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I need some help guys;

I’m new to D-B pro, and I’ve only got basic coding experience, changed values, made primitives and altered the mesh, and applied and played with textures etc. Needless to say I don’t know a lot and would like some advice. While I have the ideas, I don’t know how to apply them, so I hope there is someone who would be willing to help me.


This is my objective;

I’m looking to make a driving simulator.

So far, I need to make a map, I’m thinking of making one based on a height-map of the UK, and make the road system to scale. In other words, 1 meter in game is 1 meter on the map. This I feel will offer realism that is not available in other driving simulators I have played, where the scale is not realistic. Any tools i could use for this?? For the purposes of test, we could really use any map... also the map needs gravity and the possibility for weather changes, fog etc.

Next I need to create some kind of menu so the player can choose a car from a list, and then select the traffic level on the roads, and weather and time of day etc. Really we can just have it choosing a car for now....

The car needs to be specific to the selection, and must change if the user chooses a different car.

How should I go about making the car? I’d like to have it with working wheels, and suspension etc, and collision damage, so if we hit a 50 ton tank, the parts will get damaged and fall off etc. I know its not critical for this at the testing stage, id like to know if it’s possible and how to go about it. Later, I would like to add engine information for each car, and simulate sensors on it, for RPM, temperature and O2 levels, so each car handles differently and has its own attributes. Any advice?

That's a huge task you have ahead of you, even for a proficient coder. TGC made Driving Test Success Practical, and it took Dave Milton over 3 years doing it full-time. Dave is a damn good coder.

You should start by looking at how other people have done it. You'll find lots of discussions here on these forums, and a few driving games lying around. I bought AI Game Programming Wisdom 2 for the Racing and Vehicle AI section. It's only a few pages of a very big book, but has been worthwhile. You can probably find the same stuff across the internet too.

In short, step 1 is research. Collate all the free info you can. You won't use 90% of it, but you'll find out how everybody else does it. In between, brush up your coding skills and get to know DBP.

Good luck!

That is a big project. I have always wanted to do something similar, since the spectrum days lol. Wasn't going to happen at that point though and still isn't. You could purchase all the maps you need I suppose, but would guess it isn't a cheap option. Even then realistic car physics would be a toughie. Dark Physics is still pretty poor on that front. Newton was better but struggled speed wise for me, and I was only messing about on a basic matrix. Plus the physics boggled my mind
I hope you have a few graphic artists to hand or really enjoy doing it yourself if you plan on mapping the entire UK. I would imagine that is a lot of 3d objects. Even mapping say a village or town would be some task.
Good luck, I would recommend starting small and expanding it bit by bit. If you sort out decent car physics let me know! I'm always itching to do a racing game.

Thanks so far for the suggestions,

Can somone point me to the racecar game tutorial? or somthing...

Next, does anyone know how or where I can look to get a full scale heightmap for the UK?

literaly, this game for its infancy will contain some kind of menu, and a map and a basic car to drive in. to test the idea of scale etc...

thanks again for help so far... apreciated!

Really? I don't think you've got enough memory for that...

wow, Seriously? for a beginner, you might have to start a few thousand miles smaller than that, and also, it is likely you will not have enough memory for that, unless you have, say 10 GBs of memory.