New devel!

[jonnycowboy]

Hi guys this will be my first post so I'll try to keep it as professional as possible!! I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in vehicle dynamics and I work for a large flight simulator manufacturer designing and writing code in C and Fortran to simulate aircraft systems.

Doing all this code at work has gotten me into programming a race sim in my free time. So of course I took a look at Motorsport but unfortunately as most community projects go after the Logo Contest was over most people lost interest.

Luckily I stumbled upon VDrift and though I haven't installed it yet (in a few minute I promise!) I'm sure it will be interesting and fun!

Anyways so what am I doing here? My goal is to help out with design and coding vehicle dynamics aspect of the simulation (I wish I had some skills with 3DSMax but the right side of my brain is significantly more accessible than the left). Mainly this would deal with tire/road interaction (and the 3 aspects of friction!) and suspension dynamics.

My source code download is going fairly slow and I don't think I'll be able to obtain Visual Studio for a while (any free IDE's for windows?) but I hope to take a look at it soon and propose some improvements.

I'd upload some excel suspension dynamics stuff but unfortunately theres no 'attachment' option on the forum here... any devs on MSN?

[joevenzon]

We'd be glad to have any help you could offer. We currently use code from Vamos for our vehicle dynamics simulation, but it could be improved. The suspension simulation is probably a bit too general for most peoples' tastes. There are a few on the forums who are very knowledgeable when it comes to knowing about and researching vehicle dynamics, but we don't have anyone who feels comfortable coding things up yet, so like I said, any help is appreciated.

[jonnycowboy]

alright, where in the code can I take a look at whats currently going on? unfortunately in the file: VDrift Functional Decomposition.txt the location of each 'decomposition' in the code is not shown.
thanks

[thelusiv]

Welcome jonnycowboy! It's nice to see someone with your background interested in the project. Thanks for your interest.

VDrift uses a slightly modified version of the Vamos automotive simulator for car physics. In the VDrift source archive you can find it in include/vamos/* and src/vamos/*.

There is some documentation on the Vamos site but it is pretty sparse. The best way to figure it out is probably to read the code, and we're happy to answer any questions you might have about it.

As for IDE, we don't use Visual Studio, on Windows we have our build setup in Dev-C++. You can read about compiling the game in Windows on the wiki here: http://wiki.vdrift.net/index.php/Compiling#Windows

That section actually needs a little more information, you also need some libraries to compile the game correctly. I'll find the link to those soon and update the article...

[jonnycowboy]

OK thanks I'm downloading DevCPP right now... can't wait to try out some modifications!

[jonnycowboy]

alright the darn thing won't compile... i'm missing a few header files it seems... i've followed protomor's example

[Nigo]

we really should make a post to compile on Windows
you need to install libraries : SDL, SDL_gfx, SDLnet, SDL_image...
using a mingw32 compiler the best is to look for devpacks on the web :wink:
the definitions.h file was given in an other post

[protomor]

we really should make a post to compile on Windows
you need to install libraries : SDL, SDL_gfx, SDLnet, SDL_image...
using a mingw32 compiler the best is to look for devpacks on the web :wink:
the definitions.h file was given in an other post

+1

All the files you need to get it to work on windows are already in the SVN directory. I just had to move the header files and dll files (dont ask me where, I put them EVERYWHERE) and eventually it compiled. GL!

[thelusiv]

Did you have any luck with this?

[jonnycowboy]

i did have some luck since now I'm running an old version of ubuntu (6.04 I think)... my windows installation got corrupted (no idea how) and so I'm running linux while I try and debug windows.
anyways I'm pretty sure I can compile on linux but how do I know it compiled? scons dosen't pop up any messages..
i had installed the binary version already so i don't know if the version i run after compilation is the binary version or the source-compiled version

[thelusiv]

Have you read the wiki page on Compiling?

http://wiki.vdrift.net/index.php/Compiling

When you run the compiled version it should be obvious, it should print out the version when it runs as "devlopment" on the terminal, instead of saying the date the release was packaged.