OpenRacing

Current Status

OpenRacing is a branch of Torcs-NG, which aims to make the codebase smaller and more malleable.

Quote from Gary Hamel, The Future of Management:

Sometimes the real hurdle to renewal is not a lack of options, but a lack of flexibility in resource allocation. All too often, legacy projects get richly funded year after year while new initiatives go begging. This, more than anything, is why companies regularly forfeit the future -- they over invest in "what is" at the expense of "what could be."

New projects are deemed "untested", "risky", or a "diversion of resources." Thus while senior execs may happily fund a billion-dollar acquisition, someone a few levels down who attempts to "borrow" a half-dozen talented individuals for a new project, or carve a few thousand dollars out of a legacy budget, is likely to find the task on par with a dental extraction.

The resource allocation model is typically biased against new ideas, since it demands a level of certainty about volumes, costs, timelines, and profits that simply can't be satisfied when an ideal is truly novel. While it's easy to predict the returns on a project that is a linear extension of an existing business, the payback on an unconventional idea will be harder to calculate.

Managers running established businesses seldom have to defend the strategic risk they take when they pour good money into a slowly decaying business model, or overfund an activity that is already producing diminishing returns.

How do you accelerate the redeployment of resources from legacy programs to future-focused initiatives?

OpenRacing hosted in Launchpad / Bzr

Source, etc. is here: Launchpad

Getting started

OpenRacing is still experimental software, so it may requires a few hacks to get working right.

MonoDevelop

Ubuntu 9.04 has Mono 2.0 and MonoDevelop 2.0 beta. Note that for debugging, for now, you need to hook up to this PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~directhex/+archive/ppa

This has monodevelop-debugger-mdb and monodevelop-debugger-gdb. These little pieces are necessary for debugging and are not in the main archives yet. They hopefully will be by the time of the release.

Install the dependencies

Ubuntu users

Instructions here.

Others

Get Mono.

Install_Ogre_From_Source

Install OgreDotNet following the Ubuntu instructions.

Install SWIG.

That's not finished: MyGUI (prefer SVN over "stable version". Stable didn't compile on my system. SVN repository did).

Finally, OIS and that's all for now!

Build OpenRacing

Go into openracing's directory.

./autogen.sh

The script installs a few missing files and generate the usual configure script.

Then launch configure.

$ ./configure --with-ogredotnet=/path/to/ogredotnet/bin

If everything got right, an openracing script should have been generated. You can launch it immediately or install OpenRacing into the system.

$ su
# make install

And launch!

openracing --quick-race

If it doesn't work, please complain to us so we can fix the bugs!

Developers

OpenRacing Universal Track Interface