TORCS Project History
---------------------

Original Authors
----------------
The original authors are Eric Espié and Christophe Guionneau.

TORCS started 1997 and was called RCS (Racing Car Simulator). In the beginning
it was a 2D simulator. Later Eric and Christophe bought a 3DFX graphics card and
created a 3D version with OpenGL. The RARS project was very important at this
time as reference. This version was called ORCS (Open Racing Car Simulator)
because RCS was already known in the Unix world (Revision Control System).

In the first versions the cars did not have engines and just rolled downhill
(soap box derby simulator), there where as well no textures on the cars at this
time.

As next step the cars got engines, engine sound and were able to drive on flat
and elevated tracks. Another name change happened at this time, ORCS was
not related enough to cars, so the new name become TORCS (from torque??).

Christophe made the first camera following the cars from the side of the track,
and it was very nice how the cars were coming out of the haze (the haze
was very near for a good frame rate).

Another important event was when Eric found out that the forces were not
computed in the correct frame of reference (car local instead of global) and was
able to resolve a related car steering problem (steering back at the end of the
turns was necessary).

Later Christophe added multitexturing, this was a big step. Generally he created
a lot of the original graphic code, and Eric converted it into the final
"product".


Hand over
---------
In March 2005 (http://torcs.sourceforge.net/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=44)
Eric handed the project over to me (Bernhard Wymann). My main goal was/is to improve
TORCS and develop it towards the following USP (unique selling proposition, although
we do not sell):
- It must be easy to use TORCS and to modify it for own projects, so the derived
requirements are high portability, small code base (less errors, less compile time,
less time to start a project with it because you have less to read/navigate), good
performance, not too many dependencies.

You can see from this that my goal is not being a commercial racing game clone.


Known forks based on TORCS
--------------------------
Openracing/PyTORCS:
http://keithcu.com/wiki/index.php/OpenRacing
I guess the goal was a C# port first, then they switched to Python. I do not know the
timeline, but I think it must have been after this post:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=19568061

Speed-Dreams (formerly TORCS-ng):
http://www.speed-dreams.org
Happened short after my suggestion here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=20229446
I refused to integrate uncommon/too much stuff because of size/complexity, quality
assurance and development flexibility, so we had different goals, which led to this
fork, read the post for details.

GZRacing:
- Commercial Mac OS X port of TORCS, sources available.


Research/industrial projects based on TORCS
-------------------------------------------
You can find some references in the English Wikipedia entry, a special interesting
one is http://cig.dei.polimi.it, http://sourceforge.net/projects/cig/files/.
I answered questions to several hundred individuals from universities and industry,
TORCS has been used in many projects.


Main contributors (no particular order):
-----------------------------------------
Christos Dimitrakakis:
- Introduced the actual sound code and created/contributed lots of samples
- Created improvments/variations of simulation code
- Improved camera code
- Created tracks and documentation
- Created Olethros robot

Andrew Sumner:
- Created tracks
- Created/recreated cars
- Mac OS X port (1.2.4)

Charalampos Alexopoulos:
- Created trackeditor (http://sourceforge.net/projects/trackeditor/?source=directory)
- Improved trackgen

Jean-Christophe Durieu:
- Texturing for cars
- Cartoons (http://torcs.sourceforge.net/index.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=24)

Remi Coulom:
- K1999 robot

Bernhard Wymann (me):
- Created robots
- Created robot tutorial
- Created TRB (TORCS racing board)
- Stabilized TORCS and toolchain
- Windows port
- Reworked tracks
- Reworked/created cars
- Installers (Windows/Linux)
- Added many features
