motion simulator

[joevenzon]

Hey there, sorry it's taken me a while to respond, but you've brought up a lot of questions.

You've got a big project ahead of you... it's quite an undertaking. I'm not going to say you can't do it, but it'll take a lot of time and work, and you'll have to mostly go it alone. I can provide some pointers as to where you can look, but that's about it.

First of all, you'll want to get the development version of the code. All of the stuff I say below is relative to SVN R1887. Here's the how to:
http://wiki.vdrift.net/Getting_the_development_version

You might want to look into the force feedback steering wheels a bit more... there may be ones that work fine with linux (I haven't actually tried any) out of the box... I think the hacks in the other thread were about using one specific model. You might want to get on IRC and ask "thelusiv" about it, I know he's got a working FFB wheel, and at a college he worked at a lab where they had made something similar to what you want to make.

1) add multiple camera views (left, right, reverse) (think MS flightsim 2000+) and positoin each
2) to distort and rotate said viewpoints for easyer projection keystoning, other than using 3rd party software, which requires more cpu cycles
3) change the gauges (speed, tach) to lpt out
4) add gauges for tilt as lpt out
5) remove the startup menu and autoload the settings from a config file and the map from the teachers server (mabey smb://)

1) The camera positioning code isn't very clear, but it starts at vamosworld.cpp:750.
2) I don't have a good idea of how to do this... that's a tough one. You might be able to write a GLSL pixel shader to do it.
3) The best place to put your lpt writing code would be in the DrawHUD function that starts at vamosworld.cpp:1918
4) The best place for this would be in the same function as in #3. You'll be able to get info about the car's tilt from the current_focus->car->chassis() object, which inherits from include/vamos/geometry/Frame.h, and contains a quaternion representation of orientation. You should be able to find algorithms to compute Euler angles from the quaternion.
5) In GAME::Start() at the code that starts around game.cpp:1549 the gui is initialized and a menu is loaded. You'd want to directly set the game state, the car paint, the car name, and the track name. This is done via the gamestate class (there's a GAMESTATE object called "state" inside the GAME object). Then call GAME::LoadWorld().

Good luck!