VDrift is a cross-platform, open source driving simulation made with drift racing in mind. The driving physics engine was recently re-written from scratch but was inspired and owes much to the Vamos physics engine. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v3. It is currently available for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Windows.
The goals of the VDrift project are:
- to be a high-quality, open source racing simulation featuring enjoyable and challenging gameplay;
- to take advantage of modern computing hardware to accurately simulate vehicle physics in rich and immersive racing environments; and
- to provide a platform for creative experimentation to a community of developers and artists.
VDrift requires a relatively fast CPU. A 2 GHz or better clock speed is recommended, although it should be possible to run VDrift with a 1 GHz or better CPU.
VDrift requires a recent nVidia or ATI graphics card. Some Intel graphics cards may work with recent drivers.
A nVidia GeForce 7-series or ATI Radeon X1000-Series card is recommended in order to enable all the visual effects. By reducing or disabling some of the display options, it should be possible to play VDrift with a nVidia GeForce 2 or better.
VDrift takes up quite some harddisk space. The VDrift Data alone is about 1.6 GB in size and you will need to check it out, first and install it afterwards. So be prepared for handling some 3 - 5 GB.
VDrift consumes 300 MiB of memory space on a typical run. 512 MiB of memory may be sufficient on some operating systems. 1 GiB or more is recommended and required for larger tracks.
Make sure you have all the required libraries and build tools. Make sure you also have the development files for each of the libraries. Your Linux distribution may have different package names and/or bundled differently. The lists below should give enough information to search for applicable packages within your distribution's package manager.
The required build tools include:
- g++ - The GNU C++ compiler
- scons - A replacement for Make
The required libraries include:
- libsdl - Simple Direct Media Layer
- libglew - OpenGL extension utilities
- sdl-gfx - Graphics drawing primitives library for SDL
- sdl-image - Image file loading library for SDL
- vorbisfile - File loading library for the ogg vorbis format
- libvorbis - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec
- bullet C++ Libraries (BulletCollision, BulletDynamics, LinearMath)
- libcurl - For managing data download from the net.
- libarchive - API for managing compressed files.
VDrift needs the following packages to run:
- vdrift-data - Content from the old Sourceforge repository
Ubuntu does not include a libbullet package, but getdeb does. To add the getdeb-repository to your sources-list.d:
wget -q -O - http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu natty-getdeb games" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list'
sudo apt-get update
Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) does contain libglew1.5, only. To install libglew1.6 and its development headers:
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glew/libglew1.6_1.6.0-3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libglew1.6_1.6.0-3_amd64.deb
rm libglew1.6_1.6.0-3_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/glew/libglew1.6-dev_1.6.0-3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i libglew1.6-dev_1.6.0-3_amd64.deb
rm libglew1.6-dev_1.6.0-3_amd64.deb
All other required packages can be installed using this command:
sudo apt-get install g++ libarchive-dev libarchive-dev libasio-dev \
libboost-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libdrm-dev \
libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libkms1 \
mesa-common-dev libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev \
libsdl-net1.2-dev libvorbis-dev freeglut3 libbullet0 \
libbullet-dev scons
Download the dependencies for Windows:
- Windows:
git clone https://github.com/VDrift/VDrift-win.git
Download the dependencies for Mac OS:
- Mac OS:
git clone https://github.com/VDrift/VDrift-mac.git
For downloading the source code from the repository execute
git clone https://github.com/VDrift/VDrift.git VDrift
VDrift Data is expected to reside in a folder called data in the root of VDrift, so change your directory to the root of the sources:
cd VDrift
Currently the VDrift Data is still hosted at Sourceforge, so to getting it requires checking out the repository with subversion:
svn checkout https://vdrift.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vdrift/vdrift-data data
To compile VDrift you only need to run scons in the root directory of the
sources. You can use some flags to enable options. To compile for a 64 bits
machine, turn off debugging, use the bullet physics engine you just installed
and install VDrift to the default directory run:
scons arch=a64 release=1 extbullet=1 prefix=/usr/local
To install VDrift, you need to run sudo scons install in the root directory of
the sources. You can use some flags in this step, too. To set the prefix to the
default location explicitely for example run:
sudo scons install prefix=/usr/local
Building the project creates several artifacts that do not need to be stored, because they can be regenerated on demand. Cleaning them up can be done with scons, too:
scons --clean
To remove all additional temporary files:
rm -rf .sconf_temp/ .sconsign.dblite config.log vdrift.conf
For configuring, running and extending the game, for playing, contributing and developing please search the wiki for an article on your topic: