onEbest viewed with NetSurf
Skunks - driving simulation with Open Dynamics Engine(available for download at sourceforge.net; current version: 5.0.0) Overview
This is an electric car driving simulator
.
Driving simulators allow researchers to study driver training issues and driver behavior under conditions in which it would be illegal and/or unethical to place drivers.
Another driving simulator which has the capacity to use tracks from Stunts made in 1990 is available at SimCar, you might also want to check that out.
Skunks 5.0.0
|
Skunks 5.0.0
|
Only SDL 1.2 or 2.0 and Open Dynamics Engine, which are also free software, are required. ODE is included with all versions, so it doesn't have to be downloaded separately. Because it doesn't have a lot of dependencies, the game can be and was adapted for various operating systems and devices, as shown below. Around the time when I was thinking about a name I had recently discovered a somewhat similar game with cars released in 1990, called STUNTS, and I saw some skunks on TV, so...
Videos
Version 5.0.0
Below is a video of version 5.0.0 running on a very expensive high-end gaming laptop
.
The operating system is GNU/Linux (Fedora 34
MATE):Version 1.0.0 (phone)
Somebody from Ukraine made a menu and adapted the game for an operating system called MotoMAGX
,
for mobile phones, then sent me
the following video:Performance
The following table shows some results obtained with a few different CPUs and GNU/Linux distributions. The tests were made as shown in the first video from above, at 800x600x32 (in the video, the game is running at 800x480x32). Video cards aren't mentioned because they don't matter.
| CPU | operating system | -march= | frames/second |
| Pentium 4 650 | Fedora 34 | native (nocona) | 70 (67*) |
| CentOS 6.10 | 43 | ||
| Core 2 T7300 | Fedora 34 | native (core2) | 142 (92*) |
| CentOS 6.10 | 121 | ||
| Atom N455 | Fedora 34 | native (bonnell) | 27.1 (23.8*) |
| core2 | 31 (26.2*) | ||
| CentOS 6.10 | native (atom) | 30.1 | |
| core2 | 30.4 |
I also tested the game on a computer with a Pentium M 740 CPU and Mageia 8 installed, which came with a bunch of graphical interfaces included, so:
| CPU & operating system | graphical interface | frames/second |
| Pentium M 740, Mageia 8 | LXDE | 70 |
| IceWM | ||
| MATE | 70 (58*) | |
| GNOME Classic | 58 | |
| GNOME on Xorg | ||
| GNOME | 40 | |
| Cinnamon | ||
| Plasma | didn't work | |
| Openbox | ||
| XFCE |
*with software compositing window manager enabled in MATE (it's enabled by default, so it has to be disabled (System » Preferences » Look and Feel » Windows))
Articles and other mentions
Skunks: un simulador de conducción ideal para niños
gizmos.republica.com
,
2012-04-18Los juegos de simulación de conducción en juegos de vídeo de código abierto no abundan y entre un
listado más o menos breve de éstos, encontrar un título que sea perfectamente jugable tanto por un niño como por un
adulto, parece un gran desafío.
Si bien hay títulos muy interesantes como Trigger Rally o CoreBreach, sólo por escoger dos al azar, la dificultad de los
comandos hacen que no sean juegos de vídeo accesibles para los más pequeños.
linuxlinks.com
This page recommends some free books and tutorials for learning C and the game is also mentioned in another page
from the same site:- Free to play (no download charge, no monthly charge)
- Does not require Wine to run. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows software
- Must be playable and great fun
Raport - Cercetarea științifică în UTCB (2013)
(Report - Scientific research in TUCEB (2013))
dmcdi-old.utcb.ro
MD5: ebb903cd2feb23e94e0ad61cdb4178cb
Page 164: DEZVOLTARE SOFTWARE
[...]
skunks-4.2.0 (simulator autovehicul bazat pe metoda elementelor discrete)
An Open Source car simulation game based on Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) for Linux
linux.softpedia.com
Skunks is an open source, multiplatform and completely free 3D video game implemented in
C/SDL and designed from the offset to act as a car driving simulation that features several electric cars,
multiple tracks, as well as stunts.
[...]
The game’s software rendering is based on the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). It uses the SDL (Simple DirectMedia
Layer) library for displaying the objects in the game, which means that no hardware acceleration is required
to provide its 3D realistic driving simulation.
Ported versions
Sega Dreamcast
Version 2.0.0, which is no longer available at sourceforge.net (but 3.0.0 is), was adapted for Sega Dreamcast consoles and is available at dreamcast.es
and here. The archive includes the modified source code and this version has a menu made with SDL_ttf, which
is now obsolete.MD5: cec569958e5de3c15f6bb81b2ba85cee
AROS Research Operating System
Version 4.2.0 adapted for AROS
is available at
archives.aros-exec.org and here.MD5: b1de52325c6c6ac92dfb6acf5098393b
- Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1 where appropriate;
- Can be easily ported to different kinds of hardware architecture and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA;
- Is binary compatible on Amiga, and as source compatible as possible on other hardware;
- ...
Pandora
Version 4.1.0, modified and adapted for Pandora consoles was mentioned at pdroms.de
and can be downloaded from
repo.openpandora.org
and from here. Apparently it uses
OpenGL ES.
The files can be extracted with
p7zip, according to which the archive is of type
SquashFS. Version 4.1.0 was the first to include
support for OpenGL.MD5: 12a633ab36c89a0f5cede33df219f13d
Skunks 4.1.0 OpenGL
|
Skunks 4.1.0 OpenGL
|
The problems with OpenGL are hardware support (it's not supported by most devices, many of which have support only for OpenGL ES) and unreliable results, as can be seen in the pictures above, which show images displayed by 2 different video cards. With certain video cards, like the ones usually found in old and slow computers, where OpenGL would be most needed, gaps can be seen between triangles, and they can be eliminated only by declaring the triangles in a very complicated way. Besides, although GPUs have many advantages in scientific applications, using them for games is, in my opinion, overkill.
MotoMAGX
This was mentioned above.
Comments
happypenguin.org
2011-02-22 Reminds me of a game I used to play 20 years ago back in the arcade- called 'Hard Drivin'. Fun!
2012-03-02 My only other request, is it possible to make a camera that follows the car from behind but doesn't bob up and down with the car (makes me dizzy). They have this type of camera on games like Gran Turismo.
I did that, but I usually sit inside the car when I'm driving; I don't fly behind it. I don't know about other people.
dreamcast.es
There is no "editor" itself, but to create a circuit is very easy. As easy as fuck notepad and go
putting numbers
In the Readme inside explains how to do it,
There are RAM issues with this port: when you try to reload new tracks and cars, RAM increases until goes for more than 16MB.
This problem was solved in version 5.0.0, from 2018, but the message is from 2012, when I hadn't found out about Valgrind yet.pyra-handheld.com
The game is not finished, its more like an interactive tech demo (or a playground). Right now I'm working on moving most of the render operations to GLES (lighting and fog were made in software, among other things).
This comment refers to version 4.1.0 adapted for Pandora consoles, which seems to use OpenGL ES; I can't be certain, because whoever made the adaptation overlooked the fact that I might be interested in the source code. I made an OpenGL version for version 4.1.0 out of curiosity and I don't understand why they used that, since this type of console apparently doesn't have such a bad CPU. I don't know what finished could mean in this case and I don't think it's a demo, because I didn't make it for demonstrative purposes. The fog from the OpenGL version isn't made in software; only the colours assigned to the vertices are calculated in software, after which the interpolation, to create the appearance of fog, is done by OpenGL (the video card, where available). I found this to be more efficient and reliable than declaring fog as such in OpenGL and many video cards can't perform lighting calculations anyway, not to mention that for flat shading it's not worth the trouble. However, a playground
is something better than a game:A playground, playpark, or play area is a place designed to provide an environment for children
that facilitates play, typically outdoors.
[...]
Modern playgrounds often have recreational equipment
[...]
However, it was only in the early 20th century, as the street lost its role as the default public space and became
planned for use by motor cars, that momentum built to remove children from the new dangers and confine them to
segregated areas to play.
.
when the car was invented and thousands of people who couldn't afford cars were slaughtered
by the tiny minority of Americans who could afford them: the auto industry did a
puffery, inventing the idea of
"jaywalking," blaming the dead for their own murders:
[...]
The automotive Big Lie never died: we still routinely blame "pedestrians" (another
puffery!) for their personal
failings when they are killed or maimed by cars. Today, people with self-driving car brain-worms are saying that EVs'
propensity for running people over is a problem with people, not "AI"
Could definitely do with a reset car key when the car is toppled so I don't have to restart every time I bump a tree.
As far as I'm concerned, reset car means putting the car in the initial position and that is achieved by restarting, but from the context and considering other games I've seen, I think the person referred to magically putting the car on the road and with the wheels under it, somewhere close to its current position. I find that totally unrealistic and such a function would also encourage reckless driving, but it could be implemented by anyone who wants to, since the game is free software.