Current status of Speed Dreams development (Oct-16-2024)

Greetings to all!

We believe it would be good to inform the users of the itch.io community about the status of the development of our Open Source Racing Simulator.

Since a few months ago we are in the process of performing several tasks related to our version control system. It is our intention to stop using Subversion (svn) to start using Git. We believe it is a better and more modern system for the development of our project, and we think it can help to attract more developers than using Subversion.

This task also involves a repository change. While Sourceforge (current) has support for git, we think we would be better off elsewhere, and for that the people behind a-lec.org have offered to host us with an instance of forgejo, as well as space for our website, our masterserver and possible things that may come later. You can find more info in this post of our website.

But to be able to do this it's necessary to make important changes in the structure of the project, and for this the code is being revised to facilitate the separation of the game base from the assets (tracks, cars, robots…). In addition, an audit of these assets is being carried out, which is taking quite some time.

As for the development itself:

• Particles are being added in the OSG graphics engine (smoke, sparks, dust…) , although this is still at a very early stage of development. (MadBad)
• We are also working on a Download Manager that allows downloading content from repositories, although this is giving us some headaches in the Windows build. (Xavi)
• A lot of work has been done on the LS-GT1, LS-GT2 and LP1 categories, with new physics (Simu 4.1), new skins and improvements in the AI of the robots. (June)
• Works on the Masterserver, with a new page for user management where you can change password, email and avatar, as well as in the future view information about our races. The database is also being changed to correct errors and improve performance. (SonLink)
• New tracks are also being worked on, such as Ardennen-Spa which you can see in the video below, Long Jour (former LongDay based on Le Mans) and the improvement of some tracks already included in the game. (Leillo)
• Perhaps most important, though, is the work being done on several fronts to optimize the game’s performance, but this is an arduous task.

For all this work, all possible help would be greatly appreciated, so, as always, we are open to receive both new developers and occasional contributions.!

As an example of this we leave you with a video in which we performed a USR robot race in the aforementioned Ardennen-Spa, where you can also see the first implementation of the particles. We hope you like it:

Cheers!