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CSTUNTS - realistic off-road driving simulation About the author
On his site, the author of this game, whose name is Simon Hasur, wrote
:
After having clamorously failed in everything I've ever tried, together with a disastrous school career, I came to the programming of simulators, initially in Matlab, then in C and then in C++ . I started by making some 2D, then 3D driving simulators, and so familiarized a bit with the 3D rigid-body dynamics: with and without constraints, to simulate either single independent, or articulated bodies.
Besides dynamical simulations, he also programmed some terrain rendering algorithms,
which involve converting
heightmaps into 3D models composed of triangles, which can then be displayed on a screen
through a process called
3D rendering. A heightmap is a matrix, usually stored
in an image file (*.bmp), where the value of every element (or pixel) represents the elevation of a point
on the surface of a terrain. It is a well known fact that
things look smaller when they are farther away,
so an efficient terrain rendering algorithm should generate larger triangles as the distance to them
increases, in order to avoid an excessive number of triangles, because triangles far away will appear small
on the screen anyway.
The original version of this game is available at sourceforge.net, along with other programs made by the same author.
About free software
If you acquire a computer program accompanied by a licence that doesn't allow you to give copies of the program to others, this means you will be required to have an antisocial
behaviour:
unwilling or unable to associate in a normal or friendly way with other people
[...]
antagonistic, hostile, or unfriendly toward others;
if its licence gives you:- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
However, if we think a little, freedom 0 is impossible and freedom 2 is included in freedom 3. I can't run the program available here for the purpose of flying to the moon (although it's nice to know that the licence allows it), and redistribution of copies is a special case of distribution of modified versions, in which what was modified is nothing. I added a few small modifications though, and I'm distributing the modified version here. This would not have been possible if the program wasn't free software.
Download
The archive includes the slightly modified source code (details inside) and some executable files for GNU/Linux (i386, x86_64) and wInd0w$. You should compile the program yourself though, which is very easy if you use GNU/Linux. This way you can change the resolution, the drawing distance or the parameters of the car's suspensions.
MD5: 883dfd2768c5b32aa269f37ba537bffd
Note: If, by any chance, when you try to download the file, you get a message saying that something dangerous was detected, like a virus, and you can't download it, that means you should get a real operating system instead of the malware you currently use, because the file available above doesn't contain any of that. Proprietary software is designed not to help you in any way but to make you feel uncomfortable
, so you should avoid it if
what you want is to be able to use your computer.
At one point, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a memo to a number of employees, reading "You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MS-DOS and not run with DR-DOS. [...] Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."
VideosThe following video shows the game running on a computer with a Pentium III CPU at 731 MHz (from the year 2000) and an integrated Intel 82815 video card. Of course, I had to reduce the drawing distance compared to the screenshots below, but I wanted to show that the game can run quite well even on relatively old computers. I also used a CRT monitor.
The music in the video is from kahvi.org (licence).
In the next video, the author of the game explains some of the mathematical relations involved. He refers to an older game of his, called CTruck3D, but CSTUNTS is essentially an improved version of that.
Screenshots
CSTUNTS, original version from
sourceforge.net
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CSTUNTS, modified (large green triangles eliminated, among other things)
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