Rigs of Rods

An open source vehicle simulator with soft-body physics.

Rigs of Rods is a strange and unusual piece of software because it doesn’t seem to have a point if you are not part of the vehicle-manufacturing scene. Yet, the software has had so much effort, time and resources put into it that it seems a shame there is not a bigger market for this sort of thing.

A free open-source piece of software

It is open source, which means you can see the coding that was used to create the program. It also means you can take the coding, add to it, and change it if you wish. For this reason, the software may be good for programmers, and there is a fairly large community of people that add things to the software every now and again.

Is it a game?

It is more of a vehicle simulator with soft body physics. This means the vehicles in the game will act and react a little more realistically than in most games and simulators. It also means that things such as crashes and such will appear more real and genuine.

Is the simulator all about crashing?

There is no real point to the game, but crashing is a fun part of it. You can do mostly whatever you want to do on the maps, and there are plenty of vehicles to choose from. When you crash something, you get to see how it would act and react in real life. For example, if you derail a train, you get to see what would happen, for example, which carts would fly off and where.

Using real mathematics

The simulator could be compared to a car, because on the surface, a car looks like a tin box, but on the inside, there is millions of pounds worth of research and engineering. This game is similar because even though the concept appears simple, there is a massive amount of mathematics and engineering skill that has gone into it.

Even the way a plane flies is calculated based on air pressure, resistance, the plane dimensions, the pressure within the engines, and much more. The way a boat sits in the water is calculated. When you crash a car into a wall, it may look like a crash to you, but the software calculates what would crumple first, what would bend, crack, smash, and how the impact, pressure and vibrations would affect the rest of the car. It is a very clever piece of software.

Pros

• Very intelligently designed
• Free, plus you can alter the code
• Lots of diversity
• A unique piece of software
• A reasonably good vehicle simulator

Cons

• Clever, but seemingly pointless
• Doesn’t have any long-term re-playability
• They could have tried harder with regards to graphics