6 ms·

Rigs of Rods: free and open source vehicle simulator that uses soft-body physics

289 points by gjvc 4y ago

pragmatic8 4y ago
Link to the actual source code: https://github.com/RigsOfRods/rigs-of-rods/ https://github.com/RigsOfRods/rigs-of-rods/
numtel 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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". :)
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Oooh this looks like fun! I guess it's something like an open source version of BeamNG?
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Pre-dates BeamNG by roughly a decade, yes. I'm surprised it's still being worked on.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Ooh gotcha. Thanks!
- beAbU 4y ago
  I believe RoR is BeamNG's predecessor. The dev team split or something in the late aughts I think?
Animats 4y ago
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.
- Jensson 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    That isn't really a problem, games often have separate physical and graphical meshes already.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  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?
  - 4y ago
KronisLV 4y ago
They also have a repository where you can download everything from new vehicles to maps: https://forum.rigsofrods.org/resources/ 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/ 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 4y ago
Holy shit I remember playing this like 15 years ago. Massive nostalgia here.
foreverCarlos 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
saturn5k 4y ago
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.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  It's also superior in terms of not offering a Linux binary, I guess. Does .drive work in Wine these days?
  - dEnigma 4y ago
    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 https://www.protondb.com/app/284160 [1]https://www.beamng.com/game/news/announce/experimental-linux-support/ https://www.beamng.com/game/news/announce/experimental-linux...
  - bpowah 4y ago
    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 https://www.protondb.com/app/284160
  - ben-schaaf 4y ago
    They recently added experimental Linux support. Performance is way better, but unfortunately it crashes fairly frequently. It has been getting better every update though.
- avereveard 4y ago
  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
Night_Thastus 4y ago
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. :)
NextHendrix 4y ago
Spent many hours back in the day messing about in this. Glad to hear it's still going, superb timesink.
trifit 4y ago
1) Cars vroom 2) Enable multiplayer + voice chat 3) $
ge96 4y ago
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
gwnywg 4y ago
My 7yo son loves this, even though after few minutes he often ends up in such laggy experience he has to restart it..
- pelorat 4y ago
  BeamNG.drive on steam. Same concept, more polished.
  - gwnywg 4y ago
    Thanks, seen people suggesting this and I definitely will explore BeamNG, looks like simple way to make my kids a bit happier :)
sauntheninja 4y ago
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?

289 points by gjvc 4y ago

Link to the actual source code: https://github.com/RigsOfRods/rigs-of-rods/ https://github.com/RigsOfRods/rigs-of-rods/

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 4y ago
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". :)

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Oooh this looks like fun! I guess it's something like an open source version of BeamNG?

moffkalast 4y ago
Pre-dates BeamNG by roughly a decade, yes. I'm surprised it's still being worked on.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Ooh gotcha. Thanks!
beAbU 4y ago
I believe RoR is BeamNG's predecessor. The dev team split or something in the late aughts I think?

Animats 4y ago

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.

Jensson 4y ago
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 4y ago
  That isn't really a problem, games often have separate physical and graphical meshes already.
Waterluvian 4y ago
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?
- 4y ago

KronisLV 4y ago

They also have a repository where you can download everything from new vehicles to maps: https://forum.rigsofrods.org/resources/ 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/ 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 4y ago

Holy shit I remember playing this like 15 years ago. Massive nostalgia here.

foreverCarlos 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

saturn5k 4y ago

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.

themodelplumber 4y ago
It's also superior in terms of not offering a Linux binary, I guess. Does .drive work in Wine these days?
- dEnigma 4y ago
  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 https://www.protondb.com/app/284160 [1]https://www.beamng.com/game/news/announce/experimental-linux-support/ https://www.beamng.com/game/news/announce/experimental-linux...
- bpowah 4y ago
  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 https://www.protondb.com/app/284160
- ben-schaaf 4y ago
  They recently added experimental Linux support. Performance is way better, but unfortunately it crashes fairly frequently. It has been getting better every update though.
avereveard 4y ago
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

Night_Thastus 4y ago

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. :)

NextHendrix 4y ago

Spent many hours back in the day messing about in this. Glad to hear it's still going, superb timesink.

trifit 4y ago

1) Cars vroom 2) Enable multiplayer + voice chat 3) $

ge96 4y ago

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

gwnywg 4y ago

My 7yo son loves this, even though after few minutes he often ends up in such laggy experience he has to restart it..

pelorat 4y ago
BeamNG.drive on steam. Same concept, more polished.
- gwnywg 4y ago
  Thanks, seen people suggesting this and I definitely will explore BeamNG, looks like simple way to make my kids a bit happier :)

sauntheninja 4y ago

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?