Kitto Flora deserves some major kudos for recent developments with OpenSim vehicles. Not only do they work, but the revised car script I toyed with earlier today – was actually quite usable; and dare I say it? good. All of this is thanks to Kitto’s work refining and improving the vehicle functions and how they interrelate with the internal ODE physics engine.

I could speculate here, and say if you were a decent vehicle coder – you could probably do some amazing things with OpenSim these days. So what happens if you combine these new vehicles, with Teravus’s recent mega regions code, and my sculpty terrain code (with mods from nebadon)? This. (Recommend jumping to about 4:40)

(Edit: Added a new link to the video – 22/09/09)

I probably do not need to go into too much detail here – the above is a 3_x3 megaregion, using 576 physical sculpts, Kitto’s latest ODE mods & vehicle script – running on a home users cable connection; with several people driving around at once. Not only does it work – it suprisingly works well. I expect a more skilled texture artist could pull some amazing things off with the sculpty terrain code – the terrain is just a quick output from L3DT done by Nebadon.

The vehicle code isnt in trunk quite yet – but if you ask around in #osgrid, I’m sure someone can point you to the github account where you can get the ODE patches. I’m sure much like mega-regions, it will be in trunk soon enough.

Credits: Kitto Flora (vehicles), Teravus (megaregions), Nebadon (video, hosting, testing, sculpty terrain), Bri Hasp & Hiro Protagonist (hosting & testing), Myself (sculpty terrain generator).