · Views: 2,103
VDrift is featured in AutoSimSport Magazine - Volume 5, Issue 1. Head on over to their website and check it out: http://www.autosimsport.net/
VDrift is on page 87, but don't let that stop you from reading the rest of the magazine -- it's a great read and is chock FULL of cool racing sim goodness.
Contributed by: on Sunday, February 15 2009 @ 10:05 PM PST · Views: 4,850
I've just uploaded linux source and windows releases for 2009-2-15. This is the first release with the refactored code, and I think it's a big improvement over the last release. Although there aren't any new features, there are so many bug fixes, stability enhancements, and performance improvements it's hard to make a complete list. Most of the code has been rewritten, including the car physics. Ackermann steering has been added. The in-game HUD has a new look. Font rendering has been vastly improved. More graphical options are available. The new physics numerical integrator is more stable. And so on....
Download links at the top of this page have been updated for the new release. I also created a forum thread to discuss the release: http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=8679
Thanks to all of the folks contributing code, artwork, and bug reports!
