torcs

• Andrew Sumner published some great tracks, Forza and the updated e-track-6 will be part of the next release
• Vicente Marti created a great car setup editor and a new open wheel car
• Gabor Kmetyko created some interesting tracks

The TORCS Endurance World Championship 2007 is open for signing in. Look at the event page for additional information and review the last years championship. The required addon packages and some more material is available here. The major changes for this season are:

• Pit sharing is a requirement, even if less than 9 teams are joining
• It is possible to sign in/out during the robot upload phases
• Different car set
• Different track set

Andrew Sumner has created a great new car package, fetch it here. You can get more information about the package content if you click on the screenshot.

Bye, have fun, Bernhard.

• Vicente Marti created documentation about creating tracks. It covers the whole process, starting with the track editor, manually adjusting track properties, improving the model with Blender and finally how to create a video.
• Wolf-Dieter Beelitz created documentation and a framework which allows you to implement a robot easily in Delphi. It should form a basis for a Windows/Delphi based robot championship. There is as well an announcement in the Delphi forum.
• Olaf Sassnick created a new car.
• There are some TORCS related videos on the net (not really new, but still nice):
  • Video created by Eric Espié for the "game-over" Conférence on April 9th 2004 in Limoges.
  • Video from Northern Illinois University, students are learning principles of mechanical engineering by playing TORCS.

TORCS version 1.3.0 is available for download. The most important changes are reworked cars and tracks (Andrew, Bernhard), improved and new opponents (Christos, Bernhard), and a lot of little improvements and a few new features (Bernhard, Christos, Mart Kelder and a lot of other people). Hit Read More below to review the full set of changes.

I would like to thank all the people which made this release possible, especially Andrew, Brian, Christos, Mart, Eliam, Olaf, Eugen, Felix, Eric, Christophe and all contributors of former releases. Thanks as well to the community which helped with patches, testing, artwork and valuable comments. Thank you all very very much.

If you are interested in the list with the available packages or the changelog hit the Read More link below. In case you run into trouble have a look into the FAQ, there is as well a section about how you should report a problem. If you like TORCS and think you can write a better AI meet us here, if you want to know how good or bad you drive find it out here.

If you are interested in how the 1.2.4 release spread, look at the download statistics. TORCS 1.2.4 got on sf.net alone 220'000 downloads, and at least (!) 500'000 if you count the downloads on various free software sites, it is amazing... Bye, have fun,

Bernhard.

[Update]
If the configure script does not find the X11 library or include files you can pass the location as parameter to the configure script, example:
./configure --x-libraries=/usr/lib/
./configure --x-libraries=/usr/lib/ --x-includes=/usr/include/X11/
There are some broken OpenAL installations in the wild, so if TORCS crashes in OpenAL (start it with torcs -d to get a backtrace on crash) go to the sound options menu in TORCS and switch to the plib backend.

[Update2]
If you install TORCS on Windows in a path which contains blanks, TORCS will crash when you switch the display resolution. You can simply restart it afterwards. To avoid this you can install TORCS in a path which does not contain blanks. The bug is fixed in the CVS, it is caused by different path treating of the execlp implementations on Windows and Linux.

There is a new test release available for download. The source package compiles on Linux, FreeBSD and Windows (vc++ 6.0). There are various files available:

• A binary only Windows installer.
• The full 1.3.0-test1 source package.

There is as well an updated FAQ in the doc directory of the package in case you run into trouble. For a detailed changelog hit the Read More link below. Bye, have fun,

Bernhard.

The robot tutorial is now available as PDF draft, Gonzalo Aranda did the conversion from the original HTML version, thank you very much. You can still get the original in HTML or read it online of course.

Have fun, Bernhard.

If you want to meet TORCS fans there is an IRC channel on the server "irc.freenode.net", channel "#torcs". If you have a problem with TORCS or want to discuss technical aspects please use the the torcs-users mailing list, because the information of the chat is volatile. Bye,

Bernhard.