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 FreeBSD, Linux, 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's wiki on VDrift
• VDrift's wiki on licensing

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. Intel graphics cards are not recommended.

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 an ATI Radeon 7000.

When following this readme, one will typically need about 5.5 GiB hard disk space. VDrift source code and data sum up to about 3.5 GiB at the build location and installation requires about 2 GiB of space including dependencies.

About 2 - 3 GiB network transfer volume are required for downloading VDrift, its data and dependencies.

VDrift consumes 300 MiB of memory space on a typical run, so 512 MiB of memory is the minimum requirement. Though, 1 GiB or more memory is recommended, especially for larger tracks.

• VDrift's wiki on hardware requirements

VDrift consists of two essential parts; the core source code and content data.

Download the source code from the repository

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 svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/vdrift/code/vdrift-data data

• VDrift's wiki on getting the lastest release
• VDrift's wiki on getting the development version

VDrift requires several tools and libraries at build time. Make sure you have installed all required libraries, each correspondent development files and all build tools, as listed below.

The required build tools include:

• g++ - The GNU C++ compiler.

• scons - A replacement for Make.

  Needed on Linux, only.

• premake - Automatically builds configuration from source code.

  Needed Windows and MacOS, only.

• gettext - GNU libraries and utilities for producing multi-lingual messages

The required libraries include:

• bullet - Open Source Physics Library (minimum version 2.78).
• glew - OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library (minimum version 1.5.7).
• libarchive - Multi-format archive and compression library (minimum version 2.8.3).
• libcurl - Multiprotocol file transfer library (minimum version 7.21.6).
• libvorbis - The Vorbis General Audio Compression Codec Library (minimum version 1.2.0).
• vorbisfile - File loading library for the ogg vorbis format.
• sdl - Simple DirectMedia Layer Library (minimum version 1.2.14).
• sdl-gfx - Graphics drawing primitives library (minimum version 2.0.16)
• sdl-image - Image file loading library (minimum version 1.2.10).

Please seek advice from the wiki.

Your Linux distribution may have different package names and/or bundled differently. The lists above should give enough information to search for applicable packages within your distribution's package manager.

Below following are instructions for Ubuntu Linux. Please seek advice for other distributions from the wiki.

All required packages can be installed using this command:

sudo yum install bullet-devel gcc-c++ glew-devel libarchive-devel scons SDL_*-devel curl-devel

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 libcurl4-gnutls-dev \
                     libdrm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev \
                     libglu1-mesa-dev libkms1 mesa-common-dev \
                     libsdl-gfx1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev \
                     libvorbis-dev freeglut3 libbullet0 \
                     libbullet-dev scons

Please seek advice from the wiki.

• Install the official Git for Windows

  It will take a little while to compile Git.

• Install msysGit

  Installing git bash only will be sufficient.

• Install Subversion

  Other packages are available, too but this one is tested.

  Install with the typical profile.

• Install Code::Blocks

  Download the one containing mingw in the filename.

  Install with the MinGW Compiler Suite.

After this, all following git commands are to be entered in a Git Bash, which can be opened via the start menu.

• VDrift's wiki on software requirements

Libraries that can not be installed need to present at the git root of VDrift.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

On Linux all needed libraries can be installed using the package management, usually. Therefore it is not necessary to inject them.

Download platform specific build dependencies on Mac OS:

cd VDrift
git clone https://github.com/VDrift/vdrift-mac.git

Download platform specific build dependencies on Windows:

cd VDrift
git clone https://github.com/VDrift/vdrift-win.git

• VDrift's wiki on injecting build dependencies

The downloaded source code needs to be compiled to be executable. The process to do this depends on the platform on that the compiling is done.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

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

Please seek advice from the wiki.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

• VDrift's wiki on compiling

In order to integrate with the platform the compiled executables need to be installed in the system.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

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

Please seek advice from the wiki.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

• VDrift's wiki on installing

Building the project creates several artifacts that do not need to be stored, because they can be regenerated on demand.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

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

Please seek advice from the wiki.

Please seek advice from the wiki.

• VDrift's wiki on cleaning up

For configuring, running and extending the game, for playing, contributing and developing please search the wiki for an article on your topic:

• VDrift's wiki front page