[HN Gopher] Rigs of Rods: free and open source vehicle simulator...
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Rigs of Rods: free and open source vehicle simulator that uses
soft-body physics
Author : gjvc
Score : 270 points
Date : 2022-12-26 23:32 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rigsofrods.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rigsofrods.org)
| NextHendrix wrote:
| Spent many hours back in the day messing about in this. Glad to
| hear it's still going, superb timesink.
| saturn5k wrote:
| It's nice to see this on the front page. AFAIK, many years ago
| the development team split and BeamNG.drive was born. Rigs of
| Rods stagnated with new features and development, while BeamNG
| continued improving and adding new content. Today BeamNG is far
| superior in every aspect: physics, graphics, content.
| avereveard wrote:
| And tires, beam NG tire simulation is not the best out the but
| is far superior to ror
|
| With the addition of multilayer trough mods it also filled the
| last feature gap
|
| My only gripe is that devs have a scant idea of how control
| input should work for games, and recently introduced a steer
| limiting system that is all around bad and broke the two
| previously working mods that did it great, including mine, so
| racing is now bad again unless you have a steering wheel
| vsskanth wrote:
| Who has the best tire simulation? iRacing ?
| avereveard wrote:
| it's a moving target, but iracing v7 model is one of the
| best, for the cars that have been ported to the v7 model.
|
| RFactor 2 does degradation best tho. so there's that.
|
| some random background info:
|
| https://www.iracing.com/physics-modeling-ntm-v7-info-plus/
|
| https://www.beamng.com/game/news/blog/tire-physics-changes/
| vsskanth wrote:
| I work in the industry and always thought iRacing model
| was the most detailed but wanted to know if someone knew
| a better model.
|
| It's a shame they don't license their models for
| engineering customers (like rFactor does), since it's a
| single made-up parameter set tuned to make things feel
| "real".
| themodelplumber wrote:
| It's also superior in terms of not offering a Linux binary, I
| guess.
|
| Does .drive work in Wine these days?
| dEnigma wrote:
| According to ProtonDB[0] it seems to work reasonably well.
| Apparently there's also experimental Linux support now[1].
|
| [0]https://www.protondb.com/app/284160
|
| [1]https://www.beamng.com/game/news/announce/experimental-
| linux...
| bpowah wrote:
| I can't speak for Wine, but my son uses it on Proton
| regularly and except for a few brief glitches after updates
| and the inability to use the steering wheel controller, it's
| worked very well. https://www.protondb.com/app/284160
| ben-schaaf wrote:
| They recently added experimental Linux support. Performance
| is _way_ better, but unfortunately it crashes fairly
| frequently. It has been getting better every update though.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Is the source code for BeamNG available? It seems like a
| commercial project.
| codetrotter wrote:
| They have the game BeamNG.drive, and they also have something
| called BeamNG.tech
|
| > BeamNG.tech is an academia- and industry-oriented fork of
| BeamNG.drive. In content and features, it largely overlaps
| with BeamNG.drive, and offers additional functionality to
| support driver training simulators and the development of
| advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).
|
| > [...]
|
| > BeamNG.tech is released under a mix of commercial and open-
| source licenses by BeamNG GmbH.
|
| https://documentation.beamng.com/beamng_tech/
|
| But it's not clear from this page if they provide source code
| for the commercial parts of BeamNG.tech to customers or not.
| I guess you'd have to contact them and ask. Contact details
| are at the above linked page.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Hmm, I wonder how BeamNG can not provide source code, when
| Rigs of Rods is GPL and BeamNG was forked from it.
| haunter wrote:
| > BeamNG was forked from it
|
| Nope. They simply started BeamNG as a commercial project,
| it was never a fork
|
| https://www.beamng.com/threads/the-entire-history-of-
| beamng-...
|
| And they use Torque which is licensed under MIT
| https://torque3d.org/ But that's just the graphics not
| the physics enginge which haven't been released. Rigs is
| using Ogre https://www.ogre3d.org/
| Animats wrote:
| Nice.
|
| It's about typical for modern physics engines.
|
| Totally rigid body physics is reasonably well solved by now. It
| suffers from the "boink" problem; in impulse-constraint systems,
| there are instantaneous changes in velocity on collisions. This
| looks OK for small objects and terrible for large ones. This is
| the main reason game simulations usually look wrong.
|
| If you make everything soft, that works OK. But everything looks
| like Jell-O, as some early Pixar devs wrote. That's a soft-body
| system.
|
| What's hard is doing things which have just a _little_
| elasticity. Which is most real-world materials. That 's because
| you have to simulate what's happening on very short time scales,
| much shorter than a visual frame time. This is possible, but the
| compute load suddenly jumps by orders of magnitude during some
| collisions. That's hard for real-time systems. Also, you start to
| need double precision. If you don't need real time, as for film
| work, it's not too bad. Integration of stiff systems of
| differential equations is Not Fun. I used to do that stuff.
|
| Note, in the video, how soft the suspensions are.
| bgkim wrote:
| How about the modern physics engine for _the real world_? How
| much energy would it need to calculate all the effects of
| collisions of the "little" elastic bodies with infinite
| precision? And how fast would it need to be to calculate them
| in such a short period of time?
|
| It's amazing to think about all the objects in the universe
| which collide, always according to the laws of physics, not
| requiring any cost/resource/energy to such computing loads, and
| reliably without any uncaught exceptions.
|
| Edit: I meant the theoretical physics engine operating the real
| world.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I think it should be safe to assume that you always need a
| computer that is bigger than the mass you are trying to
| simulate (in _every_ possible aspect).
| bgkim wrote:
| Sorry I meant the theoretical physics engine operating the
| real world. For example if 1N of force is exerted on an
| atom having 1kg of mass, who is to calculate the resulting
| acceleration of the atom and update the value of the
| acceleration state variable of the atom? Atom itself or
| some kind of the universe OS? And wouldn't it be necessary
| some kind of energy to calculate it?
| meindnoch wrote:
| Jt's just a guy with a bunch of rocks:
| https://xkcd.com/505/
| radarsat1 wrote:
| > not requiring any cost/resource/energy to such computing
| loads, and reliably without any uncaught exceptions.
|
| It is highly distributed, in that every atom in the universe
| is performing this "calculation", all the time. That is
| literally an ungodly amount of energy. As for uncaught
| exceptions, they are also performing "only" this calculation,
| not much room for exceptions there. But let's not talk about
| quantum tunneling and other weird things that go on in the
| even lower level VM ;)
| l33tman wrote:
| Yeah it is incredibly much more computationally expensive
| when you consider it's a quantum mechanics universe and not
| a Newtonian, as all possible updates and combination of
| updates needs to be calculated and all considered together
| to generate the output probabilities..
| robin_reala wrote:
| If we're being literal, a lot of people would claim that
| that's _precisely_ a godly amount of energy.
| Jensson wrote:
| Problem is that artists makes rigid models in other programs
| they aren't made to have proper structural integrity. Rigid
| body physics lets you work with those models anyway, with
| proper physics you'd need to hire real engineers to design the
| different vehicles and structures and weapons in your games so
| they don't collapse on themselves.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That isn't really a problem, games often have separate
| physical and graphical meshes already.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Is there an in-between? A "plastic body system" where something
| behaves as a rigid body until a certain threshold or conditions
| and then behaves as a soft body during that condition, later
| returning to RB simulation using the new shape and altered
| parameters?
| meheleventyone wrote:
| That's what soft-body tries to encompass. You can't just
| freeze and unfreeze a soft-body system to a rigid-body though
| as you'd end up with odd behaviour and a non-trivial
| decomposition. How many rigid bodies is this soft body now?
| How are they constrained relative to one another? And how to
| decompose the new shape into suitable collision primitives?
|
| Simple mass-spring systems (like this) have issues with
| really stiff springs and high masses causing unrealistic
| responses even with a low time step but you can use
| approaches like XPBD which are stable. Changing the
| configuration of constraints is what causes the shape change.
|
| Most vehicle sims get really far with just using a rigid-body
| system and modelling the damage another way. It's much
| computationally cheaper, much cheaper in terms of time to
| setup a vehicle and lets you maintain high fidelity in the
| driving model which is the bit most players care about.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Engineers have been doing this kind of thing for a very long
| time. Animators just take lots of shortcuts because they can,
| but we're probably at the point (if it doesn't exist already)
| where you can animate with the actual properties of real
| materials with different models appropriate for the specific
| material.
|
| An engineer designing a product can certainly run it through
| a simulation that accurately predicts elastic and plastic
| deformation as well as fracture and other failure modes.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Actually, rigid body simulators using impulse based constraint
| solvers can simulate soft constraints (including soft contact),
| and you can control the stiffness from very stiff to very soft
| without becoming totally unstable. See this slide deck by Erin
| Catto:
| https://box2d.org/files/ErinCatto_SoftConstraints_GDC2011.pd...
| MrScruff wrote:
| The only issue with iterative constraint solvers is the 'long
| chain' problem, where it's not possible to solve for longer
| stiff chains of constraints. Direct solvers can do it, but
| not with reasonable performance/memory usage.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Indeed, you can add a Featherstone articulated body
| algorithm implementation for such cases, or direct solver
| with good performance (see Maciej Mizerkski talk on Roblox
| solver here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P-WP1yMOkc4)
| MrScruff wrote:
| Very interesting, thanks for the link!
| adalacelove wrote:
| There is plenty of work to do in my opinion regarding rigid
| body simulation. You just need to consider harder problems!
|
| An example: https://youtu.be/z12UdMbELdc
|
| The whole Siggraph channel is quite cool. It's just demo
| videos.
| ge96 wrote:
| I remember playing around with this like 14-16 years ago ha. It
| was so hard for me to create and import a box for a car chasis.
| Pretty cool though, there was a 4-engine Antonov on there was
| hard to start/fly.
|
| hard as in for me to comprehend 3D vertices
| trifit wrote:
| 1) Cars vroom
|
| 2) Enable multiplayer + voice chat
|
| 3) $
| KronisLV wrote:
| They also have a repository where you can download everything
| from new vehicles to maps:
| https://forum.rigsofrods.org/resources/ though with the recent
| versions it should be included in the simulator itself:
| https://docs.rigsofrods.org/gameplay/installing-content/
|
| From what I recall, RoR was a bit like BeamNG.drive "Lite":
| something that's nice to play around in, if a bit more barebones
| and could clearly use a bit more love. Then again, I think that
| both had slightly awkward UI and keyboard shortcuts, plus RoR is
| free.
| M3L0NM4N wrote:
| Holy shit I remember playing this like 15 years ago. Massive
| nostalgia here.
| gwnywg wrote:
| My 7yo son loves this, even though after few minutes he often
| ends up in such laggy experience he has to restart it..
| pelorat wrote:
| BeamNG.drive on steam. Same concept, more polished.
| pragmatic8 wrote:
| Link to the actual source code:
| https://github.com/RigsOfRods/rigs-of-rods/
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| A complete noob question (I am not a gamer and not a game
| developer):
|
| Is this a big thing? I.e. is this enough to start a community-
| driven effort to create an open source alternative to something
| like GTA (at least in gameplays I watched transportation seems to
| play a big role)?
|
| I have been wondering for a while why there is no open-source
| open world game similar to GTA, considering its poppularity.
| eclipxe wrote:
| Building something like GTA requires significant resources. The
| vehicle simulator part is a small part of the overall challenge
| with building something like GTA.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| This.
|
| The main challenge for building a game is the content - the
| art, level design, enemy design, terrain, story, etc. The
| game engines and coding tend to be (a) more portable between
| games and (b) have more people interested in contributing
| relative to the need.
|
| I was part of a game design group in college, as an extra
| curricular. We had tremendous unmet needs for art and sound
| design, which really limited the games we could make - maybe
| one or two game the 6-12 projects each year actually had the
| skills they needed. Part of that was probably the group
| running out of ACM and thus just having better ability to
| attract CS than art types, but I got the sense it was partly
| the type of people interested in building games for fun.
| squarefoot wrote:
| A central repository for FOSS scenery, vehicles, buildings,
| graphics/audio content in general, would help a lot the
| development of new games. Artists could gather on a public
| forum to discuss and collaborate, then add their creations
| to the repository rather than support just a single game,
| so that developers could concentrate on the code itself
| knowing they could count on a huge library of assets ready
| to be added. Think of GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg etc. but for
| art and media content. Not that one of the above couldn't
| be used for that goal.
| JMill wrote:
| Communities like Sketchfab [1] serve some of these needs.
| Although not 100% FOSS, 'content hubs' like this can be a
| fun place for creators/artists to share their work -- and
| to potentially get paid -- and for others to hunt for
| high quality assets. Sketchfab was acquired by Epic Games
| in 2021. [2] Maintaining stylistic consistency from one
| asset to another is a challenge, however, but maybe
| upcoming advancements in AI-powered tools like Point-E
| [3] will enable assets of one style to be re-envisioned
| en masse into another style. E.g., a text prompt could be
| "I want all assets from artist X and artist Y to be
| stylized like the game GTA: Vice City."
|
| [1] https://sketchfab.com/
|
| [2] https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/sketchfab-
| is-now-p...
|
| [3] https://huggingface.co/spaces/openai/point-e
| Karliss wrote:
| There is https://opengameart.org/ . Major limitation to
| this idea is that for a decent looking game the assets
| need to be consistent. Not only in terms of art style,
| but also detail level and technical constraints. For
| example if you want a modular building parts some random
| assets created by different artists without targeting a
| specific game requirements will probably not be
| compatible with each other or building system in game.
| Not only 3d model can be too low quality, having too high
| quality can also be a problem. You don't want some
| unimportant background prop to consume more triangles
| than main player character. It may look better to have
| less and worse quality but consistent assets, than more
| mixed quality assets.
|
| It might be slightly simpler if you assume realistic 3d
| art style. But even then what's considered realistic 3d
| game art has significantly changed over the years.
|
| Maybe this would work better if the repository served not
| only dumb file storage but tried to establish set of
| target requirements (updated once every few years) to
| improve the compatibility assets. Something like
| opengame-3drealistic-2020 or opengame-2dtopdown-
| pixelart-v3. Where each category means very specific
| rules and maybe some reference pieces meant to ensure
| compatibility. Downside is that it significantly raises
| the entry barrier and reduces amount of artists willing
| to make something which fits very specific requirements,
| instead of making whatever they want and then sharing
| their work. I am also somewhat concerned about loosing
| creativity.
| sauntheninja wrote:
| So can this be integrated into an existing game engine or a new
| game engine where someone wants to make a game like train
| simulator for example?
| numtel wrote:
| I can't believe this is still around. Back in 2005, I made a
| "vehicle editorizer" to build vehicles graphical using a VB6 GUI.
| I even had someone contribute a feature that enabled comments in
| the output. I was shocked they were able to read my code at that
| age.
|
| Before my program, you had to plot out your vehicle points
| manually and type it up in a text editor. There was a lot of
| scratch paper involved!
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| That is fantastic. I made an autoit GUI that enabled easy
| creation of scripted weapons for GMod about a year or two after
| your tool. It got decompiled and re-claimed by another, and
| everyone knew what he did. It also flooded the forums and mod
| content hosters with "low-quality pre-generated SWEPs". :)
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Something very nostalgic about this. Reminds me of of the days of
| playing Tanks II on Maid Marian, or the Gorillaz Final Drive
| game.
|
| A sandbox and some fun physics. :)
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Oooh this looks like fun! I guess it's something like an open
| source version of BeamNG?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Pre-dates BeamNG by roughly a decade, yes. I'm surprised it's
| still being worked on.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Ooh gotcha. Thanks!
| beAbU wrote:
| I believe RoR is BeamNG's predecessor. The dev team split or
| something in the late aughts I think?
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(page generated 2022-12-27 23:02 UTC)