Rigs of Rods: August 2005

RoR 0.13 - Performance Release

A big progress has been made on the performance front. This release runs about 2x faster than the previous one! Also at startup more rendering options are available to fine-tune performances to your video card.
You can adjust:

Shadow techniques: None/Texture/Stencil. Texture shadows is the best compromise. Stencil shadows are slower, and are still buggy.
Texture filtering: None/Bilinear/Trilinear/Anisotropic. Anisotropic are really the best looking, and the performance is good on recent cards.
Motion Blur: This is just for fun. Motion blur is... well... blurry!

Now with a 3GHz processor you can expect around 40fps. And slower processor can run the game too!

Version 0.12 is out!

This weed-end was good for updates. What's new in 0.12:

Shadows! Texture shadows works relatively well now, so I included them in this release. There are still some visual glitches, and the VRAM use is up. I am still looking to make stencil shadows work, man they are gorgeous! In a future version there will be a way to choose the shadow technique.
Collisions! Now you can crash in some objects of the scene. That was easy to do. This physics engine is full of surprises: its soft-body nature makes robust collisions easy.
Better Scenery: I have placed buildings all around the two scenes. Drive around and find them. Soon there will be a map. This is the beginning of a game logic.

You will find this release in the download section.
As always, to file a suggestion or a bug report regarding this release, post a comment here.

RoR 0.11 ready for download!

The first public version of RoR is now available in our download section. Please be advised that :

This is a work in progress
You will need AT LEAST a 3GHz P4 or equivalent AMD to run it!!!

The physics engine uses a slow integrator and you need a lot of horsepower to make it run properly. If your CPU is too slow, the game may crash, the truck may move un-naturaly or the game may run in slow motion.
There is no goal for the moment in the game. The phantom buildings are here just for testing and the engine/transmission is still being trimmed.
Known bug of version 0.11: the dashboard needles are in the wrong place if the screen resolution is not 1280x1024.
Feel free to comment this post if you want to report bugs or give suggestions...

Origins of RoR

Some previous games related to RoR, and sources of inspiration for me:

1nsane by Codemasters: the same feeling of complete off-road freedom in a natural landscape. Also the cars are flexible objects, but not the wheels.
Pontifex (also known as BCS) by ChronicLogic: similar physics engine, but for bridge building. RoR is a kind of "Pontifex on wheels", but lacks for the moment a truck editor.
Hard Truck 2 by softlab-NSK: because of trucks of course! Interesting game logic based on economics that may be integrated in RoR one day...

What is Rigs of Rods?

Rigs of Rods is an off-road truck simulation game. It is based on a specific physics engine called Beam.
Beam simulates a network of interconnected nodes (forming the chassis and the wheels) and gives the ability to simulate deformable objects.
With this engine, trucks flex and wheels deform as you ride the terrain, which is based on real terrain elevation data.
A closed-source, free beta version will be available soon.