Speed Dreams: TORCS Game Fork With New Features, Cars, Tracks And AI Opponents [Windows, Linux]

Speed Dreams is an open source, multi platform (works on Windows and Linux) motorsport simulator. It was forked in late 2008 from the famous open racing car simulator TORCS, in order to implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents, to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.

Speed Dreams 1.4.0 beta 1 new features:

• visually reworked menus by Brian Gavin, Andrew Sumner and Jean-Philippe Meuret,
• 2 amazing fine tuned and balanced new car sets by Andrew Sumner : Super Cars and 36 GP,
• an updated TRB1 car set (well balanced, more realistic behaviour),
• 3 exciting new tracks and many visually improved ones,
• smashing liveries for all these cars, by Eckhard M. Jager and Haruna Say,
• 2 new TRB first-class robots for the 3 car sets: USR by Andrew Sumner and Simplix by Wolf-Dieter Beelitz (at last real AI opponents,
• animated driver by Andrew Sumner on 36GP cars, 3D wheels for all cars by Eric Espie,
• 2 new leader-board modes by Gabor Kmetyko, smoke on spinning tires by Andrew Sumner,
• brand new gauges by Eckhard M. Jager, and many many other small visual improvements,
• experimental full 3D "Simu V3" physics engine by Christos Dimitrakakis,
• many menu improvements (support for grid shifting, optimized track select load time, category filter when selecting driver, more infos in results and standings boards),
• and more ...

Here is an older video with Speed Dreams 1.4.0 beta in action : (thanks, fabrixx)

It's developers promise Linux pre built packages for Mandriva, Ubuntu, etc., but until then, only Windows binaries are available (and source files).


Update: Speed Dreams is now available as a Ubuntu .deb file on PlayDeb.net!


I will cover how to compile it on Ubuntu (only tested it in Karmic so the lib names might be different in other Ubuntu versions) so you can too, enjoy this wonderful game (I've tried it today and love it).


1. Download the source files (download link at the end of the post), and extract it.

2. Install the following packages needed to build Speed Dreams in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libplib-dev libopenal-dev libalut-dev libpng12-dev zlib1g-dev libjpeg62-dev libXxf86vm-dev libxmu-dev

2. Navigate to the folder where you extracted the Speed Dreams archive and run the following commands:

./configure
make
sudo make install
sudo make datainstall
speed-dreams

Note: do not exit the folder where you extracted Speed Dreams before you first run "speed-dreams", as I've noticed some files being copied when running it from the src folder the first time. Then you don't have to navigate to this folder to run Speed Dreams, and you can simply open a terminal and type this to run it:

speed-dreams

If, for some reason, these instructions do not work for you, find the official build instructions, HERE.


Download Speed Dreams [Windows and Linux]

Special thanks to Jean-Philippe Meuret for sending us the tip and assistance with compiling it.